A critical look at the roots of George W. Bush's foreign policy.
Reviewed by Fred Kaplan
Sunday, April 27, 2008; BW05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/24/AR2008042402896.html
U.S. vs. THEM
How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security
By J. Peter Scoblic
Viking. 350 pp. $25.95
The shelves are already bulging with books about George W. Bush's disastrous foreign policy -- where it went wrong, how to steer things right. Yet space should be made for J. Peter Scoblic's U.S. vs. Them, if only because it points out that there's nothing "neo" about the neoconservatives.
The neocons' military unilateralism, shunning of diplomacy as "appeasement," scorn of international institutions as "unwelcome checks on American power" -- all these notions, Scoblic argues, are rooted in un-prefixed American conservatism, a movement founded by William F. Buckley in the 1950s, which fused the once separate strands of libertarianism and religious traditionalism into a crusade against Roosevelt's New Deal at home and Truman's containment abroad.
Bush, Scoblic writes, "is the direct descendant -- indeed, the ultimate product -- of this movement" because, unlike other postwar Republican presidents, he has taken conservatives' foreign policy ideas seriously and brought their dreams to deadly life. (…)
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