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dreams of Washington's wonks By Leon Hadar
and social
relationships (managing bureaucratic infighting
and leaking to the press).
And please do
some deconstructing of the We Care About You
stuff, and assume that the wonks produce policies
that can conflict with the overall desires of the
general public and reflect the interests of the
more powerful and wealthy members of that
public (I know, you're
shocked! shocked! shocked!).
Like the
politicians they consult, the wonks have their own
"constituencies" that include interest groups and
lobbyists that fund their think-tanks (which
provides policy analyses and briefings), their
magazines and webzines. In short, they make sure
that the wonks can pay the rent (especially after
their president loses the election).
And
it just happens that the wonks seem to agree with
the views and agendas of those who help keep them
afloat professionally and financially, which
explains why when he leaves government, the
retired wonk lands on a six-figure salary working
on K Street. Hence the term "rent seeking" coined
by public-choicers to refer to agents in and
outside governments extracting the resources
provided by government; in our case, foreign
policy.
In a way, the intellectual and
political epoch of The Rise and (Almost ... we're
getting there ...) Fall of Neo-conservatism, would
probably be recalled by future aspiring wonks as
the classic case of ambitious peddlers of
foreign-policy ideas of embracing successful
adaptationist mechanisms that have helped them win
in the evolutionary process in Washington, while
excelling as "rent seekers" as they continue to
gain personal and professional profits.
While conspiracy theorists imagine the
neo-cons as a group of conniving conspirators
meeting in secret locations in Washington and
around the globe as they try to orchestrate
Machiavellian intrigues, anyone who has followed
the amazing victories of the neo-conservatives in
Washington's foreign-policy community after
September 11, 2001, through the insightful reports
by Jim Lobe and other journalists and analysts can
only conclude that the likes of Paul Wolfowitz,
Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, Max Boot, William
Kristol, Robert Kagan, Peter Rodman, and Douglas
Feith have basically demonstrated their policy
reproductive success and talent for "rent
seeking".
Indeed, they have adopted
mechanisms of growth (through influence by such
scholars as Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom and Albert
Wohlstetter as well as networks linked to the
Congress for Cultural Freedom to the Committee on
the Present Danger); development (through
attachment to "sugar daddies" ranging from
politicians such as former senator Henry M Jackson
and Ronald Reagan to businessmen such as Rupert
Murdoch and Conrad Black as well as to think-tanks
such as the American Enterprise Institute and the
Hudson Institute); differentiation (through
opposition to liberal internationalists on the
left and conservative realists on the right);
maintenance (through propagation of ideas in such
outlets as the Project for the New American
Century [PNAC] and The Weekly Standard and,
indeed, "being there" when September 11 took
place); mating (with winners, President George W
Bush); parenting (the post-September 11 foreign
policy, including the war in Iraq); and social
relationships (through the management of
bureaucratic infighting that led to the
resignation of Colin Powell as secretary of state
and through leaking to the press disinformation on
Iraq before the war and manipulating public and
elite opinions).
And when it comes to
extracting bureaucratic, financial and
intellectual rewards, the neo-cons can probably
write the book on "How to Succeed in the Foreign
Policy Business". They established footholds not
only in think-tanks and publications well funded
by their close benefactors, but have also
penetrated the editorial pages of such newspapers
as the New York Times and the Washington Post and
other intellectual powerhouses of the
foreign-policy establishment, including the
Council on Foreign Affairs and the Carnegie
Endowment, while dominating centers of
foreign-policy making in the White House, Pentagon
and State Department and, in retirement, winning
lucrative consulting jobs and book contracts
(Wolfowitz' professional rise in government,
including his final landing on the job of
president of the World Bank, is probably the most
dramatic example of a contemporary policy wonk
rising from rags to riches).
One of the
most critical roles that the neo-cons have played
in the foreign-policy community can be understood
by applying a term coined by biologist Richard
Dawkins - "meme", which refers to a "unit of
cultural information" that can propagate from one
mind to another in a manner analogous to genes. By
successfully diffusing their foreign-policy memes
through government, the think-tanks and the media
since the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf
War - Francis Fukuyama's celebrated End of
History; the inclusion by Wolfowitz of themes of
"unilateralism" and "preemption" in a draft 1992
Pentagon paper; the continuing propaganda efforts
by PNAC to press for Saddam Hussein's ouster; Max
Boot's popularization of military-driven
nation-building; demonizing China and political
Islam as post-Cold War threats - the neo-cons were
able to construct what Dawkins refers to as
"memeplexes" or "meme complexes", that is, memes
that propagate as a more or less integrated
cooperative set.
From that perspective, in
the post-September 11 era, the neo-con memes
evolved into a meme complex, in the form of the
"Bush Doctrine" consisting of such memes as
"unilateralism", "preemption", "freedom agenda",
and "aggressive internationalism".
So who
are the Washington wonks who are trying to diffuse
new foreign-policy memes that could evolve
eventually into the post-post-meme complex that
would be known as the "Clinton II Doctrine" or
perhaps the "Hegel Doctrine"? I met two of them in
a seminar held recently in the offices of The
National Interest magazine at the Nixon Center,
whose editor Nikolas K Gvosdev and a group of
"neo-realist" foreign-policy wonks have been
imagining, debating and writing about the shape of
global things to come in the aftermath of the
reign of the neo-cons.
In the seminar, one
of these thinkers, Michael Lind, a Whitehead
senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a
"cool" think-tank that has been the home for other
anti-neo-con warriors, such as wonk extraordinaire
Steven Clemons and columnist Jim Pinkerton, called
for replacing the hegemonic strategy of the Bush
administration with a concert-of-great-powers
system, in which the United States, the European
Union, Russia, China and India would share in the
task of policing the world.
Instead of
unilateralism, Washington would embrace
multipolarism, an approach that would be more
cost-effective in terms of US economic and
military resources, argued Lind, the author of
The American Way of Strategy: US Foreign Policy
and the American Way of Life (Oxford
University Press, 2006).
Joining him in
the panel was Amitai Etzioni of George Washington
University, another critic of the neo-cons'
unrealistic agenda, which he wants to replace with
what he called a "security first" foreign policy
in which the focus of US strategy would be placed
on protecting core national-security interests,
such as denying
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