If the obvious impacts of America's proxy war in Ukraine are lives lost and debt accrued, a quieter impact is the neoconservatives' revival. A few weeks ago, the Biden administration conferred the deputy secretary of state position on Victoria Nuland, a policymaker in almost every 21st-century American intervention abroad and an ardent supporter of our involvement in Ukraine. Recently, William Kristol, who along with Nuland's husband Robert Kagan co-founded the Project for the New American Century, which drove the push for the Iraq invasion, launched a $2-million organization, Republicans for Ukraine, encouraging congressional Republicans to fund the proxy war despite a majority of the public turning against it. Even if history truly does come as tragedy and repeat as farce, the neoconservatives' re-emergence is extraordinary, because Iraq isn't the only tragedy, or farce, on their sixty-year record. This record has nothing to do with the hard-nosed, practical, anti-communist, and anti- Iranian outlook with which it's sometimes associated — one shared by many Republicans. Instead, it flows from a broader foreign and domestic project of power accrual and social control driven by ideologues and administrators in Washington, D.C. The project's effects reach wide and deep: though the Center for American Progress and Democracy: A Journal of Ideas feed the Biden White House personnel and policies, their insider playbook was created by the neocons, whose think-tanks and magazines laid the groundwork for an insulated class of political ideologues to wreak their will on the rest of us.
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