By Jacob Heilbrunn New York Review of Books

Russia’s war on Ukraine has opened up a new front in Washington’s foreign policy elite, mobilizing veterans of the cold war and Iraq. Especially on the right, a fierce fight is in prospect.

Since the end of the Iraq War, many of the liberal hawks and neoconservatives who championed it have been waging a two-front war to regain their political footing and, incidentally, their previous prominence. The first hostilities began during the Obama administration. After Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea in 2014 and the Middle East experienced an upsurge in Islamic militancy, these warrior intellectuals attacked President Barack Obama. The historian Robert Kagan, a leading supporter of the Iraq War, declared in an essay in The New Republic that “superpowers don’t get to retire,” prompting The New York Times to announce: “Events in Iraq Open Door for Interventionist Revival, Historian Says.” The revival never happened. Although President Obama met with Kagan at the White House, he was not sold on presiding over a new era of intervention. Instead, he went on to deliver a speech in May 2014 at West Point in which he said that the use of military power abroad was no panacea and that his detractors were “either misreading history or engaged in partisan politics.”

If the hawks failed to persuade Obama of the merits of their case on that occasion, they retained their pride of place in the Republican Party until the improbable rise of Donald Trump in 2016. For all the fusillades that the hawks launched at Trump, he remained unscathed, exploiting the neocons as a useful foil. With his characteristic penchant for personal vituperation, he ridiculed William Kristol, who had argued in 2002 that the Iraq War would “start a chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy,” as a “dummy” and “a loser.” The pivotal moment for Trump came during a debate at the South Carolina primary in February 2016, where he laid waste to longstanding conservative taboos in accusing George W. Bush of lying about weapons of mass destruction and in blaming him for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

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