The Books of My Life: Imperial Designs

Gary Dorrien's Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004) is, like another book I recently read, Betty Dobratz's and Stephanie Shanks-Meile's The White Separatist Movement in the United States: "White Power, White Pride", quite timely thanks to the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency. This is true in spite of the fact that Dorrien's book, like the book of Dobratz and Shanks-Meile, was published over ten years ago.

Dorrien, who is currently the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, explores, in Imperial Designs, the rise of neoconsevative foreign policy ideologues in the wake of the Cold War, apologists and polemicists like Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer, and Robert Kagan, the sects that make of the post-Cold War neocon faith, namely, neocon realists and neocon interventionists, and the important role these neocons, particularly those of the interventionist Wilsonian variety, played in the administration of Bush 43 promoting, as they did, wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and even China. It is this, the neocon polemics for war against Iran, Syria, and North Korea, that makes Dorrien's 2004 book timely again. After all John Bolton, one of the neocon Wilsonian polemicists of the Bush the second era, is currently a National Security Advisor in the Trump administration and appears to be preaching the same neocon interventionist gospel he and other neocon Wilsonians preached in their years in the wilderness during the Clinton era and during their years on the inside during the Bush the 43rd administration.

There were a number of things I liked about Dorrien's book. I found his close textual reading of American neoconservatism and his typology of the various forms the neoconservative movement took in the US to be particularly enlightening. I also found Dorrien's book helpful in understanding the Trump administration, an administration that seems to be, at least for the moment, a hybrid of various paleocons and neocon interventionists all at the same time.

There were a few things in Dorrien's book I found somewhat problematic. In the fifth chapter of Imperial Designs, for instance, Dorrien explores the tensions between interventionist neocons and old Cold War and post Cold War palecons like Pat Buchanan, who, by the way, in retrospect seems like Donald Trump before Donald Trump. In chapter five Dorrien, like neocon polemicists such as Canadian David Frum, feathers all paleocons with the tars of nativism and anti-Semitism (see pages 200-202 and 220). Personally, I think it is helpful to see anti-Semitism as similar to two other antis, anti-Americanism and anti-Mormonism. There are, I think, reasonable and valid criticisms one can make of the state of Israel, of the US, and of Mormonism. There are also unreasonable and invalid polemics and apologetics one can engage in with respect to the state of Israel, the US, and Mormonism. The former are not species of anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, or anti-Mormonism. The latter are. Somewhat ironically given Dorrien's claim that all paleocons are anti-Semites, Dorrien's discussion of the paleocons in his Imperial Designs suggests the opposite, namely that not all contemporary paleocons appear to be flaming anti-Semites.