Boltonism need not be as disastrous as Cheneyism

Now that John Bolton has finally ascended from the limbo of the green room to the Valhalla of the White House, we need to settle the first question of his tenure: Is he a “neocon” or a “paleocon”?

I have seen both terms used, the former more promiscuously, to describe Donald Trump’s new national security adviser. But they’re both misdescriptions, and explaining why is a useful way of putting Trump’s foreign policy team in intellectual and historical perspective.

Foreign policy conservatives can be grouped into four broad categories. The first group, the genuine paleocons, are the oldest and least influential: Their lineage goes back to the anti-war conservatism of the 1930s, and to postwar Republicans who regarded our Cold War buildup as a big mistake.

The last paleocon to play a crucial role in U.S. politics was Ohio Republican Robert Taft, who opposed NATO and became a critic of the Korean War. But the tendency’s only politically significant heir right now is Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

Except that even Paul, wary of the label, would probably describe himself instead as a realist — internationalist, stability-oriented, committed to the Pax Americana but skeptical of grand crusades, and open to working out cynical arrangements rather than pushing American power to its limit.

This cynicism explains why realists have found their chief rivals among the neoconservatives, a group best defined as liberal anti-communists who moved right in the 1970s as the Democratic Party moved left, becoming more hawkish and unilateralist but retaining a basic view that American power should be used for moral purpose, to spread American ideals.

Some of the most disastrous Iraq decisions were made by members of the fourth conservative faction, the pure hawks, the group to which John Bolton emphatically belongs. The hawks share the neocons’ aggressiveness and the realists’ wariness of nation building; they also have a touch of paleoconservatism, embracing “America First” without its noninterventionist implications.

But the hawkish tradition, from Douglas MacArthur down to Dick Cheney and now Bolton, is distinguished by simplicity: The default response to any challenge should be military escalation, the imposition of America’s will by force.

Most Republican administrations have placed hawks, neocons and realists in complex internal alignments.

President Donald Trump’s vision, though, promised a different combination, mixing a revived paleoconservatism — hence his NATO skepticism, his right-wing “come home, America” pose — with a realist desire for a Russian détente and a hawkish attitude toward terrorism.

Boltonism need not be as disastrous as Cheneyism. If a realist like Cheney can turn into a “1 percent doctrine” hawk, then perhaps Bolton can transform the other way, and find a strategic prudence that his “let’s fight everyone” punditry conspicuously lacks. Also, Defense Secretary James Mattis’ military form of realism might have a restraining influence over Trump, and Trump’s bluff and bluster might not readily translate into OK’ing the war-on-allfronts strategy that Bolton has tended to endorse.

But a foreign policy team managed by hawks, untouched by neoconservative idealism and cut loose from Trump’s paleocon tendencies, seems more likely than not to give us what the hawkish persuasion always wants: more wars, and soon.