There is a Professor Jiang explaining the Clean Break document to Theo Von, between advertisements for kratom and testosterone supplements, and I want to record for posterity that I listened to the whole thing twice. Not out of masochism, though the format invites it, but because the man's central claim is correct in a way that discomfits both the people who despise him and the people who booked him. The 1996 memorandum, that curious little artifact drafted for Netanyahu by a committee of Americans, is having its afterlife on a comedy podcast. This is either the death of public intellectualism or its resurrection. I cannot decide, and I have stopped pretending the indecision is a pose.
The document itself — 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm' — has always been my favorite piece of evidence for a contention I have carried since the Balkans, which is that neoconservatism was never an American ideology in foreign disguise, nor a foreign ideology smuggled into Washington, but a genuinely transnational project in which the line between advising an ally and writing your own foreign policy through somebody else's parliament simply ceased to exist. Consider the actual sequence. Richard Perle, an American citizen, drafts a strategy paper for the prime minister of another country, recommending that Israel abandon the land-for-peace framework and instead 'roll back' Syria, remove Saddam, redraw the region. He then returns to Washington, sits on the Defense Policy Board, and helps make the case for a war that enacts, with almost embarrassing fidelity, the very memorandum he had authored for a foreign leader seven years earlier. This is not a conspiracy, because conspiracies require secrecy and there was none here.
It was done on letterhead. The interesting fact is not that it was hidden but that it never needed to be — that two governments could share a nervous system in daylight, and the only people scandalized were the ones not invited to the wedding.
Where Professor Jiang is genuinely useful — and I do not say this often about men who explain grand strategy to audiences who have never heard of Ariel Sharon — is in his willingness to name the document's emotional core rather than its geopolitical furniture. The Clean Break argument, stripped of its policy prose, is a claim about the psychology of small nations that have decided to behave like empires. It says: peace is weakness performed for an audience that despises you for performing it. That land-for-peace is not statecraft but surrender dressed as maturity. The document does not argue this proposition so much as radiate it, the way a resentment announces itself long before it has assembled the grievance that will make it respectable.
And here is my first objection. This is not an Israeli insight. It is not even a Jewish one. It is the oldest thought empires have, and it has never once been true.
Every hegemon in the record arrives at this conclusion roughly fifteen minutes before it begins the project that will eventually destroy it. The Athenians said it to the Melians in prose so cold it still frosts the page — the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must — and then lost the war, and the empire, and the argument. The distribution list is the whole innovation. What Jiang mistakes for a specific ideological rupture, the Israeli right's break with Oslo, is one more state discovering the imperial temptation, which is available to anyone with sufficient ordnance. But ordnance is common.
What is rare is the specific dread that converts every concession into a rehearsal for one's own funeral — and here I have to be more exact than the clip, because to name fear is not to explain it. The Clean Break authors were not paralyzed by fear; they were liberated by it. Fear gave them permission. It reframed aggression as prudence and made the reckless man feel like the only adult in the room. That is the mechanism: not terror, but the moral license terror issues to those who learn to perform it.
But the part everyone skips is the part that undoes the easy story. Clean Break did not merely recommend a harder military posture. It recommended privatization, free markets, an economy rebuilt to sustain permanent readiness. You cannot run perpetual war on a kibbutz. The market does not merely fund the posture.
It becomes the posture.
This is where the podcast's populism, and the anti-war right's fondness for these clips, quietly betrays itself. The men who nod along to Jiang's account of neoconservative overreach are frequently the same men who worship the market as the last redoubt of freedom against the coercive state. But Clean Break understood, with a candor its later admirers lack, that the market and the war machine are not rivals competing for the state's affection. The document prescribed neoliberalism as a strategic necessity, not an economic preference: a security posture that needed private capital because the treasury alone could not carry decades of readiness, and needed foreign investment because a garrison state must convince the world it is a good bet. You do not get the free market as the alternative to the garrison.
You get it as the garrison's paymaster, and eventually as the thing the garrison exists to defend.
So I return to Theo Von's studio, and I find I cannot sneer. Somewhere a man who sells car insurance is hearing the name Perle for the first time, learning that a paper written for a foreign leader became, in effect, American policy — and learning it between jokes. I want to say the seminar would have served him better. But I was in the seminar. In 2002 and 2003 I sat in rooms where every relevant fact was on the table, where I could have parsed Clean Break line by line, and I chose the war anyway, and defended it, and was wrong in a way no quantity of Thucydides inoculated me against.
The comedian's audience at least comes to the material without my investment in being right. Perhaps that is not innocence. Perhaps it is only a different debt, not yet come due. But it is not obviously the inferior seat, and the man who tells you otherwise is protecting the seminar's reputation, which, on the evidence of the last quarter century, is mostly my own.
