The Great Neocon Freakout
16th March 2023
Steve Hayward at Power Line.
About a decade after the end of the Vietnam War, by which time the bloodbaths of the Communist takeover of South Vietnam and the spillover of the carnage to Cambodia were undeniable, the West German journalist Uwe-Siemon-Netto, who had specialized in anti-American reportage as a correspondent during the war, caused a stir in Europe when he publicly suggested that for him and his fellow anti-war activists, the most appropriate course of action was a prolonged period of silence.
This recommendation comes back to mind just now in watching the neocon freakout over Gov. Ron DeSantis expressing doubts about our Ukrainian policy. Bill Kristol had an embolism on Twitter, his most prominent public platform these days. (How the mighty have fallen.) The Ukraine romantics (I’ll call them) rushed to say that Gov. DeSantis’s position was “pro-Putin,” even though DeSantis said he supported aid to Ukraine, but worried that the Biden Administration and other cheerleaders for our Ukrainian support don’t have a clear strategy and seem heedless of—or frightened by—the risks. It looks more and more like Vietnam all over again, in which we thought we could calibrate “graduated pressure” to achieve a precise outcome while always fearful of what a more forceful strategy might entail. War doesn’t work like that. As Ronald Reagan liked to say in the 1960s, we should either win, or get out. Everyone said he was irresponsible and naïve.