Well, first, consider whether Robert Gates's arrival is really a repudiation of the so-called neoconservative vision.
The neoconservative is often cited as one of the main architects of the Iraq war.
The fracture between the Obama camp and the neoconservative camp came to a head with Libya.
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Mr. OLMAN: We have exaggerated the neoconservative influence to some very large degree.
Over the past several months, a certain intolerance has crept into the rhetoric of leading neoconservative publications and writers.
CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: The Jacksonian Foreign Policy Option
Neoconservative writers have castigated opponents of US military involvement in Libya as isolationists.
CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: The Jacksonian Foreign Policy Option
The problem with the neoconservative position is that it makes no distinction between liberal regime opponents and illiberal regime opponents.
CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: America's descent into strategic dementia
Mr. KAGAN: Well, I've never accepted the label of neoconservative, and I don't think I'm the founder of anything in particular.
Professor ANDREW BACEVICH (Boston University): The neoconservative perspective really is not useful.
The basic concept being propounded by leading neoconservative writers and publications is that anyone who disagrees with neoconservative policies is an isolationist.
CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: The Jacksonian Foreign Policy Option
Rumsfeld and his team of neoconservative civilians at the Pentagon favor an activist and often unilateralist approach to advancing America's interests abroad.
Back in 2000, his keenness to stamp American democracy on the world made him the neoconservative pick ahead of the milder Mr Bush.
He is often depicted in the media as a neoconservative zealot, but on the road he is unfailingly polite, demonstrating a scholarly interest in local culture.
Just as anyone who dissents from liberal orthodoxy risks being called a racist, so too anyone who dissents from Neoconservative orthodoxy now risks being called an anti-Semite.
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He is often identified as a neoconservative defense policy intellectual.
This is part of American Exceptionalism and Neoconservative thinking.
Still, it would be a real tragedy if at the end of the primary season, due to neoconservative intellectual bullying, the Republican presidential nominee were forced to choose between neoconservativism and isolationism.
CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: The Jacksonian Foreign Policy Option
Former president George W. Bush is widely viewed as the first neoconservative president, due to his wholehearted embrace of this core concept of neoconservativism in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: The Jacksonian Foreign Policy Option
During the Bush years, the so-called neoconservative camp believed it had formulated the means of convincing an American electorate dominated by the leftist media to support the projection of American power in the Islamic world.
While these ideas may be correct in theory, in practice the consequence of Bush's adoption of the neoconservative worldview was the empowerment of populist and popular jihadists and Iranian allies throughout the Middle East at the expense of US allies.
CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: The Jacksonian Foreign Policy Option
For all the deficiencies of the neoconservative worldview, at least the neoconservatives act out of a deep-seated belief that the US is a force for good in the world and out of concern for maintaining America's role as the leader of the free world.
CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: The Jacksonian Foreign Policy Option
If Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the administration's leading neoconservative, had been aware of the brutal war America had fought in the Philippines, or of Wilson's misadventures in Mexico, or of the blighted history of Western imperialism in the Mideast, they might still have invaded Iraq.
For lack of a better name, it is what historian Walter Russell Mead has referred to as Jacksonianism, after Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the US. As Mead noted in a 1999 article in The National Interest titled "The Jacksonian Tradition, " the most popular and enduring US model for foreign policy is far more flexible than either the isolationist or the neoconservative model.
CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: The Jacksonian Foreign Policy Option
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