The neoconservative Right would have you believe this election affords them

a uniquely tough choice. On the one hand, there’s Hillary Clinton, liberal

bogeywoman and hated embodiment of the Democratic establishment. On the other,

there’s Donald Trump, who has repeatedly called the Iraq war a mistake, accused

the Bush administration of lying to drag the United States into said war, claimed

he would be “neutral” in his dealings with Israel and just recently

sketched

out an “unabashedly noninterventionist approach to world affairs”

for the Washington Post editorial board.

Whether or not Trump believes any of this is, as usual, up for debate. But

some neocons are so disgusted with his rejection of foreign policy establishment

thinking that they’ve declared the unthinkable: They’re going to

vote for Hillary Clinton.

Concerned that Trump would “destroy American foreign policy and the international

system,” author Max Boot told

Vox that Clinton would be “vastly preferable.” Historian

Robert Kagan has also come out in

favor of Clinton, saying he

feels “comfortable with her on foreign policy.” Eliot Cohen,

a former Bush administration official who has been called “the most influential

neocon in academe,” declared

Clinton “the lesser evil, by a large margin.”

It would be convenient to accept that this support is just part of a Faustian

bargain neocons have reluctantly entered into because of the looming specter

of Trump. But the truth is, neocons and assorted war hawks have long had a soft

spot for Clinton and her views on foreign policy.

When President Obama nominated Clinton for Secretary of State in 2008, Richard

Perle, one of the Iraq War’s primary

cheerleaders and chairman of the Defense Policy Board in the lead-up to

the war, said

he was “relieved.” “There’s not going to be as much change

as we were led to believe.”

Perle, who was sometimes referred to as the “Prince

of Darkness” and who once

predicted there would be “some grand square in Baghdad that is named

after President Bush,” made clear his support for Clinton was not due

to a lack of choices. “I heard about others on the list [for Secretary of State] that I wouldn’t be happy about,” he said. “Those were

mostly Republicans.”