Why Trump succumbed to the hawks

The death of the neocons has been greatly exaggerated

Hawks swooped in to fill the policy void.
(Image credit: iStock)

I am sure it's just a coincidence that The New York Times announced they'd hired Bret Stephens away from The Wall Street Journal in the same week that the Trump administration's foreign policy underwent a radical reorientation away from an "America First" sensibility and toward the neoconservatism that completely dominates the center-right foreign policy establishment. But that doesn't make it any less disconcerting.

Stephens is a prominent, Pulitzer-Prize-winning neocon pundit who wrote an entire book, in apparent sincerity, about how Barack Obama — who bombed nine countries in his time as president — was pushing "isolationism" and working to bring about American withdrawal from the world. That the Times is eager to add such a strident hawk to its roster of columnists — joining fellow hawks Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristof, and David Brooks — is just one more sign that the much-vaunted demise of neoconservatism over the past 18 months has been greatly exaggerated.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.