The neocon revolution

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US unilateralism was a means of breaking the old order. Now it is building new alliances

Martin Jacques
Thursday March 31, 2005
The Guardian

With any new political phenomenon, there is always a tendency to underestimate its novelty and treat it as some kind of short-term aberration. I vividly recall how long it took commentators and analysts, on the right and left, to recognise that Thatcherism was something quite new and here to stay. Similar doubts greeted the Bush administration and the neocon revolution: its novelty would be short-lived, it would not last and it was just not viable. It is always hard to imagine a new kind of world, easier to think of the future as an extension of the past, and difficult to comprehend a paradigm shift and grasp a new kind of logic.


There was speculation last autumn that the second Bush term would be different, that the breach with Europe would be healed as a matter of necessity, that the US could not afford another Iraq, that somehow the new position was unsustainable. Already, however, from last November's presidential election it was clear that the neocon revolution had wide popular support and serious electoral roots, that it was establishing a new kind of domestic political hegemony. In fact, the right has been setting the political agenda in the US for at least 30 years and that is now true with a vengeance. All the indications suggest that the revolution is continuing apace.
The appointment of John Bolton as the US ambassador to the United Nations and the nomination of Paul Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank reveal a determination to place the cadres of the neocon revolution in key positions of power and influence and thereby create the conditions for its continuation and expansion. This was heralded almost immediately after the presidential election with the decision to replace Colin Powell, a man of very different political hue, with Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state.

During the first Bush administration, and especially in its conduct of the Iraq war, the neocon revolution was often characterised as unilateralist, but this was always somewhat simplistic. No nation can simply go it alone, certainly not one that seeks to dominate the world. However strong it may be, it is still required to pursue its power and ambitions through a system of alliances. The end of the cold war led to the realisation that the US was now the world's sole superpower. The period following 9/11 persuaded the Americans that they now had an opportunity to remake the world in their own image, that the alliances that had been necessary in pursuit of the cold war, notably that with Europe, were no longer appropriate, certainly not on the old terms.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1448930,00.html