Word has just reached us that Robert Kagan, currently Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is moving his franchise over to Brookings.
[…..[Kagan — next to Francis Fukuyama, Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, and David Frum — is one of the top tier serious intellectuals among neoconservatives, though it’s clear that Frum and Fukuyama have distanced themselves from the broader movement to establish their own reformist franchises.
Kagan’s move is important for Brookings as the institution has been working hard to get Haim Saban to give another large infusion of resources to his namesake unit, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at Brookings. Securing Kagan is one way that Brookings may have sweetened the pot for Saban who is according to one Brookings source “painfully flamboyant” about using his money to try and influence the DC establishment through think tanks and other vehicles to secure Israel-first, Israel-defending policies out of Washington.
There are those who describe neoconservatism as a “zombie” ideology, but it’s far more alive than undead. Two of the three major newspapers have neoconservative editorial boards (WSJ is right-wing across the board, but I think it’s air to describe their foreign policy as neoconservative), many of the most influential politically-oriented magazines are owned and/or edited by neocons (The New Republic, Weekly Standard, and Atlantic for example), and now even the liberal Brookings Institute has a neocon heading up its Middle East foreign policy team.
The failure of the Iraq war is irrelevant. The think tank/media system still incentivizes neoconservative beliefs.