A Neoconservative Lion Roars Again

One by one the great conservative voices are falling silent. The great generation of Mises, Hayek, Strauss, and Voegelin are long gone. Irving Kristol is silent, though his wife continues to write. Buckley is ageing and not as rambunctious as in his prime.

But the ageing neoconservative lion Norman Podhoretz is still roaring. And in OpinionJournal.com he gives what may be his last great contribution to this great nation. He commends President Bush’s grand strategy for World War IV and beats back the critics who claim that Bush has given up.

Not at all, he claims. Just like Ronald Reagan, Bush is a practical politician who lives by the art of the possible and the prudential.

In the 1980s pundits like Podhoretz frequently chided Reagan for his tactical retreats—that seemed like betrayals at the time. Now we have critics from the right feeling betrayed and critics from the left relieved that he has abandoned his cowboy diplomacy.

But in the end, Podhoretz writes:

what these acts of Reagan's turned out to be was a series of prudential tactics within an overall strategy that in the end succeeded in attaining its great objective.

Just like Reagan, Bush is constrained by the tactical possibilities. We shouldn’t expect miracles.

Anyway, we make a mistake when we compare Bush to Reagan. World War IV is in its Truman stage. It was Truman who set up the grand cold war strategy of containment, just as Bush has set up the World War IV grand strategy of Middle East transformation.

In 1953 the Republicans gained the White House and, despite all their criticism in the previous four years, continued the Truman grand strategy.

The great test will occur when the Democrats next win the White House. Will they turn away from the Bush strategy, as they seem to suggest and certainly want their “netroots” to believe? Or will they quietly continue the Bush strategy?

For it is not that the Bush strategy is so brilliant. It is merely the strategy of common sense. We believe in capitalism, democracy, and the rule of law. What else can we do but promote and support them throughout the world, and what else can we do but resist the forces arrayed against them?

Podhoretz concludes:

I feel safe in predicting that, like the Truman Doctrine in 1952, the Bush Doctrine will prove irreversible by the time its author leaves the White House in 2008. And encouraged by the precedent of Ronald Reagan, I feel almost as confident in predicting that, three or four decades into the future, and after the inevitable missteps and reversals, there will come a president who, like Reagan in relation to Truman in World War III, will bring World War IV to a victorious end by building on the noble doctrine that George W. Bush promulgated when that war first began.

What else would you expect Podhoretz to say?