If you want to insult someone in the foreign policy establishment, call them a neoconservative.

As an example, consider the case of John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s national security advisor. When Bolton’s appointment was announced in April 2018, he was described as a “neocon favorite ” in Forbes and a “neoconservative warmonger” in The New American. Joe Scarborough said on MSNBC, “John Bolton is a bigger neocon than Dick Cheney.” Others were content to insult him merely by association or by comparison. One writer in The American Conservative admitted, “Bolton has always been thick with the neocons. … I don’t have to believe that Bolton is 100 percent a neocon to know that he hangs out with them,” while the New Republic simply proclaimed him “Scarier Than a Neoconservative.” The designation even went international, with the BBC characterizing Bolton as a “strident Bush administration neoconservative.”

These descriptions of Bolton’s views are inaccurate, but my interest is not in vindicating Bolton, much less neoconservatism. Rather, I want to use his critics’ words to illustrate, first, the debasement of language and, second, how the obsession with hating on neocons has distorted the foreign policy debate.

The word “neoconservative” actually has a history and a meaning, and we lose something when we turn it into a demeaning way to refer to any variation of foreign policy hawkishness. Damning neocons has become a ritual incantation among international relations scholars and pundits, something done to protect or improve one’s reputation with other scholars. It’s a way of policing the Overton Window of the international relations discourse, positioning neoconservatism as beyond the pale, not just wrong but reprehensible, professionally dangerous, and civically irresponsible.

As a result, we have lost sight of how neoconservatism fits within the mainstream of America’s foreign policy traditions. We have also hampered our ability to have honest debates about the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Neoconservatism is out of fashion now because of the legacy of the Iraq War, but elements of the neoconservative approach to America’s role in the world have echoes and parallels throughout American history.

If we treat neoconservatism as an aberration, we lose sight of that history, misunderstand the role American ideals have historically played in U.S. foreign policy, and miss opportunities for more fruitful debates about past, present, and future wars.

Neoconservative History

Neoconservatives were disillusioned liberals who defected from the Democratic Party and the progressive movement in the 1960s in part because of the waste and bloat of the Great Society.

As good liberals, they favored civil rights and an active role for the state in promoting them. Richard John Neuhaus, for instance, marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., when few other white clergy would. But neoconservatives saw rising crime, family breakdown, and soaring deficits as an indictment of big-state liberalism.

That is why, for example, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan became one of the most prominent Democrats to break publicly with his party when he warned about the tie between family breakdown and poverty in the African-American community. He and others believed the so-called New Left was drifting too close to outright Marxism and to what we today call identity politics, all far removed from their idealized New Deal liberalism.

But domestic policy was only part of the story. Neoconservatives also migrated away from the left because of diverging views of America’s role in the world. The left during the 1960s increasingly came to be dominated by the viewpoint of the “New Left,” which viewed the United States and the Soviet Union as morally indistinguishable, questioned the very basis of the Cold War, and opposed American leadership in the world, largely because of the Vietnam War.

A minority of liberal intellectuals — the same people troubled by the failures of the Great Society and the dawn of identity politics — dissented, and they became the new, “neo-”conservatives. In some cases, neoconservatives’ hawkish liberalism was a result of coming of age in the 1940s and 1950s, when America’s leadership was strongest and enjoyed robust bipartisan support. In other cases, it was more deeply rooted: Many of the famed New York intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s who later shaped neoconservatism, including Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer, and Irving Kristol, were either immigrants or first-generation Americans whose families had direct experience with the totalitarian movements then wracking Europe. Some in the movement were inspired by what they took from the ambiguous and contested teachings of the German-American political philosopher Leo Strauss.

These thinkers were troubled by the New Left’s moral equivocation during the Cold War and believed the left was insufficiently dedicated to American national security and American ideals. They maintained an unabashed belief in American leadership on the world stage and strident opposition to communism. “The number of intelligent men who could not count the Soviet Union as an enemy, even though this was its own self-definition, was absolutely astonishing,” Kristol, often recognized as the “godfather” of neoconservatism, wrote in 2003. (He wrote what is essentially the official defense of neoconservatism in his 1995 book, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea.)

Kristol and his fellow travelers were liberals in the Truman-Kennedy tradition, unashamed to be hawks for American interests and ideals. They believed wholeheartedly that the ideals animating the American experiment were universally valid and superior to all alternatives and, thus, that the exercise of American power on behalf of those ideals was self-evidently good. Vietnam was not a lesson about the inherent failings of the American moral character or the dangers of leadership on the world stage. It was a narrower lesson about how to exercise leadership, not whether to do so. For some, Vietnam was above all a lesson about the vital importance of sustaining political will. In 1963, on the eve of Ngo Dinh Diem’s overthrow, Kristol wrote despairingly about South Vietnam’s incompetence and corruption, and concluded that the only course of action was to escalate America’s involvement — a view from which he and his fellow travelers rarely wavered.

Vietnam proved the formative experience for this community of thinkers. If there is a hard core to the neoconservative worldview, it is that Vietnam did not disprove the theory of American indispensability, the truth of American ideals, or the goodness of American power. In the term’s original iteration, a neoconservative is someone who lived through the Vietnam War and believed the United States was right to fight it and should have won it.

Neoconservatives believe that, Vietnam notwithstanding, the United States should continue playing the role it inherited after World War II. They believe in a world in which American power and liberals ideals are the lynchpin of global order.

And so this group of formerly liberal intellectuals drifted, not to the old-style conservatism that William Buckley was reviving in the pages of National Review, but to a new kind of conservatism in the pages of Commentary, The Public Interest, and, eventually, The Weekly Standard. In contrast to its paleo- counterpart, neoconservatism “is hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking, not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic,” Kristol wrote in the same 2003 essay. Neoconservatism combined liberal idealism with American leadership abroad (and with a more empirically-grounded approach to domestic policy compared to their liberal and progressive counterparts). This worldview evolved during the 1970s, yielding a generation of Republican policymakers, like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Paul Wolfowitz, who helped shape the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations.

The original neoconservatives felt that they had not left the Democratic Party; it had left them. They believed, with good reason, that by championing American power and American ideals they were staying within the mainstream of American foreign policy. Rather, it was the New Left and the Democratic Party under LBJ, Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and Jimmy Carter, who had departed from America’s historic role underwriting the international liberal order with its power and leadership.

Neoconservatism Is Not Unique

The belief in the goodness of American power and ideals was hardly unique in the country’s history. Neoconservatives rediscovered — they did not invent — the idea that American power should work in tandem with American ideals. In fact, one could argue that some version of this blend is the majority tradition of American statesmanship (Tony Smith identified a similar blend and called it “selective liberal internationalism”). Among the most maddening claims of anti-neocon sentiment is that neoconservatism somehow distorts the American foreign policy tradition or smuggles something alien into it.

Thomas Jefferson called for America to be an “Empire of Liberty.” If the Declaration’s truths were self-evident, they were universally true and applicable to all peoples and all governments. He wrote that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed” — not Western governments, or Christian governments, or Anglo-Saxon governments, but simply governments, all of them, with no qualifier. That truth, for Jefferson, called for America to play a special role in the world as the foremost exemplar and champion of the ideals he espoused. In this sense, neoconservatives’ belief in the universality of liberal principles is solidly Jeffersonian.

When William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt waged war in Cuba and occupied the Philippines, they justified their imperial conquests as benevolent, if coercive, humanitarianism, using American power to spread American ideals and influence, while alleviating human suffering (in this case, regardless of the wishes of those who were to be the lucky beneficiaries of America’s benevolence). Neoconservatism was an updated, less explicitly imperialistic, version of Roosevelt’s big stick and “civilizing” mission.

Woodrow Wilson comes closer than any of his predecessors to neoconservatism in his close marriage of idealism backed by military power. Wilson oversaw military interventions in Mexico, Russia, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba — in addition to inaugurating a century of American involvement in the Eurasian balance of power through World War I. Wilson believed this expression of American power was right and justified by virtue of superior American ideals and American purpose. Later neoconservatives believed they were honoring Wilson’s legacy, not departing from it, though they placed less faith in intergovernmental institutions than Wilson did and didn’t share his progressivism on domestic matters.

The inheritors of the Wilsonian tradition, including Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy, fought and won World War II on the basis of the Atlantic Charter’s liberal ideals and FDR’s Four Freedoms, built the United Nations and NATO, articulated the Truman Doctrine, created the Marshall Plan, and fought the Korean War and the first phase of the Cold War while laying the foundations of the most powerful economic and military system in the history of the world.

These statesmen were, like their predecessors, augmenting American power and using it to advance American interests and ideals. While there are tradeoffs between ideals and interests in the short-term, most American statesmen have generally believed that, in the long run, there is a rough harmony between them.

When George W. Bush proclaimed in his Second Inaugural,

The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.

…he was not articulating a new and unique doctrine. He was following the precedent of more than century of presidential rhetoric.

Hawks, Idealists, and Vietnam

This history throws into sharp relief the contemporary misuses of the term “neoconservative.” First, many people use the word as an all-purpose synonym for “hawk,” as they did with Bolton (who is more accurately described as an offensive realist or nationalist because of his disregard for democratization as a component of U.S. foreign policy). But neoconservative is not a synonym for “hawk.” If hawkishness makes a neoconservative, then Franklin Roosevelt, James K. Polk, and Andrew Jackson were neocons, as were Winston Churchill, Napoleon, Mao Tse-Tung, and Attila the Hun, and the word has lost all meaning. It is true that neoconservatives appreciate hard power, but that view is hardly unique to them.

Second, some may be tempted to use “neocon” as a synonym for “idealist” or, worse, “Wilsonian,” which is simply anachronistic. Jefferson and Wilson were idealists, but they were not neocons. Idealism has long been a part of American statesmanship — only one part, but a legitimate part nonetheless.

The word is best used as it was originally coined — as a label for a specific epistemic community, one that began with debates about America’s role in the world and, specifically, the Vietnam War. Neoconservatism’s roots in the Vietnam debate explain why the concept and the community returned to prominence during the war in Iraq. As during Vietnam, prominent neoconservative thinkers and policymakers hoped to see U.S. power serve U.S. ideals. Prominent neoconservatives, like Paul Wolfowitz, then serving as deputy secretary of defense, championed the war at its outset. After the U.S. failed to find an active Iraqi weapons of mass destruction program, the Bush administration emphasized democratization as central to the war’s continuing purpose.

Most everyone was apt to analogize Iraq to Vietnam and extrapolate their preferred lessons. Opponents said Iraq was doomed to failure like Vietnam, and the United States should leave the former more quickly and cheaply than it left the latter. Supporters warned that believing the war was lost would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bush made the comparison himself in 2007, arguing that the United States needed to show resolve in Iraq lest it defeat itself as it did in Vietnam. Iraq has joined Vietnam as a proxy for competing foreign policy worldviews. What you think the “lessons of Vietnam” and the “lessons of Iraq” are speaks volumes about your place in the ecosystem of the foreign policy establishment. The same became true of the word “neoconservative,” which after Iraq was reduced to an insult, a shorthand for “dogmatic idealist” and “self-righteous hawk” all in one.

Using Neocon as an Insult Accomplishes Nothing

Because so much foreign policy debate now parallels the intractable tribal clashes that characterize American public discourse generally, neoconservative has come to serve as an all-purpose insult, something with which to demean foreign policy professionals on the supposedly wrong side of a given issue. Neoconservative has come to mean anyone whose foreign policy views you dislike, especially anyone you want to paint as dangerous, naïve, utopian, or inflexibly and arrogantly ideological. Figures on the right are not the only victims; sometimes the far left uses the label to criticize the moderate left — such as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — for being insufficiently liberal.

Consider the unusual passion evident in the #NeverNeocon crowd. Steve Walt, a prominent professor of international affairs at Harvard, has grown his brand partly on hating neocons. He tweeted in 2015: “Neocon Formula: 1) blunder into no-win quagmires 2) Lose power 3) accuse successor of “retreat” when US w/draws 4) regain power 5) Repeat.” He compared neoconservatives to “Germans who denied starting World War I.” Walt has suggested that neoconservatives don’t deserve jobs, are responsible for the rise of Trump (in fact, the opposite is closer to the truth), shouldn’t give advice on international affairs, and shouldn’t be listened to because of their past support for the war in Iraq. “That anyone pays attn. to neocons after their serial disasters is eloquent testimony to irresponsibility of US foreign policy institutions,” he tweeted in 2014. He wrote an article in 2015 subtitled “Why neoconservatives are never right.”

I pick on Walt because his words set a tone, coming as they do from an influential, tenured professor of international relations at one of the top-ranked universities in the world who has a well-trafficked blog, edits a prestigious book series (disclosure: including mine), and has tens of thousands of Twitter followers. Walt is hardly alone; indeed, his view is the dominant one and his tone is relatively moderate compared to other voices. Michael Lind blamed neoconservatives, similarly and just as inexplicably, for the rise of Trump. C. Bradley Thompson warned, “the neoconservatives are preparing this nation philosophically for a soft, American-style fascism.” Or consider Bolton’s critics who use the term not in reference to Bolton’s intellectual lineage and views on the Vietnam War. They are using it to mean “irresponsible hawk” or “warmonger.”

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Walt should keep his anti-neoconservative views to himself, nor even that anti-neoconservative views are wrong. Rather, I am asking, even if we assume the critics are right about the dangers of neoconservatism, is this the best way to present the case? Anti-neoconservative views have deteriorated from a principled disagreement over America’s role in the world and the Vietnam and Iraq Wars into a casual insult that relies on caricature and name-calling.

Towards a More Honest Debate

One productive result of returning to the term’s original meaning could be a more robust debate on the Vietnam War. The neoconservatives’ views on Vietnam put them in a small minority. Most Americans, and virtually all academic historians, view the Vietnam War as a mistake. If you want to disagree with neoconservatism, you have public opinion and ample historical studies on your side; you do not need to resort to name-calling.

Academic historians generally believe that the war was unwinnable because of the corruption of the South Vietnamese government and because a foreign power will be hard-pressed to win another country’s civil war. A few — very few — historians have looked more favorably, if not on the entire war, then on particular periods of it, though their contributions have generally not been welcomed in conventional academic circles. Mark Moyar argued that the relatively small training and advising mission under Kennedy was the right approach, but that this was betrayed by Johnson’s Americanization and “big war” strategy (an argument echoed in Max Boot’s recent work). Lewis Sorley went to the other end of the war, arguing that General Creighton Abrams implemented a counterinsurgency and pacification campaign that nearly won the war in 1970–71. Andrew Krepinevich concluded that the unconventional war was the right approach and showed promise, but was consistently starved for attention and resources. This new research could make for an interesting debate about various aspects of the Vietnam War. A few (mostly younger) scholars have led the way, reflecting on Ken Burns’ monumental documentary last year and on the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive this year.

But academia seems mostly uninterested in reopening these debates. As Moyar persuasively catalogued, the early histories of the war were written almost entirely by opponents of it and set the standard against which later scholars are routinely compared. Partisanship occludes serious discussion of the war, as does the culture of expectations that pervades academic history departments: As Moyar argues, a major “problem that impedes the study of Vietnam is a politically correct contraction of allowable inquiry.” The gatekeepers of historical orthodoxy seem so keen on protecting their generational consensus on the war that they have created a sort of historical fundamentalism, a closed epistemic community unable to consider outside views, driving other scholars to think tanks, service academies, and security studies programs.

Notably, of the four authors mentioned above who have written major volumes challenging the historical consensus on Vietnam, none are tenured professors (despite that three of them have PhDs from Harvard, Cambridge, and Johns Hopkins). They’ve spent their careers in think tanks and (for Sorley and Krepinevich) the military. Scholarship on the war in Iraq seems doomed to the same dynamic.

Moyar’s argument about the academy’s response to scholars willing to challenge the consensus on Vietnam may apply more broadly to scholars with suspected neoconservative sympathies. I recently received a job announcement in my inbox for a tenure-track position at a nationally-ranked research university; the announcement was accompanied by an informal introductory email that explicitly stated “no neocons.” Such overt political discrimination in the academy is rare, but it is consistent with the well-documented underrepresentation of conservatives in academia. Regardless of the cause, the political homogeneity of our universities ensures they exist in a climate of group-think and reflects poorly on the ethos of academic freedom.

The Vietnam revisionists, for their part, may be guilty of overselling their conclusions. The two sides are not mutually exclusive. It may be true that the war was unwinnable in a broad sense because of the corruption and incompetence of the South Vietnamese government. But it is also quite plausible that the United States did, at different times, hit upon a more successful counterinsurgency strategy; that it might have achieved a less disastrous outcome in Vietnam if it had stuck to it; and that its own choices and mistakes (such as persisting in a conventional, “Big War” strategy), and its lack of resolve, made things worse rather than better.

If true, such history might chasten both neoconservatives and their critics for their expectations of American power: neoconservatives for expectations that are too high; their critics, too low — which seems a good lesson in the post-Iraq age as well. Exploring these ideas would be an example of constructive public dialogue that informs the citizenry and aspiring statesmen about something relevant in the past that should shape how we approach our foreign policy commitments in the future.

Paul D. Miller is a professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council.