And, despite Obama's opposition to the neocons' obsession with endless warfare, he didn't purge them from his administration. Neocons, who had burrowed deep inside the U.S. government as "civil servants" or "career foreign service officers," remained as a "stay-behind" force, looking for new allies and biding their time.
Obama compounded this "stay-behind" problem with his fateful decision in November 2008 to adopt the trendy idea of "a team of rivals," including keeping Republican operative (and neocon ally) Robert Gates at the Defense Department and putting hawkish Democrat Hillary Clinton, another neocon ally, at State. The neocons probably couldn't believe their luck.
Back in Good Graces
Rather than being ostracized and marginalized -- as they surely deserved for the Iraq War fiasco -- key neocons were still held in the highest regard. According to his memoir Duty, Gates let neocon military theorist Frederick Kagan persuade him to support a "surge" of 30,000 U.S. soldiers into the Afghan War in 2009.
Gates wrote that "an important way station in my 'pilgrim's progress' from skepticism to support of more troops [in Afghanistan] was an essay by the historian Fred Kagan, who sent me a prepublication draft."
Defense Secretary Gates then collaborated with holdovers from Bush's high command, including neocon favorite Gen. David Petraeus, and Secretary of State Clinton to maneuver Obama into a political corner from which he felt he had no choice but to accede to their recommendation for the "surge."
Obama reportedly regretted the decision almost immediately after he made it. The Afghan "surge," like the earlier neocon-driven Iraq War "surge," cost another 1,000 or so dead U.S. soldiers but ultimately didn't change the war's strategic direction.
At Clinton's State Department, other neocons were given influential posts. Frederick Kagan's brother Robert, a neocon from the Reagan administration and co-founder of the neocon Project for the New American Century, was named to an advisory position on the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. Secretary Clinton also elevated Robert Kagan's wife, Victoria Nuland, to be State Department spokesperson.
Though Obama's original "team of rivals" eventually left the scene (Gates in mid-2011, Petraeus in a sex scandal in late 2012, and Clinton in early 2013), those three provided the neocons a crucial respite, time to regroup and reorganize. So, when Sen. John Kerry replaced Clinton as Secretary of State (with the considerable help of his neocon friend John McCain), the State Department's neocons were poised for a powerful comeback.
Nuland was promoted to Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs and took personal aim at the elected government of Ukraine, which had become a choice neocon target because it maintained close ties to Russia, whose President Putin was undercutting the neocons' "regime change" strategies in their most valued area, the Middle East. Most egregiously, Putin was helping Obama avert wars in Syria and Iran.
So, as neocon NED president Carl Gershman wrote in the Washington Post in September 2013, Ukraine became "the biggest prize," but he added that the even juicier target beyond Ukraine was Putin, who, Gershman added, "may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself."
In other words, the ultimate goal of the Ukraine gambit is not just "regime change" in Kiev but "regime change" in Moscow. By eliminating the independent-minded and strong-willed Putin, the neocons presumably fantasize about slipping one of their ciphers (perhaps a Russian version of Ahmed Chalabi) into the Kremlin.
Then, the neocons could press ahead, unencumbered, toward their original "regime change" scheme in the Middle East, with wars against Syria and Iran.
As dangerous -- and even crazy -- as this neocon vision is (raising the specter of a possible nuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia), the neocons clearly appear back in control of U.S. foreign policy. And, they almost can't lose in terms of their own self-interest, whichever way the Ukraine crisis breaks.
If Putin backs down in the face of U.S. ultimatums on Ukraine and Crimea, the neocons can beat their chests and argue that similar ultimatums should be presented to other neocon targets, i.e., Syria and Iran. And, if those countries don't submit to the ultimatums, then there will be no choice but to let the U.S. bombings begin, more "shock and awe."
On the other hand, if Putin refuses to back down and Crimea votes to abandon Ukraine and reattach itself to Russia (which has ties to Crimea dating back to Catherine the Great in the 1700s), then the neocons can ride the wave of Official Washington's outrage, demanding that Obama renounce any future cooperation with Putin and thus clear the way for heightened confrontations with Syria and Iran.
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