By James Carden, The American Conservative, 8/2/24

The foreign policy establishment has been shaken by scandal. 

A former CIA operative and member of the George W. Bush National Security Council staff, Sue Mi Terry, was recently indicted by the U.S. Justice Department for acting as a foreign agent for South Korea for over a decade. 

Terry, who, until the scandal broke, was a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is married to the neoconservative chicken hawk (forgive the redundancy) Max Boot. Boot, a columnist at the Washington Post, also worked alongside his handbag-loving spouse as the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Boot’s political trajectory tracks with those of other high-profile neocons away from the GOP, announcing in an October 2021 column, 

I’m a single-issue voter. My issue is the fate of democracy in the United States. Simply put, I have no faith that we will remain a democracy if Republicans win power. Thus, although I’m not a Democrat, I will continue to vote exclusively for Democrats.

He was also among the highly-placed Washington propagandists who helped create, then cash in on, the wholly fabricated narrative that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election. According to Boot, the authoritarian menace posed by Putin’s Russia is as serious as that posed by American citizens (invariably those who live in less exalted zip codes than the Boots’) with whom he disagrees. Trump voters, as well as conservative and progressive advocates for peace, realism, and restraint, are all consigned to the “Useful Idiot” bin by Boot and his colleagues at the Washington Post.

Boot’s speciality has long been to accuse those with whom he disagrees of acting as apologists for the Kremlin. These self-styled protectors of “democracy” yell at the top of their lungs about various and sundry threats to American democracy all the while doing their very best to undermine it by anathematizing and marginalizing those who dissent from the prerogatives of the D.C. foreign policy Blob. Needless to say, they make a handsome living in the process.

For all the richly deserved opprobrium that has come Boot’s way as a result of the scandal, Terry and Boot are hardly alone among establishment elites, who as a matter of course abuse their positions of influence in order to further the interests of foreign countries. 

The twin, indeed conjoined, careers of Anne Applebaum and her husband, Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, is another such relationship, rife with conflict of interest and dual loyalties. While the similarities are obvious, both Boot and Applebaum are neocons-turned–liberal darlings who have made lucrative careers out of scaremongering, their differences are equally important: Boot is a simpleton for whom war is always the answer; Applebaum is far more formidable.

In the space of four years, Applebaum has published dozens of articles and two book-length contributions to the literature of the new Cold War. Released in 2020, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends resembles nothing so much as Norman Podhoretz’s Ex-Friends, one of the silliest neocon tracts to ever see print (and that is saying something). 

Applebaum’s book is an account of the political migration of her former cohort from what she describes as the “the pro-European, pro-rule-of-law, pro-market” center-right to what in her eyes are far less reputable precincts of political thought. At its core, it is an effort to shift responsibility away from where it rightly belongs; after all, Applebaum and her set, including Boot, William Kristol, David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg, and a host of other neocons-turned-MSNBC fixtures, were nothing if not enthusiastic supporters of the neoliberal economic and militaristic foreign policies that have so badly damaged this country. 

This summer saw the release of a second title, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. It is a book that purports to be about the threat posed by, as Applebaum puts it, “the strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and perhaps three dozen others.” Yet one can’t escape the feeling that her intended target is closer to home, what she calls “the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.” The historian Heather Penatzer writes, “Applebaum’s narrative is a story of a cabal of financial elites pulling the strings of history from their headquarters in Trump Tower in close coordination with the Kremlin.” 

Indeed, any opposition to the policies Applebaum favors (war in Ukraine, war in Syria, NATO expansion, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan) can be traced back to the sinister machinations of a global “cabal” of authoritarians. And how else to explain why over 70 million people voted for the American “autocrat” in 2020? It couldn’t possibly be that Midwesterners actually want, you know, jobs.

As we head closer to the November election, expect more of this kind of thing. Last week, to take one example, the Soros-funded Just Security website launched its “American Autocracy Threat Tracker” which purports to catalog all of the “actions to be taken during a second Trump presidency that directly threaten democracy, the rule of law, as well as U.S. (and global) security.” 

In the end, liberals’ tarring of their domestic political opponents as “authoritarian” is simply Russia-gate under a different guise; it is a way to smear Middle Americans as unpatriotic and, here’s the real trick, somehow also foreign—outside the acceptable, even legal bounds of American politics. Put simply: It is a scam, one that began during the 2016 campaign and continues to haunt our politics.

Boot and Applebaum and their like-minded acolytes at Just Security are neither protectors of democracy, nor avowed enemies of authoritarianism. They’re grifters, and should be treated accordingly.