The Iraq war debacle, the relative (to Bush) restraint of the Obama administration, and the 2016 anti-interventionist campaign of Donald Trump may have seemingly discredited the neo-conservative movement and its personalities, but they have come roaring back.
This new stage in American foreign policy could be characterized as Kaganism: neither Democrat or Republican, but rather a non-partisan 21st century crusade for “liberalism.”
Donald Kagan, the patriarch of Kaganism, followed a similar intellectual trajectory to his colleagues Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz: Marxist academics who transformed into rabid Reaganoid Cold Warriors in response to the Soviet Union’s support for Arab nationalism and anti-Zionism in the 1960s. Donald was quite clearly in the Republican camp, though his children have dropped some of the “right-wing” elements of the neo-conservative doctrine (previously used to mobilize Evangelical Christian voting blocs) and replaced it with a unified American state ideology that is as at home in the Democratic Party as it is in the GOP.
…In his 2023 book, Kagan does not view World War III as a conflict humanity would be better off avoiding, but instead a testament to the American empire’s invincibility and the necessity of war to spread the ideologies of liberalism, capitalism and globalism. The Kaganists believe a multi-front war against nuclear-armed China, Russia and (soon) Iran is better than sharing the world with whoever they categorize as “anti-democratic” or “fascist.”
How many Americans agree with that insane prospect?
The Kaganists don’t care. Unless we organize politically to stop them, they’re taking us along for the ride whether we like it or not.
American Buddhist Net 