The Third Way of Neoconservatism: An Analysis of the Political, Strategic, Moral, Philosophical and Epistemological Basis to Neoconservatism

My thesis examines the public policy debates of the late 1960s to today involving arms control, dÌÄå©tente and the War in Iraq in an effort to explain the essential strategic, political, and moral ingredients of a neoconservative foreign policy. In examining these policy debates, the objective of my thesis is not that of an historian but rather that of a political philosopher. I argue that there are two distinct lines of thought running through neoconservatism, the one strategic and the other political and moral. The two lines are married by Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and others into a unified approach to foreign policy. Taken together with a philosophical and epistemological foundation at variance with the orthodoxy of its academic counterparts, neoconservatism is rightly understood to belong alongside modern realism, neorealism and neoliberalism as a distinct tradition in the study of international relations. On matters ranging from the importance of morality in foreign policy to the relevance of common sense as the standard for judging the effectiveness of public policy, the gulf between neoconservatism and the more mainstream traditions is very wide.

Neoconservatives are just as comfortable advocating the use of military strength in pursuit of the strategic aims of the United States as they are in writing and speaking in universal terms of right and wrong. They are, as a whole, unashamed of associating moral rightness with the cause of the United States and the West, in either its Cold War ideological battles with communism or, more recently, in its confrontation with radical Islam. They take as their starting point a broad understanding of human behavior and state action and, consequently, they reject the importance that modern realists place on the material interest of states and the structure of the international system as determinants of the behavior of states and statesmen. Neoconservatives find these concepts to be poorly defined and otherwise lacking in appreciation for history or for the every-day passions and motivations of individuals and states. They also find the emphasis that some of the more academic traditions like neorealism place on methodology and a stringent form of propositional logic ill prepared to capture the political and moral issues involved in crafting an effective foreign policy.

As a result of these differences, neoconservatives and modern realists find themselves frequently in disagreement about matters of war and peace. The tension between these traditions goes beyond policy and highlights an obvious discomfort within neoconservatism for the more abstract and counterintuitive arguments employed by modern realists in favor of a more intuitive or common sense approach. It also exposes sharp differences in conceptual logic including a disagreement over the very meaning of knowledge and the relevance of common sense to theory making in the social sciences. In bolstering these claims, my thesis draws heavily upon the influence of a small cadre of thinkers on the development of neoconservatism, like the strategic theorist Albert Wohlstetter and the political philosopher Leo Strauss: Wohlstetter was instrumental in helping establish the strategic foundation for neoconservative thinking on US nuclear strategy and dÌÄå©tente whereas Strauss provided a philosophical supplement to what was otherwise an intuitive reaction by neoconservatives to what they perceived as the pervasive relativism of Kissinger's Realpolitik, liberal intellectuals, and the larger foreign policy establishment.