Springtime for Neocons.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: The Realist

In May 1968, Richard Hofstadter published an essay about the Vietnam War in the New York Times Magazine. It was called "Uncle Sam Has Cried 'Uncle!' Before." Hofstadter had earned fame for works such as The American Political Tradition and Anti-Intellectualism In American Life that upended traditional interpretations of American history. The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian was also a colleague and close friend of Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun and Daniel Bell at Columbia University. It was a moment when the voice of the New York intellectuals carried, even as the paladins of the New Left assaulted everything that they cherished.

In the Times, Hofstadter now offered a characteristically revisionist (and insightful) reflection about American foreign policy:

The American people, like their leaders, have very little familiarity with losing national enterprises. Although they have been uncommonly uneasy about the war in Vietnam almost from the beginning, they are equally uneasy with the idea of national failure, and an American "defeat" seems to many of them unthinkable and absurd. But it wasn't. Contrary to popular mythology, Hofstadter argued, the United States had never enjoyed a smooth rise to global dominance. Instead, pretty much like any other nation, it had experienced periodic setbacks and defeats.

Hofstadter thus pointed out that in 1794 George Washington had signed the deeply unpopular Jay's Treaty, which preserved the peace between Great Britain and the United States at the cost of numerous concessions. The United States also paid ransom to the Barbary states (in 1795 alone it handed over almost one million dollars to the dey of Algiers to rescue 115 sailors). Then there was the War of 1812. American bungling throughout the conflict was overshadowed by Andrew Jackson's spectacular victory at New Orleans, which created the impression of overwhelming U.S. military power even though it wasn't even necessary to fight (slow communications meant that neither the British nor Americans knew that a peace deal had already been reached). Battling Mexico and Native Americans, Hofstadter wrote, further fostered a complacent belief in American invincibility. So did World War I, which the United States entered late in the day. World War II propelled the United States to global power, but the Korean War proved an unpopular and intractable conflict that Dwight Eisenhower pledged to end upon entering the Oval Office. Now Hofstadter said that prolonging the Vietnam War would, in the words of his biographer David S. Brown, "almost certainly bring about a reaction from the Right" to avenge the failure of liberal elites in Southeast Asia.

What Hofstadter did not anticipate, however, is that perhaps the most fervent response to defeat in Vietnam would come from a militant faction within the liberal movement, the one that came to be known as neoconservatism. It was a neologism coined as a term of derision by Michael Harrington, but it would ultimately be embraced by its adherents. The desire to restore a perceived American dominance--to repudiate the "Vietnam syndrome"--helped lead to the birth of the...