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June
2, 2003
The Strategist and the Philosopher
Leo Strauss
and Albert Wohlstetter
By ALAIN FRACHON and
DANIEL VERNET
Translated for CounterPunch
by Norman Madarasz.
Who are the neoconservatives playing
a vital role in the US president's choices by the side of Christian
fundamentalists? And who were their master thinkers, Albert Wohlstetter
and Leo Strauss?
It was said in the tone of sincere praise: "You
are some of our country's best brains". So good, added George
W. Bush, "that my government employs around twenty of you."
The president was addressing the American Enterprise Institute
in Washington DC on February 23 (quote from an article published
in Le Monde, March 20, 2003). He was paying homage to
a think tank that is one of the bastions of the American neoconservative
movement. He was saluting a school of thought that has marked
his presidency, avowing everything he owes to an intellectual
stream whose influence is now predominant. He was also acknowledging
the fact of being surrounded by neoconservatives, and giving
them credit for the vital role they play in his political choices.
At the outset of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy
recruited professors from the center-left, from Harvard University
especially. They were chosen among the "best and the brightest",
in the words of the essayist David Halberstam who coined the
phrase. As for President George W. Bush, he would go on to govern
with precisely those who, since the Sixties, began to rebel against
the then-dominant center consensus colored as it was with a hue
of social democracy.
Who are they and what is their history?
Who were their master thinkers? Where do the intellectual origins
of Bushian neoconservatism lie?
The neoconservatives must not be confused
with Christian fundamentalists who are also found in George W.
Bush's entourage. They have nothing to do with the renaissance
of protestant fundamentalism begun in the southern Bible Belt
states, which is one of the rising powers in today's Republican
Party. Neoconservatism is from the East Coast, and a little Californian
as well. Those who have inspired them have an 'intellectual'
profile. Often they are New Yorkers, often Jewish, having their
beginnings 'on the Left'. Some still call themselves Democrats.
They have their hands on literary or political reviews, not the
Bible. They wear tweed blazers, not the navy blue double-breasted
suits of Southern TV-evangelists. Most of the time, they profess
liberal ideas on questions related to society and social trends.
Their objective is neither to prohibit abortion nor to make school
prayer obligatory. Their ambition lies elsewhere.
The peculiarity of the Bush administration,
as Pierre Hassner explains, is to have ensured the junction of
these two streams. George W. Bush has brought the neoconservatives
and Christian fundamentalists to co-exist. The latter are represented
in government by a man like John Ashcroft, the Attorney General.
The former have one of their stars in the position of Deputy
Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz. George W. Bush, who led
his campaign on the center-right without any very specific political
anchorage, has performed a stunning and explosive ideological
cocktail. It weds Wolfowitz and Ashcroft, neoconservatives and
born-again Christians, planets diametrically opposed.
Ashcroft has taught at Bob Jones University
in South Carolina, an academically unknown college though a stronghold
of Protestant fundamentalism. The kind of talk one overhears
there brushes on anti-Semitism. Jewish and from a family of teachers,
Wolfowitz is for his part a brilliant product of East Coast universities.
He has studied with two of the most eminent professors of the
1960s. Allan Bloom, the discipline of the German-Jewish philosopher,
Leo Strauss, and Albert Wohlstetter, professor of mathematics
and a specialist in military strategy. These two names would
end up counting. The neoconservatives have placed themselves
under the tutelary shadow of the strategist and the philosopher.
'Neoconservative' is a misnomer. They
have nothing in common with those striving to guarantee the established
order. They reject just about all the attributes of political
conservatism as it is understood in Europe. One of them, Francis
Fukuyama, who became famous from his book on The End of History,
insists: "In no way do the neoconservatives want to defend
the order of things such as they are, i.e. founded on hierarchy,
tradition and a pessimistic view of human nature" (Wall
Street Journal, December 24, 2002).
As idealist-optimists convinced of the
universal value of the American democratic model, they want to
bring the status quo and soft consensus to an end. They believe
in the power of politics to change things. On the domestic front,
they have worked out the critique of the welfare state created
by Democratic and Republican presidencies (Kennedy, Johnson and
Nixon, respectively), which has belabored to resolve social problems.
On foreign policy, they denounced 1970s Détente, which,
they claimed, had benefited the USSR more than the West. As critics
of the Sixties' balance sheet who are opposed to Henry Kissinger's
diplomatic realism, they are anti-establishment. Irving Kristol
and Norman Podhoretz, the founders of Commentary and two
of neoconservatism's New-York godfathers, come from the Left.
And it was from the Left that they formulated their condemnation
of Soviet communism.
In Ni Marx, ni Jesus (Neither
Marx nor Jesus) (Robert Laffont, 1970), Jean-François
Revel described the USA plunged in the turmoil of the 1960s social
revolution. More recently, he has explained neoconservatism as
a backlash, above all on the domestic front. The neoconservatives
criticize the cultural and moral relativism of the Sixties in
the wake of Leo Strauss. In their view, relativism culminated
in the 'politically correct' movement of the 1980s.
Another high-ranking intellectual wages
the battle at this point. Allan Bloom from the University of
Chicago was depicted by his friend Saul Bellow in the novel Ravelstein
(Which Books, 2000). In 1987 in The Closing of the American
Mind, Bloom assails the university community for having given
everything equal merit: "Everything has become culture",
he wrote. "Drug culture, Rock culture, Street Gang culture
and so on without the least discrimination. The failure of culture
has become culture."
For Bloom, who was an important interpreter
of the classic works of literature, very much in the image of
his mentor Strauss, a part of the legacy of the 1960s "ends
up as contempt of Western civilization for itself," explains
Jean-François Revel. "In the name of political correctness,
all cultures are of equal merit. Bloom questioned the students
and professors who were perfectly disposed to accept non-European
cultures that often stood against liberty, while at the same
time protesting with extreme harshness against Western culture
to such a point as to refuse any acknowledgement of it as superior
in any respect."
While political correctness gave the
impression of holding the high ground, neoconservatives were
making headway. Bloom's book was a major best-seller. Within
US foreign policy, a true neoconservative school was taking shape.
Networks were set up. In the 1970s, the Democratic Senator from
Washington State, Henry Jackson (d. 1983) criticized the major
treaties on nuclear disarmament. He helped shape a generation
of young lions keenly interested in strategy, in which one comes
across Richard Perle and William Kristol. The latter had attended
Allan Bloom's lectures.
From within the administration and from
without, Richard Perle would meet up with Paul Wolfowitz when
they both worked for Kenneth Adelman, another contrarian of Détente
policies, or Charles Fairbanks, Under-Secretary of State. In
strategic matters, their guru was Albert Wohlstetter. A researcher
at the RAND Corporation, Pentagon advisor and a gastronomy connoisseur
nevertheless, Wohlstetter (d. 1997) was one of the fathers of
the American nuclear doctrine.
More precisely, he engaged in the early
attempts to reformulate the traditional doctrine that had been
the basis for nuclear deterrence: the so-called MAD or "Mutual-Assured
Destruction". According to that theory, as both blocs had
the capacity to inflict irreparable damage onto each other, their
leaders would think twice before unleashing a nuclear attack.
For Wohlstetter and his students, MAD was both immoral--due to
the destruction it would inflict on civilian populations--and
ineffective: it would end up in a mutual neutralization of nuclear
arsenals. No sane head of state, or at any rate no American president,
would decide on "reciprocal suicide". To the contrary,
Wohlstetter proposed "staggered deterrence", i.e. accepting
limited wars that would eventually use tactical nuclear weapons
with high-precision "smart" bombs capable of striking
at the enemy's military apparatus.
He criticized the joint nuclear weapons
control policy with Moscow. According to him, it amounted to
bridling US technological creativity in order to maintain an
artificial balance with the USSR.
Ronald Reagan heard him out, and launched
the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), baptized "Star Wars".
It is the ancestor of the Antimissile Defense System pursued
by Wohlstetter's students. They would be the partisans warmest
to the idea of a unilateral renunciation of the ABM Treaty, which
in their view prevented the US from developing other defense
systems. And they managed to convince George W. Bush.
In Perle and Wolfowitz's tracks, one
meets Elliott Abrams, these days in charge of the Middle-East
at the National Security Council, and Douglas Feith, an Under-Secretary
of Defense. They all share unconditional support for the policies
of the State of Israel, whatever government sits in Jerusalem.
This unwavering support explains how they have stoically sided
with Ariel Sharon. President Ronald Reagan's two mandates (1981
and 1985) gave many of them the opportunity to exercise their
first responsibilities in government.
In Washington DC, the neoconservatives
have woven their web. Creativity is on their side. Throughout
the years, they have marginalized intellectuals from the Democratic
center and centre-left to hold a preponderant place where the
ideas that dominate the political scene are forged. Among their
fora are reviews such as the National Review, Commentary,
the New Republic, headed for a time by the young 'Straussian'
Andrew Sullivan; the Weekly Standard, once under the ownership
of the Murdoch group, whose Fox News television network
takes care of broadcasting the vulgarized version of neoconservative
thought. Under Robert Bartley's charge, the editorial pages of
the Wall Street Journal have also fallen into neoconservatist
activism without qualms. Their hunting grounds are also the research
institutes and think tanks such as the Hudson Institute, the
Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute. Families
play a role as well: Irving Kristol's son, the very urbane William
Kristol runs the Weekly Standard; one of Norman Podhoretz's
sons worked for the Reagan administration; the son of Richard
Pipes--a Polish Jew who emigrated to the US in 1939 to become
a Harvard University professor and one of the major critics of
Soviet communism--Daniel Pipes has denounced Islamism as a new
totalitarianism threatening the West.
These men are not isolationists, on the
contrary. They are usually very well-educated, having vast knowledge
of foreign countries whose languages they have often mastered.
They share nothing with Patrick Buchanan's reactionary populism,
which espouses a US retreat to deal with its domestic problems.
The neoconservatives are internationalists,
partisans of a resolute US activism in the world. Their ways
do not resemble those of the GRAND Old Republican party (Nixon,
George Bush Sr.), trusting in the merits of a Realpolitik
and caring little about the nature of the regimes with which
the US was doing business to defend their interests. Someone
like Kissinger, for example, is an anti-model for them. Yet they
are not internationalists in the Wilsonian democratic tradition
(in reference to president Woodrow Wilson, the unfortunate father
of the League of Nations), that of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton.
The latter are deemed naive or angelic for counting on international
institutions to spread democracy.
After the strategist, introducing the
philosopher. There are no direct links existing between Albert
Wohlstetter and Leo Strauss (d. 1973) prior to the official emergence
of neoconservatism. But within the neoconservative network, some
of them have spawned bridges between the teachings of these two
men, despite the fundamental difference separating their fields
of research.
Either by filiation or capillary action
(Allan Bloom, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol and so on), Strauss's
philosophy has served as neoconservatism's theoretical substratum.
Strauss hardly ever wrote on current political affairs or international
relations. He was read and recognized for his immense erudition
of the classical Greek texts and Christian, Jewish and Islamic
scriptures. He was feted for the power of his interpretive method.
"He grafted classical philosophy to German profundity in
a country lacking a great philosophical tradition", explains
Jean-Claude Casanova who was sent to study in the US by his mentor,
Raymond Aron. Aron admired Strauss greatly, whom he had met in
Berlin before the war. He advised many of his students, like
Pierre Hassner or Pierre Manent a few years later, to turn toward
him.
Leo Strauss was born in Kirchain, Hesse,
in 1899 and left Germany on the eve of Hitler's rise to power.
After a short stint in Paris and then in England, he left for
New York where he taught at the New School for Social Research
before founding the Committee on Social Thought in Chicago, which
would become the 'Straussian' crucible.
It would be simplistic and reductive
to trace back to Strauss's teaching a few principles from which
the neoconservatives in George W. Bush's entourage may have drawn.
After all, neoconservatism plunges its roots in traditions other
than the Straussian school. But the reference to Strauss forms
a pertinent background to the neoconservatism currently at work
in Washington. It allows one to understand how neoconservatism
is not the simple caprice of a few Hawks. It leans on theoretical
bases that are perhaps debatable, though hardly mediocre. Neoconservatism
sits at the crossroads of two thoughts present in Strauss' thinking.
The first is linked to his personal experience.
As a young man, Strauss lived through the decay of the Weimar
Republic under the converging thrusts of Communists and Nazis.
From this experience, he concluded that democracy had no chance
of being imposed were it to remain weak, even if that meant refusing
to bolster itself against tyranny. Expansionist by nature, tyranny
might have to be confronted by resorting to the use of force:
"The Weimar Republic was weak. It had only one moment of
strength if not greatness: its violent reaction to the assassination
of the Jewish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Walther Rathenau,
in 1922, " wrote Strauss in a foreword to Spinoza's Critique
of Religion (1966, trans. 1980). "All in all,
Weimar showed the spectacle of justice without force, or of a
justice incapable of resorting to force."
The second thought results from his frequentation
of the ancients. What is most fundamental for them, as it is
for ourselves, is the kind of political regime that ends up shaping
the character of people. Why had the 20th century engendered
two totalitarian regimes, which Strauss preferred to call "tyrannies"
in reference to Aristotle's terminology? To this question that
has not ceased provoking contemporary intellectuals, Strauss
answered: for modernity caused a rejection of moral values, of
the virtue that is the basis for democracies, and a rejection
of the European values of Reason and Civilization.
Strauss argued that this rejection had
its roots in the Enlightenment. The latter produced historicism
and relativism as quasi-necessities, which means as a refusal
to admit the existence of a Higher Good reflected in concrete,
immediate and contingent goods, but irreducible to them. This
Good was an unattainable Good that is the measure for real goods.
Translated into the terms of political
philosophy, the extreme consequence of this relativism was the
USA-USSR convergence theory, very much in vogue during the 1960s
and 1970s. It amounted to eventually acknowledging a moral equivalence
between American democracy and Soviet communism. Admittedly for
Leo Strauss, there exist good and bad regimes. Political thought
must not be deprived of casting value judgments. Good regimes
have the right--even duty--to defend themselves against evil
ones. It would be simplistic to immediately transpose this idea
with the "axis of Evil" denounced by George W. Bush.
But it is very clear, indeed, that it proceeds from the same
source.
This central notion of regime as political
philosophy's matrix was developed by the Straussians who developed
an interest in the Constitutional history of the United States.
Strauss himself--also an admirer of the British Empire and Winston
Churchill as an example of the will-driven statesman--was inclined
to think that American democracy was the least-worst case of
political systems. Nothing better had been found for the flourishing
of mankind, even were there a tendency for special interests
to replace virtue as the regime's foundations.
His students, Walter Bens, Hearvey Mansfield
or Harry Jaffa, were especially the ones to fill the ranks of
the American Constitutionalist school. In the institutions of
the United-States they saw much more than merely the application
of the thought of the US' Founding Fathers. They saw the living
performance of higher principles, or indeed, for a man like Harry
Jaffa, of Biblical teachings. In any case, religion, eventually
civil religion, must serve as the cement to bind institutions
and society. This call to religion was not foreign to Strauss.
But the atheist Jew "enjoyed covering his tracks",
in Georges Balandier's words. He considered religion as useful
to upkeep illusions for the many, without which order could not
be maintained. By contrast, the philosopher must conserve a critical
spirit to address the few in a coded language as matter to be
interpreted and intelligible only to a meritocracy founded on
virtue.
Advocating a return to the ancients against
the trappings of modernity and illusions of progress, Strauss
nonetheless defended liberal democracy as the Enlightenment's
daughter--and American democracy as its quintessence. A contradiction?
Doubtless, but a contradiction he tackles in the tradition of
other thinkers on liberalism (Montesquieu, Tocqueville). For
the critique of liberalism, which runs the risk of losing itself
in relativism schematically speaking: the search for Truth
loses value is indispensable for its survival. For Strauss,
the relativism of the Good results in an inability to react against
tyranny.
This active defense of democracy and
liberalism reappears in the political vulgate as one of the neoconservative's
favorite themes. The nature of political regimes is much more
important than all of the institutions and international arrangements
to maintain world peace. The greatest threat comes from States
that do not share the values of (American) democracy. Changing
these regimes and working for the progress of democratic values
are the surest ways to reinforcing security (of the US) and peace.
The importance of political regimes,
praise for militant democracy, quasi-religious exaltation of
American values and firm opposition to tyranny: any number of
these themes, which are the stock and trade of the neoconservatives
populating the Bush administration, may be drawn from Strauss's
teachings. At times, they are reviewed and corrected by second-generation
'Straussians'. Yet one thing separates them from their putative
mentor: the Messianic-tainted optimism the neoconservatives unfold
to bring freedoms to the world (to the Middle East tomorrow,
to Germany and Japan yesterday), as though political voluntarism
could change human nature. This is yet another illusion that
is perhaps good enough to spread to the masses, but by which
the philosopher must not be fooled.
Still, a riddle remains: How does 'Straussism',
which was first founded on an oral transmission largely tributary
of the master thinker's charisma and expressed in austere books,
texts on texts, come to seat its influence in a presidential
administration? Pierre Manent, who directs the Raymond-Aron Research
Center in Paris, puts forward the idea that the ostracism to
which Leo Strauss's pupils were subject in the American university
milieu propelled them toward public service, think tanks and
the press. They are relatively over-represented in all of these
domains.
Another--complementary--explanation holds
to the intellectual void that followed the Cold War which the
'Straussians', and in their wake the neoconservatives, seemed
best prepared to fill. The fall of the Berlin Wall showed they
were right insofar as Reagan's strong-armed policies with respect
to the USSR triggered its downfall. The September 11, 2001 terrorist
attacks confirmed their thesis on the vulnerability of democracies
faced with tyranny's diverse forms. From the war on Iraq, the
neocons will be tempted to draw the conclusion that toppling
"evil" regimes is possible and desirable. Faced with
this temptation, calls to international law may claim moral legitimacy.
What is lacking, as things stand today, are the powers of conviction
and constraint.
Article originally published in Le Monde, April 16, 2003.
Translated for CounterPunch by Norman
Madarasz, Ph.D., May 24, 2003. Philosopher/international relations
analyst: nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca
Reproduced with kind permission.
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