Why I (Strangely) Enjoy Reading American Neo-Cons

Mayur Chetia

I’ve been reading a lot of American neo-conservatives lately. I know—it sounds odd, even self-incriminating. After all, these are the architects of imperial wars, the cheerleaders of endless occupation, the ones who saw nation-building as a side hustle to military conquest.

And yet, I can’t help but find something intellectually engaging in their writing.

Not their politics, obviously. Their ends—control, domination, resource capture—are antithetical to everything I stand for. But their means—their obsession with state-building, institutional design, legitimacy—overlap with concerns that anyone thinking seriously about socialism, post-capitalist futures, or democratic planning must eventually confront.

Here’s what I think is worth learning from them:

 1. Institutional Engineering: A Weird Obsession That Pays Off

Neo-cons obsessively dissect how institutions work—or fail. They study judiciaries, armies, bureaucracies, tribal networks, patronage systems. Sure, it's often in service of maintaining power over others. But the detail they offer is real. Their work reads like grim statecraft manuals: how to co-opt local elites, how to rebuild a judiciary, how to avoid insurgencies inside police forces.

This kind of granular analysis is rare even among some left-wing thinkers, who sometimes treat “the state” as a black box. Neo-cons open that box and start labeling wires.

 2. They Take Chaos Seriously

 Say what you will about their motives, but neo-cons don't walk away from the mess they create. They are obsessed with filling vacuums. That means confronting the hard problems of post-conflict governance: how to manufacture legitimacy, how to hold elections that don’t collapse the next day, how to balance civil-military relations.

 It’s in these debates that they say things I find surprisingly useful—even if I want to apply them in a totally different context.

 3. Long-Term Thinking (Delusional but Structured)

Unlike liberals, who often want clean narratives, fast exits, and symbolic victories, neo-cons think in decades. They’re delusional, yes. But they also ask long-horizon questions:

How do we shape institutional inheritances? What compromises are necessary early on? How do we build a state that lasts beyond the next funding cycle?

These are also the questions that revolutionaries—real ones—must ask. Market socialists too.

 4. Their Failure Analysis Is Brutally Honest

Ironically, some of the best critiques of U.S. policy in Iraq or Afghanistan come from within neo-con circles. They dissect their own disasters in painful detail—why local elites turned against them, how corruption hollowed out institutions, how militia integration failed.

Ideology blinds them to deeper truths, but their post-mortems are analytically rich. There's a lot to steal here.

 5. Read with Caution

 Of course, it goes without saying: their normative framework is a mess. They treat people as clay, states as machines, order as an end in itself. Justice, autonomy, popular sovereignty—these are afterthoughts in their world.

 But that’s exactly why they’re useful to read. You’re not buying what they’re selling. You’re learning from how they build—even when their structures collapse.

 6. A Socialist Parallel?

 I’m interested in how to build a post-capitalist state that actually works. That integrates informal labour. That redistributes land without administrative collapse. That retools bureaucracies without elite sabotage. That regulates markets while ensuring service delivery. That earns legitimacy from below.

The technical challenges are similar—tax systems, local governance, institutional trust. And so I find myself strangely drawn to those who, for all the wrong reasons, have thought deeply about how to make states function after a rupture.

So yes—read the neo-cons.

Just reverse the moral polarity.

You're not looking for blueprints. You're looking for the reasons their blueprints failed.