Irving Kristol

Together with the likes of Norman Podhoretz, Kristol's successor at Commentary, and Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things, Kristol was instrumental in nurturing writers whose views on foreign and domestic policies shared the same maverick, anti-liberal establishment ethos that Kristol forged in his own writings. Angered by what they viewed as liberals' tendency to be soft on communism, by the rise of the counterculture and anti-war movement in the 1960s, and by the "appeasement" politics of the Democratic Party in the early 1970s, Kristol and his cohorts blazed a political trail leading from left to right. They were, as Kristol famously put it, "liberals mugged by reality."

Kristol also played an important role in shaping the neoconservative connection to the think tank and pressure group world. Most importantly in this regard was the relationship Kristol developed in the 1970s with Bill Baroody Sr., then head of the AEI. At the time regarded as a mainstream conservative think tank concerned mainly with economic policy, the AEI would become by the 1980s the unofficial headquarters of neoconservatism. After taking Kristol on board as a fellow, Baroody began hiring a number of influential neoconservative scholars, including Michael Novak, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Ben Wattenberg. AEI serves to this day as the core establishment in the neoconservative firmament (see Irving Kristol, "An Autobiographical Memoir").

While neoconservatism first emerged as a coherent political ideology in the 1970s, Kristol's path from radical leftist, to liberal, to neoconservative Republican, began much earlier, in the early 1950s, when he was editor of Commentary. Among his favorite targets for criticism at the time were "progressives," who, according to Kristol and other like-minded "liberal anti-communists," were abetting communist influence in the United States. An exemplary dispute that foreshadowed the emergence of neoconservatism erupted in the early 1950s over the Red Scare propaganda campaign of the far right. While neocons-to-be like Kristol regarded these conservatives as enemies of liberalism, they likewise attacked progressives who championed the cause of those targeted by the Red Scare. In a 1952 Commentary article, "'Civil Liberties'—A Study in Confusion," Kristol criticized the likes of Alan Barth, Henry Steele Commager, and William O. Douglas for defending the civil liberties of communists. Arguing that granting civil liberties to U.S. communists was like a businessman paying "a handsome salary to someone pledged to his liquidation," Kristol maintained that communism is "an Idea, and it is of the essence of this Idea that it is also a conspiracy to subvert every social and political order it does not dominate" (cited in Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision, p. 63).

Although a fierce anti-communist during the Cold War, Kristol's views on U.S. foreign affairs seemed to soften with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although the political faction he helped create has been intimately associated with the Iraq War and the George W. Bush administration's war on terror, Kristol himself has remained largely on the sidelines, while his son William, editor of the Weekly Standard, and William's comrades in organizations like the Project for the New American Century led the effort to push the country into war.

An irony of the neoconservative campaign in support of invading Iraq is that one of the justifications used by the group was that the United States could impose a democratic project on the Middle East that would ensure greater peace and security. But this idea runs directly counter to arguments developed by Irving Kristol. During the early stages of the Vietnam War, Kristol wrote that the "plain truth is that South Vietnam, like South Korea, is barely capable of decent self-government under the best of conditions. It lacks the political traditions, the educated classes, the civic spirit that makes self-government workable ... No amount of American aid, no amount of exhortation, no amount of good advice can change this basic condition ... The most we can hope for in South Vietnam is what we have achieved in South Korea; that is, to remove this little, backward nation from the front line of the Cold War so that it can stew quietly in its own political juice" (cited in Gerson, p. 113).

This realism was again on display in the late 1980s, when Kristol split with other neoconservative writers over the best course for U.S. policy in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. People like Charles Krauthammer and Joshua Muravchik began championing a new crusade for the United States, one aimed at capitalizing on the country's position as the lone superpower to aggressively promote democracy and American values as a replacement for militant anti-communism. In his seminal 1990 Foreign Affairs article "The Unipolar Moment," Krauthammer wrote that if "America wants stability, it will have to create it." The alternative to "such a robust and difficult interventionism," he argued, "is chaos." For his part, Muravchik argued that if "communism soon completes its demise, U.S. foreign policy still should make the promotion of democracy its main objective" (cited in Halper and Clarke, p. 79).

For Irving Kristol, these ideas were overly idealistic. Instead, he advocated a new realism based on the prevailing circumstances in the international system. Arguing that there was no longer any "balance of power for us to worry about," efforts at "monitoring and maintaining a balance of power among other nations, large and small, in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere ... would make the United States the world's policeman ... We are simply not going to be that kind of imperial power," he concluded (cited in Halper and Clarke, p. 79). While he opposed these new trends in neoconservative discourse, Kristol recognized that they would appeal "not only to liberals but to many conservatives who are ideologically adrift in the post-Cold War era" (cited in Halper and Clarke, p. 79). Likewise, Robert Tucker, a former editor of the National Interest, warned against undertaking a new mission to impose freedom, promoting instead "a framework of stability and moderation within which democratic institutions may take root and grow" (cited in Ehrman, p. 181).

For neoconservative hardliners, people like Kristol and Tucker had ceased being neoconservatives. Instead, they were, according to Muravchik, conservative neo-realists or right isolationists. Around the ideas promoted by Muravchik and Krauthammer a new era of neoconservatism began to emerge, one spearheaded by a so-called Young Turk faction, which would grow to include many of the earliest neoconservatives' offspring, including William Kristol, Robert Kagan (son of Donald), John Podhoretz (son of Norman), and Daniel Pipes (son of Richard). This faction would be at the core of efforts after 9/11 to push for war in Iraq and an interventionist war on terror aimed at reshaping the Middle East map.

Since the invasion of Iraq, Irving Kristol has remained conspicuously silent on most aspects of the war or the current course of U.S. foreign policy. In one of his few statements on the subject, Kristol wrote in an August 20, 2003 AEI article, titled "The Neoconservative Persuasion," that the United States, for better or worse, is the most powerful country in the world and that it will either "find opportunities to use it or the world will discover them for [it]." He wrote: " Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces, external or internal. That is why it was in our national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary. Behind all this is a fact: the incredible military superiority of the United States vis-à-vis the nations of the rest of the world, in any imaginable combination. This superiority was planned by no one, and even today there are many Americans who are in denial ... The older, traditional elements in the Republican Party have difficulty coming to terms with this new reality in foreign affairs, just as they cannot reconcile economic conservatism with social and cultural conservatism. But by one of those accidents historians ponder, our current president and his administration turn out to be quite at home in this new political environment, although it is clear they did not anticipate this role any more than their party as a whole did. As a result, neoconservatism began enjoying a second life, at a time when its obituaries were still being published."

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Education

Irving Kristol, "An Autobiographical Memoir," published in Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1997).

Charles Krauthammer, "The Unipolar Moment," Foreign Affairs, Winter 1990/1991.

Charles Krauthammer, "Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World," National Interest, Winter 1989/90.

John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs 1945-1994 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Irving Kristol, "The Neoconservative Persuasion," AEI, August 20, 2003.

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