Today’s Victor Davis Hanson column reflects on the “neoconservative” slur: Idealism and Its Discontents.

Neo- is a prefix that derives from the Greek adjective veos — “new” or “fresh” — and in theory it is used inexactly for those conservatives who once were not — or for those who have reinterpreted conservatism in terms of a more idealistic foreign policy that eschewed both Cold War realpolitik and the hallowed traditions of American republican isolationism.

But the accepted definition has given way in practice to refer to the more particular proponents of the use of military action to remove threatening governments, and to replace them with democratic systems — hence the occasional sobriquets of “neo-Wilsonian.” But for a number of detractors, “neoconservative” is also little more than generic disparagement, and (off-the-record) it is synonymous with American Jews who seek to alter American foreign policy to the wishes of the right-wing Likud party of Israel.

Yet note the misinformation about its meaning and usage. The five most prominent makers of American foreign policy at the moment — George Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld — are (1) not Jewish, (2) hard-headed and not easily bamboozled by any supposed cabal, and (3) were mostly in the past identified with the “realist” school and especially skeptical of using the military frequently for anything resembling Clintonian peace-keeping.

So, for example, while Secretary Rumsfeld signed the now-infamous 1998 letter to President Clinton calling for the de-facto preemptive removal of Saddam Hussein, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice did not. Yet Richard Armitage — considered a stalwart in the Colin Powell camp — was a signatory. Thus there seems no hard ideology or past litmus test to neoconservatism other than a coalescence of once-differing views after September 11.

Second, this new version of neoconservativism was predicated on the end of the Cold War, at least in its present approach to foreign policy. Nearly thousands of nukes pointed at the United States, coupled with global Communist-inspired national-liberation movements, did not leave much room for American idealism — or at least it was so felt. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall, former realist conservatives deduced that the advocacy of democracy was both practicable and in the long-term interest of the United States, as part of its promotion of international free markets and consensual government. Meanwhile, some liberals saw military action as not so odious if aimed at right-wing authoritarians rather than Communists masquerading as socialists (e.g., Noriega, Milosevic, the Taliban, or Saddam Hussein rather than Castro). Why the latter were not called neoliberals is unexplained.