Give it up. Make a mountain out of DoD expenditures while completely neglecting the unceasing and escalating costs of retirements, entitlements, and social programs why don’t you?
Further, to infuse the argument of the author with some perceived acceptance by those big three with NeoConservatism is ludicrous in my opinion.
The author isn’t a liberal who has been mugged by reality (my definition of a NeoCon). The use of the term falsely equates that movement with conservatism. To further delve back into reinterpreted history (arguments commonly used by liberals) about Iran of yesterday, the CIA et al and associate it with nearly every Mideast problem today is obfuscation, frankly. These peoples’ own bibles written centuries before the OSS and CIA’s inception tell the real influences.
He pondered how America forgot that it is ‘America’. Not how Necon influence is such a big thing at the “papers of note.”
America didn't forget. America changed and the world changed. And we can define those changes.
The world shifted from the Cold War Period to the Post Cold War Period. Foreign policy is framed by the foreign policy period. Foreign Policy is organized around external threats.
The cusp of the change was under GHW Bush and there emerged two competing ideas: the Powell Doctrine and the Wolfowitz Doctrine which would also be called first the NeoCon Doctrine and then the Bush Doctrine.
The Hart-Rudman Commission and the Gilmore Commission were convened to determine how the US would shift to the Post Cold War Period, which led to a major re-organization of the govt and creating DHS. The external threat shifted from the Soviets to the terrorists, which resulted in the "War on Terror". And we would win the war on terror the same way we won the cold war, demographically, or outlasting them.
The Cold War created a bi-polar world: Soviets Vs America. So in the post cold war period are we in a uni-polar world where the US is last remaining superpower and world hegemon, or is it now a multi-polar world. So the question becomes Unilateralism vs Multilateralism?
America changed in the sense that Foreign Policy Doctrines shifted. Under Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and GHW Bush, the Realists were most influential but the Liberal Interventionists rose to power under Clinton and the NeoCons rose to power under GW Bush. Under Obama the Realists have had the most influence. But Obama has framed everything as multilateral. And if you had to use one word to describe Obama's foreign policy, it would be multilateralism.