Last Tuesday, about 200 assorted neoconservatives gathered in the Jubilee room of the House of Commons to toast their ascendancy over wine and canapés, and to plot the next stage of American global dominion.
Paying scant heed to the traditional niceties of politics, they came from across the party divide, but with one thing in common: a secret aspiration to impose American rule on hitherto free peoples.
I was there. I am one of those very neoconservatives. And today I expose the truth behind the plot to change the world.
The gathering was the London launch of the Henry Jackson Society, an organisation — at this stage little more than a website and a group of supporters — named after the great Democrat senator and anti-communist campaigner, Henry “Scoop” Jackson.
Jackson was a traditional New Deal liberal, a trade unionist who believed in nationalisation and price controls, and a civil rights campaigner. But his real impact, and his legacy, lay not in domestic but international politics. He was an implacable opponent of the received foreign policy wisdom of détente with the Soviet Union. As the Henry Jackson Society’s founding statement puts it: “He believed that this was an unprincipled accommodation, which abandoned the wider cause of human rights, as well as compromising security. Jackson’s core belief was that democratic governments should consider the internal character of foreign states when dealing with them.”
Jackson’s message — the relevance of which is as great today as then — was that the “realistic” approach of the likes of Henry Kissinger, which accepted that the Soviet Union was here to stay and sought to reach an accommodation with it that would lessen its threat to the West, was misguided both strategically and morally.
The parallels with today are striking. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Tuesday’s gathering was that it was genuinely all-party. The event was hosted by two MPs, Michael Gove, a Conservative, and Gisela Stuart, a former minister under Blair. Denis MacShane, Europe minister until June, is a signatory of the society’s statement of principles.
The truth, which I expose today, is that the Henry Jackson Society is not a secret cabal designed, as one newspaper columnist put it last week, to create “a new governing consensus of the right”, but quite the opposite. It has neoconservative members. But it also has social democrats and traditional conservatives. Socialists would feel comfortable with its aims — “the spread of democracy not only on idealistic grounds, but also because this is the surest guarantee of security”. And it is not about American dominion but the very absence of empire. There is indeed a mission to change the world. But it is to rid it of tyranny and to give all people liberty as we enjoy in the West.
The founding of the society, and the reaction to it, illustrates a fascinating — and potentially dynamic — development. As its broad-based membership shows, it is no longer possible to tell from someone’s political affiliation what their outlook will be on the basic issues of foreign policy.
It might, after all, be thought reasonable to identify democracy, freedom and human rights as key components of a left-wing approach. And yet the reaction to the Iraq war shows that this no longer applies. At its most basic, had the Conservatives under Iain Duncan Smith not voted for the war, Britain would not have been involved; Blair did not have sufficient votes on his own side. Some Labour MPs went along because their prime minister asked for support. But today, few remain in favour of a war which freed Iraqis from one of the most murderous dictators in history.
Yet on the Conservative benches, support from the likes of George Osborne remains steadfast — not just because of the geopolitical importance of Iraq and the war on terror, but specifically because of the merits of liberal intervention. Fighting, in other words, to secure other people’s freedoms.
Party affiliation is no longer an accurate indication of approach. My own realisation of this came in the wake of 9/11. I have always considered myself to be on the left. After September 11, 2001, I realised the reaction of many, if not most, of my fellows was a variation on the theme of “America had it coming”. That was compounded over Iraq where the “liberal left” ended up in bed not only with the traditional “realist right” in opposing foreign intervention, but also with militant Islam.
The earliest indication of this change came over Bosnia. The Douglas Hurd-Malcolm Rifkind approach, with a long Tory history, was to oppose being dragged into a nasty foreign mess. What had human rights to do with British foreign policy? That stream of Conservatism has not gone away; both men opposed the Iraq war.
Christopher Montgomery, a historian of the “realist” school, whose book about Conservative leadership elections is published next week, considers that the real divide is between those who “slavishly follow America” and those who stand up for Britain’s national interest. “There is no new divide or emphasis on human rights. In Bosnia, we were simply dragged in because of the dictates of an alliance with America.”
What is undeniable, however, is the intellectual ferment now occurring around these issues.
Another timely and excellent new book by Oliver Kamm, Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy, argues there has been a left-wing tradition of “militant anti-totalitarianism”, but that there has been a recurring temptation for progressives, critical of their own societies’ failings, to make excuses for the ideological opponents of western liberal democracies.
In America, the emergence of Ronald Reagan, who was as hostile to his Republican predecessor Richard Nixon as he was to his ineffectual Democrat predecessor Jimmy Carter, transformed politics.
Far from it being the left which placed the ending of tyranny at the centre of foreign policy, it was Reagan who, memorably, described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire”. And it was Reagan who stood at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987 and urged Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”.
That there are contemporary supra-party alliances over foreign policy is clear. What we do not yet know is whether — as over Europe — party politics will remain intact or whether there will be a realignment between the forces of openness and those of reaction.
Stephen Pollard is a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe, a Brussels-based think tank
Andrew Sullivan is away
