Brent Scowcroft profile in the New Yorker

This week the New Yorker has a long profile of Brent Scowcroft. It doesn’t seem to be online in full yet, however Steve Clemons has published extended excerpts on his blog The Washington Note. The New Yorker also has an online only exclusive interview with the author of the profile, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Scowcroft was the National Security Adviser to George H.W. Bush, and is one of the leading exponents of the realist school of foreign policy thought. This has, inevitably, led him to become a spokesman for those Republican that do not agree with the neoconservative aspects of George W. Bush’s administration’s foreign policy. In his critique of the current state of foreign affairs, Scowcroft articulates many of the concerns that several conservatives share.

One of the first differences in opinion that become apparent is Scowcroft’s attitude towards the first Gulf War:

The first Gulf War was a success, Scowcroft said, because the President knew better than to set unachievable goals. "I'm not a pacifist," he said. "I believe in the use of force. But there has to be a good reason for using force. And you have to know when to stop using force." Scowcroft does not believe that the promotion of American-style democracy abroad is a sufficiently good reason to use force.

"I thought we ought to make it our duty to help make the world friendlier for the growth of liberal regimes," he said. "You encourage democracy over time, with assistance, and aid, the traditional way. Not how the neocons do it."

This leads on to his opinion of Dick Cheney. Cheney and Scowcroft were colleagues in George H.W. Bush’s administration, with Cheney as Secretary of Defense while Scowcroft was NSA. However the first Gulf War caused the widening of the split within the Republican Party into essentially three camps, and the realignment of alliances: the realist conservatives, who believed that the Gulf War was a success, parted ways with the democratic nationalists, some of whom joined with the neoconservatives. Scowcroft says of Cheney:

"I don't think Dick Cheney is a neocon, but allied to the core of neocons is that bunch who thought we made a mistake in the first Gulf War, that we should have finished the job."

Goldberg, in the interview he gives on the New Yorker site, further makes clear the difference between the motives of the democratic nationalists and the neoconservatives, despite their advocacy of the same course of action:

Preëmption is not necessarily an idealistic notion; a realist could very well argue for preëmption. I believe that Dick Cheney would put himself in this camp—the camp of people who were less interested in bringing democracy to Iraq as a means of permanently making the place stable, but who saw in Saddam a rising threat and felt it necessary to do something.

The realist position that Scowcroft supports is, by his own admission, a “cynical” one:

"The reason I part with the neocons is that I don't think in any reasonable time frame the objective of democratizing the Middle East can be successful. If you can do it, fine, but I don't think you can, and in the process of trying to do it you can make the Middle East a lot worse."

Realists, in other words, are cynical, and neoconservatives are idealists. Goldberg describes Scowcroft as representing a faction in the widening rift within the Republican Party between traditional conservatives and neocons:

Scowcroft speaks for the non-neoconservative, non-evangelical, non-human-rights wing of the Republican Party—the business side of the Party.

And when asked about the backlash by the conservatives against the neocons, he notes:

They’ve been doing so for some time. Just read George Will. Their complaint is that neoconservatives aren’t conservative; they’re liberals with guns. Conservatives tend to take Scowcroft’s more jaundiced view of human nature. Paul Wolfowitz, on the other hand, is a liberal, but a liberal who believes that transformation can be brought about by force, not just persuasion. Obviously, there are other breaches within the Republican Party, on the Harriet Miers nomination, on spending, and on and on.

"Liberals with guns" is, I think, a neat description of neoconservatives. I, in fact, encourage the division: I believe that (real) neoconservatives have more in common with the DLC/centrist faction of the Democratic Party than with the Republican Party.