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Bret Stephens

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

Although the term “neoconservative” has fallen into disuse — except as an occasional slur used by the MAGA right, the progressive left and social-media antisemites who really mean to say “Jew” — I’ve never been shy about describing myself as one. In Donald Trump’s whipsawing performances with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday and Volodymyr Zelensky and his European allies in Washington on Monday, I’m reminded of why.

Neoconservatism emerged in the early 1970s as a loosely coherent movement of disenchanted liberals who were critical of the welfare state and turned off by the anti-Americanism of parts of the antiwar left. But the movement also took a dim view of the Nixon administration, particularly in its pursuit of arms control with the Soviet Union, its relative indifference to human rights issues behind the Iron Curtain, and its realpolitik approach to foreign policy in general.

I learned this the hard way 14 years ago, when Henry Kissinger nearly kicked me out of his Park Avenue office for having the ill grace to ask him about China’s brutal treatment of Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned dissident. The former secretary of state, then 88, was still too concerned with currying influence in Beijing to say anything nice about his fellow Nobel Peace laureate.

Little wonder, then, that many of Trump’s most ardent conservative opponents in recent years are, or were, old-school neocons. Like President Richard Nixon’s, Trump’s politics are a mix of statist economic impulses, populist grievances, the conceit of being

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