Eliot Cohen, last seen going from irritating to atrocious
When neocons go bad.
Last month, Johns Hopkins professor Eliot Cohen had a post up at the Atlantic, Farewell to Academe, remarking that “I leave with doubts and foreboding that I would not have anticipated when I completed my formal education [at Harvard] in 1982.”
Professor Cohen, who is Jewish, was understandably dismayed by the repeated displays of incompetence and cowardice at his alma mater in the past year, not to mention outright antisemitism, and even “celebration” of the hideous attacks on innocent Israelis by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023. The abysmal performance of some Harvard students, and some Harvard faculty and administrators, naturally provoked “comment” both within Harvard and without, prompting Lawrence Bobo, Harvard Dean of Social Science to write a piece for the Harvard Crimson, Faculty Speech Must Have Limits, complaining in particular about the ability of “famous” (my word) faculty to generate pressure on Harvard administrators:
A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors — be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government — to intervene in Harvard’s affairs. Along with freedom of expression and the protection of tenure comes a responsibility to exercise good professional judgment and to refrain from conscious action that would seriously harm the University and its independence.
…
Would it simply be an ordinary act of free speech for those faculty to repeatedly denounce the University, its students, fellow faculty, or leadership? The truth is that free speech has limits — it’s why you can’t escape sanction for shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.1
Dr. Cohen has this to say in response:
His [Dean Bobo’s] essay reflects a poor appreciation of the norms and values that academic freedom was developed to protect. As the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard—a faculty group of which I am co-president—has written, “A university must ensure that the work of its scholars receives robust, informed, and impartial appraisal that applies the best truth-seeking standards appropriate to their discipline—without pressure to bow to the opinions of the state, a corporation, a university administrator, or those (including students) who express feelings of outrage or harm about ideas they dislike.”
Dr. Cohen goes on to say that
But Dean Lawrence Bobo’s call for the punishment of disaffected speech is symptomatic of deeper diseases in our elite universities. Job candidates being required to pledge fealty to progressive views on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are but one manifestation of a university culture that is often intolerant of free speech, unwilling or unable to protect unpopular minorities, and uninterested in viewpoint diversity. As a politically conservative young professor, I was in a minority—but a large one. More important, I never felt that my views would be held against me by my colleagues. Now I would not be so sure. Inevitably, and justly, the public immunities, including tax exemptions, on which universities have thrived are endangered by the arrogance with which they respond to criticism, and their failure to live up to their own stated principles.
According to a recent study, the problem is worst with young faculty: “Among liberal faculty 35 and under, only 23% indicated that shouting down a speaker is never acceptable, 43% said the same for blocking entry, and 64% for using violence to stop a campus speech.” Put differently, in at least some instances, 36 percent approve using violence, 57 percent approve blocking entry, and 77 percent think it’s okay to shout down some speakers. This is a part of academe’s present; what is scary is that it may portend academe’s future. At least half of faculty identify as liberal or progressive, with minorities as small as a quarter or even only a tenth identifying as conservative.
I agree with both statements. In fact, I agree with just about everything Dr. Cohen has to say about “woke” Harvard, and I, along with many others—Dr. Cohen surely included—have been pleased to see that Harvard has been “waking up” as it were, from its wokeness, deciding that maybe requiring applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores is a good idea after all, and that, furthermore, requiring new hires to “to pledge fealty to progressive views on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives” was a bad one, almost as if Harvard benefited from the criticism it received from “external actors”, even some of them “incited” by Harvard loud mouths like, I don’t know, Steven Pinker, perhaps.
Yes, a great deal of contemporary “scholarship” is awful, result-driven exercises in virtue-signaling and careerism. The thing is, though, I have the same thing to say about Dr. Cohen’s “scholarship”, at least as it applied to contemporary affairs, for, fuhgeddaboutit, when it came to the Middle East, the professor’s effusions were not informed, not impartial, not truth-seeking, but rather all designed to deceive the American people into thinking that if we didn’t invade the Middle East—Iran in particular—with everything we had, well, it would be the end of EVERYTHING, pretty much. “War on Terror”? Hell, no! WORLD WAR IV! In a November 20, 2001 article in the Wall Street Journal, titled, well, “World War IV”, Cohen called for the overthrow of both the Iranian and Iraqi governments, explicitly stating (and lying) that Iraq had aided al Qaeda, and that theocratic Iran was/is an “existential” threat to the U.S. that must be eliminated, a line he has continued to push for more than 20 years, regardless of the endless disasters America’s policy of compulsive interventionism has heaped upon itself—and the rest of the world—since the Bush administration most unfortunately began its mindless misuse of American military muscle back in 2001.
Worst of all, of course, is Eliot Cohen’s hypocrisy. Despite all his claims for the necessity of defending “America”, “Democracy”, “the West”, etc., he isn’t concerned about any of these. Instead, he’s concerned about Israel. But he can’t say that. Hypocrisy can scarcely go any farther.
Well, or so I thought. One “good” thing I can say about Dr. Cohen is that, despite his general detestation of flaccid fairy Democrats like Barack Obama (okay, he didn’t say that) and Hillary Clinton, he was one of the very first, and one of the very loudest, on the right to oppose the emergence of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate, and as late as 2020 he was still saying the same thing, joining with dozens of foreign policy “experts” (I use the term advisedly) who had served in Republican administrations, including Trump’s, to issue a policy statement that began in the following manner: “We are profoundly concerned about our nation's security and standing in the world under the leadership of Donald Trump. The President has demonstrated that he is dangerously unfit to serve another term.”
All well and good, right? But that was so 2020. By early July 2024, Dr. Cohen had had a bit of a change of heart, to wit: Cancel the Foreign-Policy Apocalypse A second Trump term probably wouldn’t change U.S. foreign policy all that much. This “stunning” reversal frankly didn’t surprise me all that much, given the good doctor’s track record of moral “flexibility”—I mean, I’ve seen cobras that were stiffer—but another good doctor, Daniel Drezner of Tufts, of whom I’ve often written, was gobsmacked by Eliot’s sudden change of heart, knocking out a point by point refutation/beatdown of Eliot’s shameful surrender to the dark side,2 which concludes as follows: “So, to sum up: I think Eliot Cohen is wrong. Not a little bit wrong. All the way wrong. Very, very, very, very, very wrong.”
If you want to know in detail just how wrong, and just how stupid, how atrocious, Eliot Cohen has become, well, Dr. Dan can tell you. But, for me, all you need to know to condemn Eliot is what he has to say in his new piece in the Atlantic regarding the recent assassination attempt on Trump’s life: “The most inveterate Trump opponents have to admit that his intimate encounter with mortality did not immediately produce venom or incitement, but instead, a kind of Trumpian grace.”
“Trumpian grace,” huh? Thanks but no thanks.
Afterwords
I’m afraid this Afterwords ain’t gonna be pretty. Why is Dr. Cohen suddenly filled with “Trumpian grace”? I think it’s the ugly series of events that have played out since the hideous October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on innocent Israelis by Hamas. We have seen the rise of brutal, self-righteous, left-wing antisemitism on American campuses. We have seen Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu seek to cover his massive culpability in the Hamas massacre with a bloodthirsty invasion of Gaza, subjecting all of its inhabitants to a heartless reign of terror, killing tens of thousands of innocent people, subjecting over two million Palestinians to nightmarish conditions for months and utterly laying waste to the land, rendering it virtually uninhabitable, with no plans for what will be done in the future to make life possible. And we have seen the emergence in the Democratic Party a sympathy, not for Hamas, but for the suffering of the Palestinian people, and a deep resentment for American involvement in the source of that suffering—the callously blind policy of the nation of Israel. Dr. Cohen realizes that, in effect, no matter how obedient Joe Biden is to the Israeli lobby in the U.S., the Democratic Party as a whole is no longer is so obedient, and it is Israel, and Israel alone, that Dr. Cohen cares about. And that is why he finds himself now filled with Trumpian grace.3
Afterwords II, more about Dr. Dan
I would, I think, be remiss if I did not write about an earlier post by Dr. Drezner in praise of Joe Biden’s foreign policy, particularly as regards Israel, which prompted me to post a harsh response on his blog. I’ll include the full text of my response, Dan’s brief response, and my brief (relatively) reply:
Alan: Frankly, I’ve never been so disappointed in one of your posts—and I’ve read many—as this one. Biden has made himself effectively the prisoner of both Zelensky and Netanyahu, underwriting their fantasies. The U.S. should have started putting pressure on Zelensky to accept a compromise peace before the Ukraine “offensive”, which inevitably resulted in an easily foreseeable failure. If the U.S. had listened to people like George Kennan and Henry Kissinger, and accepted Russia’s status as leading power in eastern Europe, instead of trying to “free the East” and freeze out Russian influence entirely, a noble but unworkable goal, this never would have happened in the first place. Putin’s outrageous aggression had to be resisted, of course, but the notion that Putin, and Russia, could be forced to accept complete defeat has only prolonged the bloodshed.
Biden’s policy towards Israel—total support in fact, coupled with occasional whining—is far worse. Contemporary Israel is an expansionist, right-wing country that does not at all deserve the blank check support that Biden is continuing to give it. AIPAC should not be in charge of U.S. policy in the Middle East but under Biden it is. Biden is isolating the U.S. by blindly supporting Israel. This blindness is promoting the growth of both anti-Americanism and antisemitism throughout Europe.
Everything about Biden’s conduct of foreign policy is stiff, and rigid, and truculent. The Biden administration is continuing to act as though we are still in a “uni-power” world, with the U.S. economy and military establishment dwarfing the rest. We are not. It is a genuine tragedy that the only leading American politician who actually speaks about a “restrained” U.S. foreign policy is Donald Trump, with all his ignorant bluster and childish greed. The American people, and the people of the world, deserve a far more intelligent and realistic foreign policy than the Biden administration is providing, and which you are wholeheartedly endorsing. Seriously, Dan. I’m disappointed in you.
Dan: The disappointment is entirely mutual, because if you think Trump will pursue a “restrained” foreign policy I have many, many bridges to sell you.
Alan: Excuse me, but what leader did Trump overthrow? He was definitely less aggressive than President Obama, who overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, an utter disaster that, incidentally, cost Hillary Clinton the presidency in 2016. Trump received huge press early in his administration for using Tomahawk missiles. He never used them again. Trump likes to threaten people, thinking that threats always work, but when they don't he backs off. He spends money endlessly on weaponry, but likes parades more than he does war. It was Trump that set our withdrawal from Afghanistan in motion, remember? The great danger is that he will provoke a war by accident. His only real "allies" are Saudi Arabia, because they buy so much weaponry, and Israel, because the AIPAC crowd give his campaigns so much money. Yes, he “hates” Iran, but you may remember that John Bolton quit, not because Trump was utterly corrupt, but because he wouldn't “get tough” with Iran.
For more information on what Trump II’s foreign policy would be like—and it wouldn’t be pretty—check out “the good Dan”, Daniel Larison, for his post, Beware of an Unconstrained Trump Foreign Policy.
[AV footnote] The comparison, one has to say, is inapt. In addition, the Constitution does not forbid shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, Justice Holmes’ dicta to the contrary notwithstanding.
As Dr. Drezner notes, Cohen wrote his piece before Trump delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, which indeed began a bit “graceful”, but, once Donald began to get into the real spirit of things, once he began to feel like, you know, Donald Trump, the juices, and the trash talk, and the insults started to flow, and, guess what, it was the old Donald Trump all over again. Surprise!
Now that Biden has dropped out, and Kamela has taken over, Dr. Cohen has much more reason to fear a significant policy shift towards Israel on the part of the Democrats, and I agree with him on this one.