Reply to Mr. McCarty

Fumiaki KUBO (Professor, University of Tokyo)

I greatly appreciate the comments made by Mr. Steve McCarty on my article. When I used the word "neo-conservatives," I referred to Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol and other Jewish people who advocate a kind of foreign policy that emphasizes the use of force and morality. If isolated, their influence might be rather limited. But in the current Administration, they tend to be supported by "old" conservatives such as Rumsfeld or Cheney. In fact, since the mid-1970s some of these people have tended to work together in various place such as the Committee on the Present Danger, or the "Team B" of the CIA. We can find most of their names on the list of the signers of the Statement of Principles of the Project for the New American Century, which was established in 1997. In a broader sense, all of them are Reaganites who believe in the doctrine of " peace through strength." Old hawks tend to emphasize the force element, while neo-conservatives add morality and responsibility factors.

With the advocates of the Iraq War put on the defensive, we might see an increasing influence of the more isolationist or more realist school of foreign policy experts in the Republican Party again.