{"id":54970,"date":"2025-09-07T14:06:34","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T22:06:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=54970"},"modified":"2025-09-07T14:06:34","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T22:06:34","slug":"the-big-con-tempers-flare-at-this-years-national-conservatism-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/07\/the-big-con-tempers-flare-at-this-years-national-conservatism-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"The Big Con: Tempers Flare at This Year’s National Conservatism Conference"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from The Realist Review<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

According to a report by the estimable Kelley Vlahos<\/a>, this year\u2019s National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC came replete with fireworks \u2013 of the figurative variety. In a debate moderated by Modern Age<\/em> editor Dan McCarthy, American Conservative<\/em> editor Curt Mills faced off with Northeastern University scholar Max Abrams over Israel. Abrahams touted the alleged success of the US attacks on Iran and deemed those whom he called \u201cMAGA isolationists realists\u201d as \u201cinsane.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mills parried by asking:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy are these our wars? Why are Israel’s endless problems America’s liabilities? Why are we in the national conservative bloc, broadly speaking, why do we laugh out of the room this argument when it’s advanced by Volodymyr Zelenskyy but are slavish hypocrites for Benjamin Netanyahu? Why should we accept America First \u2013 asterisk Israel? And the answer is, we shouldn’t.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

That NatCon is open to debate on Israel is a good first step but overall, its brand of nationalism is inextricably linked with a particular brand of Israeli nationalism. The NatCon conference is the creation of the Edmund Burke Foundation<\/a>, whose founder is the Israeli nationalist Yoram Hazony<\/a>, a former speechwriter to Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu. An admirer of the violent Jewish supremacist Meir Kahane, Hazony and his family have made their home in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.<\/p>\n

The closer one looks, it is hard to escape the conclusion that NatCon is simply neoconservatism by another name. It\u2019s a Trump-era rebrand for an ideology that has fallen into disrepute with the President \u2013 not so much for its ideas but for its personnel (see, for eg., John Bolton).<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the NatCon re-brand seems to be working. Several high-profile Israel First figures long associated with the NatCon conferences have made their way into the Trump State Department, particularly on the Policy Planning Staff.<\/p>\n

As Col. Douglas Macgregor and I pointed out after last year\u2019s NatCon conference,<\/p>\n

For ethno-nationalists like Hazony and his American disciples, the July 2018 adoption by the Knesset of the Israel Nation-State Law was a watershed moment. The law, among other things, says that \u201cthe right to exercise national self-determination\u201d in Israel is \u201cunique to the Jewish people.\u201d Such a declaration may be well within the boundaries of the Zionist political tradition, but few things could be more antithetical to the American political tradition.<\/em><\/p>\n

James W. Carden is the editor of The Realist Review<\/a>.\u00a0 He is a columnist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from The Realist Review.\u00a0 According to a report by the estimable Kelley Vlahos, this year\u2019s National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC came replete with fireworks \u2013 of the figurative variety. In a debate moderated by Modern Age editor Dan McCarthy, American Conservative editor Curt Mills faced off with Northeastern University scholar Max Abrams over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":647,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1321],"class_list":["post-54970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"0","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/647"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54970"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54974,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54970\/revisions\/54974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54970"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=54970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}