CFTNI Policy Brief
The Ghosts of Neocons Past: Stabilization and Reconstruction in the Trump Era
In our latest Policy Focus, "The Ghosts of Neocons Past: Stabilization and Reconciliation in the Trump Era," CFTNI Senior Fellow Joshua Yaphe examines the foreign policy challenges that lie ahead. The White House would prefer to avoid anything that remotely resembles the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it has dismantled a large part of the bureaucracy that had accumulated from those conflicts. However, in many parts of the world, the Administration is going to find that conflicts it thought were resolved are not.
Particularly in the Middle East (Gaza, Iran, Syria, Lebanon), Washington will discover that some level of ongoing commitment is necessary, and the Administration will have to reinvent the wheel on stabilization and reconstruction operations — not to justify a heavy U.S. footprint in ongoing conflicts, but rather as a way to support our allies quietly and subtly. In this paper, Dr. Yaphe revisits some of the most fundamental lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan to show how the Administration, to its credit, is clearly aware of the problems but is unprepared to deal with them. It is in the Middle East that the ghosts of neoconservatives past will come to haunt the White House.
Read the report.
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Paul J. Saunders
President
