Don’t look now but the foreign policy divisions among the conservatives gathered at the annual National Conservatism conference are no longer contained. Today they finally spilled out, like gushing hot lava or whatever metaphor is best, all over Breakout Session B.
Fascinatingly it wasn’t over the Ukraine War, or China, but over Israel.
For many realists and restrainers who include themselves in this annual event — dominated by New Right conservatives who are a bit diverse but at this confab largely support state sovereignty, traditional values, and “the idea of nation” — today was a bit of a victory. For years, “NatCon”, launched in 2019 by Yoram Hazony, a staunch pro-Israel nationalist, had largely stayed away from foreign policy; a rare panel on China here, one on NATO there, interspersed with overwrought conversations about the threat of Islamism here in the U.S. and abroad.
But included this year in D.C. are two sessions hosting voices from the right-of-center realism and restraint faction, including remarks on Wednesday from National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty, entitled “Why Restraint is Conservative.” If NatCon is the intellectual underpinning of “America First,” it has finally come around to asking if entangling alliances, especially decades-long ones that seem to be driving us off a cliff to the unknown, are indeed “America First.”
At ground zero of this question is the U.S.-Israel relationship and it is causing a conservative schism, which played out quite viscerally in a debate Tuesday between Curt Mills, editor and executive director of The American Conservative, and Max Abrahms, assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University. It was hosted by Daniel McCarthy, who is a former editor of TAC and now edits Modern Age.
Abrahms came out swinging to call all realists today – especially John Mearsheimer — “wrong” on the issue of Iran and the Middle East writ large. In fact, he called them all “MAGA isolationist realists” who have become “insane” in their wrong-headed analysis since being “right” on the failures of the post-9/11 wars.
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