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This Week on the Right

The Neoconservatives and Political Aid: The New Crusade of the Democratic Globalists

By Tom Barry

(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from new Right Web analysis, available in full online at: https://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2005/0508crusade.php)

One of the major achievements of the neoconservatives over the past two decades has been to integrate the missionary impulses of liberal internationalism with right-wing interventionism. Not only have the democratic globalists succeeded in setting the ideological foundations of a new U.S. foreign policy, they have also played a central role in directing that policy.

Hard-liners they certainly are, but neoconservatives like Elliott Abrams—who directs the Bush administration’s Global Democracy Initiative—come armed with an internationalism that preaches values and mission, as well as military might. Their foreign policy is neo-Reaganite. Like Reagan’s policy agenda, which he said was based on “moral clarity” and “peace through strength,” the Bush agenda has sought to merge idealism and militarism.

Nowhere else is the “soft side” of the U.S. government’s global vision so clearly on display as at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Not even in the Pentagon are the delusions about American might and right so shamelessly exhibited.

Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the birth of NED, President Bush in a November 2003 speech delivered at NED headquarters reaffirmed the U.S. government’s role as international provocateur in a “global democratic revolution.” Aside from those attending the speech at the NED offices and the neoconservatives who coined the term “global democratic revolution,” the speech was largely ignored. But for those listening, it was the sound of the second shoe dropping.

The entire world had already heard the loud and clear message of the Bush administration’s embrace of a new militarism in international affairs after September 11. At a June 2002 speech at West Point, President Bush spelled out the defining principle of a new national security strategy: a commitment to preventive war and the use of U.S. military supremacy to order the globe.

Neoconservative military strategists such as Paul Wolfowitz had long argued—most explicitly in the draft Defense Policy Guidance that he coauthored with I. Lewis Libby in 1992—that the post-Cold War order should be shaped by the exercise of overwhelming U.S. military power. Other neoconservatives, especially those operating out of the American Enterprise Institute, shared the Wolfowitz vision. However, they argued that the unapologetic use of U.S. military superiority should be accompanied by social engineering strategies that would politically restructure key parts of the globe. Among the more prominent “democratic globalists” is Carl Gershman, the neoconservative who has presided over the NED since 1984.

But just as the Reagan foreign policy had a soft side in its promotion of “free-market democracies” through new political aid programs funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the George W. Bush administration coupled its aggressive military policies with a renewed but very selective commitment to democracy building. [Read entire article]

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Democracy for Whom, by Whom, of Whom?
The NED, created by Ronald Reagan the in the early 1980s, has made an art of using “democracy” as a weapon at the service of U.S. interests.
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The Neo-Right Trajectory
At one time a leading member of the Socialist Party-USA, Carl Gershman hasspent the last 30 years as head of the NED.
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Freedom’s Just Another Word …
Created by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1941, Freedom House today epitomizes theselective approach to human rights that is a hallmark of neoconservatism.
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Venezuela, Haiti … What’s Next?
The International Republican Institute, a key conduit of NED funds to U.S.-friendly “democrats” acrossthe globe, has been in the middle of a series of recent coups in America’sbackyard.
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Letters From Our Readers

(Editors Note: We encourage feedback and comments, which can be sent for publication through our feedback page, at: https://rightweb.irc-online.org/form_feedback.html. We reserve the right to edit comments for clarity and brevity. Be sure to include your full name. Thank you.)

Re: Whose Side Are You On

Tom Barry essentially classifies all those in favor of immigration restrictions as being on the right. This is wrong. Many people concerned with population control in the United States are concerned with maintaining a healthy natural environment and do not consider themselves as rightists. Barry underplays this significant group, which also includes a number of leftists. The difficult question is whether we should have totally open borders, and if not, how to control those borders as well as legal immigration. Those are thorny questions, not helped by ignoring or downplaying the difficulties. That people sympathetic to immigrants’ problems necessarily have to be for unrestricted immigration is a PC position, one too common in the discussion.

– Morton K. Brussel

Re: John R. Bolton, UN Ambassador-designate

I enjoyed your article on John B

olton, despite its negative slant. Bolton is obviously the best man for the UN job. We, the public, like plain-speaking criticism of the UN and most Americans consider the organization a wasteful, useless entity which exists just to embarrass and shackle the United States. If we won’t dump the UN, then let Bolton try to reform it from the inside. Time for a wake up call.

– Mike Bowens

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