‘You can’t make America great again by making it retreat again’- Dr. David Wurmser

In an interview with The Jewish News Syndicate’s Ruthie Blum, CSP Senior Analyst Dr. David Wurmser sets the record straight about his opposition to conservatives working to undermine MAGA.

In a recent interview on “The Tucker Carlson Show,” the eponymous host asked typically leading questions of his interviewee—in this case, Curt Mills. The purpose of the one-on-one between the two conservative pundits and supporters of newly instated President Donald Trump was to reiterate their shared aversion to the Republican Party’s “war-mongering neocons.”

Carlson highlighted what he sees as the persistence of neoconservative figures in shaping foreign policy, expressing surprise that “over 20 years after the Iraq War, its architects and supporters are still not fully in control of America’s foreign policy, but certainly influential in it.”

David Wurmser, a renowned Middle East policy expert and former senior adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, is not mentioned by name in the above exchange. But he has been a target of false accusations regarding his ostensibly pernicious undue sway over U.S. foreign policy. In the following Q&A with JNS, Wurmser sets the record straight.

Q: Before addressing the internecine clash between what I’ll call the “Tucker” camp of the Republican Party/MAGA movement and other conservatives, can you define the term “neocon” and what it has come to mean?

A: Neoconservatives were a group of American liberal intellectuals who began in the 1970s to see a fundamental problem with left-leaning positions. Mining classic philosophy, they essentially had a discovery of civilizational values and foundational ideas that define what made the West—not only in the previous 20 years, but in the previous 2,000—and realized that defending Western civilization was on the table. As a result, they drifted into the camp that was defending it. These figures included Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Nathan Glazer. For me, the epic neoconservative, who emerged during what came to be called the “[Ronald] Reagan revolution,” was Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Originally on the left, affiliated with the Young Socialists—even giving the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention—she ended up becoming the symbol of Reaganism.

What defined her and the entire age of Reaganism was a revival of the faith in America’s being a good and proud nation that needed to issue no apologies. It was a reaction to the defensiveness of the post-Vietnam War era, which had descended into constant self-excoriation during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, always explaining the global hatred of the United States through “blame America first.”

In any case, I don’t believe there’s such a thing anymore as a neoconservative, and I never was one. Because how could I have been a “new” conservative when I reached the age of political awareness after the movement rightward had already happened? I was born and raised on conservative principles. My mother had been a Czech dissident who fled Czechoslovakia in 1948 with the KGB on her tail. She wound up in Germany in a DP camp, then went to Switzerland and finally arrived in America, where most Czech dissidents headed. Later, I found out that she’d been the leader of the Moravian underground against Stalin.

Q: What was the first presidential election in which you voted?

A:  In 1984, when I voted for Reagan. I’ve never voted Democrat since.

Q: You’ve been openly supportive of Trump, both during his first term and again this time around. Why are some MAGA Republicans going after people like you, and what’s behind the split in his base? What’s happened inside the Republican Party to cause the divide?

A: It’s actually what hasn’t happened. There’s no crisp definition of what MAGA is, going forward, and what we’re seeing now is a battle over the soul of the movement. The term-turned-epithet “neoconservatism” became a kind of clarion call on the part of those who hated Israel, were antisemitic or classic leftists like “The Squad.” It became a rubric, and the Iraq War became a symbol of how “evil” the neoconservatives were. Of course, the history of that war has been distorted. The people I was dealing with at the time had a very different vision of how it would progress from the way it’s been depicted by detractors. It was much less a colonialist American vision than an Iraqi one. It was Colin Powell’s vision to go in with 600,000 troops, and then it was Paul Bremer’s idea to have a colonial presence in Iraq to rebuild the country. That was horrifying to many of us. We wanted Iraqis to do the heavy lifting of liberating their country; we wanted them to assume control as fast as possible. Our model was the Free French in World War II.

All that aside, “warmongers” has become shorthand among a collection of people in the MAGA movement—a minority trying to control it—for something we aren’t. There are three groups in this minority. One is made up of outright antisemites, such as Nick Fuentes and, unfortunately, Candace Owens.

The second consists of isolationists who want to withdraw from the world. They believe, for instance, that America’s involvement with Israel causes wars and entangles the United States in them. Though isolationism may have some intellectual validity, it’s a disastrous foreign policy, because you can’t make America great again by making it retreat again. Nor does it work, since the world will come to us; the Middle East will come to us as it has consistently done.

The third group consists basically of Barack Obama types trying to weasel their establishment views inside this administration to slowly guide the ship back toward establishment positions: appeasing Iran, pressuring Israel to concede in order to bring about stability, aiming for a two-state solution, etc.

On the other side, you have President Trump, who made MAGA, who is MAGA; he’s the definition of MAGA. He went to the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s grave before and after the election to get spiritual strength. This is a guy who has no problem with Jews; he surrounds himself with religious Jews. He’s also been very pro-Israel. He filled his entire Cabinet with pro-Israel appointees, who believe in the Judeo-Christian values of the American Revolution.

I can guarantee that Trump isn’t going to write a seven-volume book on the essence of the American spirit—but he embodies it. And he defines half of the political spectrum. That’s why I think that the above groups are going to lose and why they’re being so aggressive.

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