Left or Right?

The phrase Neocon has come to be used to describe a type of person who is a warmongering right wing nut, who just wants war for wars sake. It is usually used today in reference to the people that supported the of invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Members of this neoconservative movement see themselves as coming from the same tradition as the Democratic party during WW2 and the Cold War under Roosevelt and Truman who were internationalists with an assertive foreign policy.

Neocons like Paul Wolfowitz who would serve in the George W. Bush administration as the Deputy Secretary of Defense. In the 1970’s Wolfowitz saw him self as the exact opposite to Conservatives like Henry Kissinger. As Wolfowitz disagreed with his policy of de taunte; a strategy of containment and deterrent, one of limited engagement.

Kissinger who was a conservative was arguably the most influential person on America’s foreign policy during this time. At one point serving both as Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor in the Ford administration.

In his book A World Restored, Kissinger praises the Austrian statesmen Metternich. Who in the nineteenth century was the diplomat that orchestrated the balancing of the different sovereign powers across Europe after Napoleon was defeated.

Wolfowitz believed that Kissinger missed the point. That the real hero of that time was the tsar of Russia Alexander the first who pushed to confront and defeat the tyrant Napoleon on principals of universal human rights.

Journalist and author Christopher Hitchens was also another Neocon who came from a far leftist Trotskyite background who wrote a book (The Trials of Henry Kissinger) about the alleged war crimes of Henry Kissinger and was one of the public intellectuals that supported and argued for regime change in Iraq.

Left or Right these Neocons believed America should be the world’s super power that uses it military might to advance democracy across the globe.