After 40 years in the U.S. Senate, Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell is finally retiring. He made the announcement on the one-month anniversary of President Donald Trump’s second term, February 20.
McConnell has legitimate reasons to retire, the most obvious being his declining health. He has literally frozen, like a malfunctioning computer, multiple times while speaking. But in his farewell address, he did not mention his deteriorating health, which became evident in 2023. He did, however, hint at frustration with the shifting winds of Republican politics.
Like fellow neoconservatives Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and perhaps the poster boy of modern neoconservatism, Mitt Romney of Utah, McConnell’s voting record is a great disappointment to constituents who prefer their representatives take the U.S. Constitution seriously. McConnell has accrued a 56 percent lifetime score in The New American’s Freedom Index, among the best tools for accurately gauging legislators’ fidelity, or lack thereof, to the U.S. Constitution.
It appears that anyone who seeks to be a member of the Neoconservative Club must, first and foremost, support constant war. “Perpetual war for perpetual peace” is the gameplan, Wayne Allensworth observed in his Chronicles essay titled “Return of the War Nerds.” Allensworth, a retired CIA analyst, points out the absurdity of a strategy that essentially calls for bombing everyone into submission until there is peace and “democratic” values all over the globe.
Before the 2025 presidential election, a parade of neocons came out in support for Kamala Harris. The mainstream media couldn’t get enough of it. Among the Republican defectors was the father-daughter Cheney team and more than 200 Republicans who worked for both Bush Presidents, Senator John McCain, and Romney. Allensworth believes the reason they supported Harris was because they viewed a Trump presidency as a threat to the War Machine, which would endanger the ultimate agenda:
For the globalists, victory in the Cold War was but a prelude to conquering the entire planet.… patriots naively believed that the collapse of Communism meant that America could refocus on domestic issues and address our country’s demographic, cultural, and moral erosion. Those are not concerns the neocons share. America is only a platform for their grand design, just as their membership in the Republican Party was only a means to an end.
McConnell’s voting record is rife with support for war and other interventionist policies. He hasn’t openly said he supports the creation of a one world order; rather, he justifies his position with the noble façade of “national security,” a notion no rational American opposes. In his farewell speech, he chided his fellow senators for not prioritizing national security. He justified endless wars in the context of issues American actually care about:
On this floor, there is no place to hide from the obligations of Article One … the Senate’s unique relationship with Article Three … or our role in equipping the powers of Article Two. Here, every debate over agriculture or infrastructure or education or taxes is downstream of the obligations of national security. Every question of policy here at home is contingent on our duty to provide for the common defense.
Everyone agrees that without domestic security the other issues are secondary. But neocons want to go after every bad guy half a world away who stands in the way of the Western-led “Rules Based Order.” The United States has built about 750 military bases around the world, manned by at least 2,000 military personnel. What other reason can there be for doing something like this aside from building up a global empire?
Meanwhile, in America, bridges are crumbling, downtowns are falling apart, crime is rampant, grocery prices are through the roof, roads are peppered with potholes, planes are crashing into helicopters, firefighters are running out of water, people have developed a fascinating ignorance of basic human biology, energy prices are bankrupting citizens, and an endemic of chronic illness has infected more than half the population.
On top of it all, U.S. interventionism has not even accomplished its stated domestic goal: Americans are not safer because of it. Hundreds of known terrorists have tried or succeeded in sneaking into the country during the Biden administration’s open-border bonanza. Almost all of them hailed from the Middle East, where decades of U.S. interventionism has fueled the creation of more extreme jihadist groups, anti-American militant factions, and hatred for Americans. As new Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard pointed out during her confirmation hearing, just the Iraq invasion alone, based “upon a total fabrication or complete failure of intelligence,” led to the deaths of thousands of American soldiers, mass migration, regional destabilization, the rise of ISIS, and the strengthening of al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups.
McConnell voted against confirming Gabbard because of what he deemed a “lapse in judgment.” It just so happens she has been very critical of America’s “forever wars.” He also voted against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegesth, who he believed threatened “our global interests,” which is just another way of saying Hegseth would put American first.
Neocons such as McConnell perceive Gabbard’s and Hegseth’s views as a threat to the collapsing unipolar order. McConnell wrote an essay in the January/February 2025 edition of Foreign Affairs, the publication of the globalist think tank Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), titled “The Price of American Retreat: Why Washington Must Reject Isolationism and Embrace Primacy.” He starts with a warning that the America First agenda threatens the globalists’ one-world agenda:
Even though the competition with China and Russia is a global challenge, Trump will no doubt hear from some that he should prioritize a single theater and downgrade U.S. interests and commitments elsewhere.… Such thinking is commonplace among both isolationist conservatives who indulge the fantasy of “Fortress America” and progressive liberals who mistake internationalism for an end in itself. The right has retrenched in the face of Russian aggression in Europe, while the left has demonstrated a chronic allergy to deterring Iran and supporting Israel. Neither camp has committed to maintaining the military superiority or sustaining the alliances needed to contest revisionist powers. If the United States continues to retreat, its enemies will be only too happy to fill the void.
He is right. The U.S.-dominated unipolar world is collapsing. The Trump administration indicates it knows this, and it has no plans to stop it. Instead, it will do something completely wild: It intends to focus on the nation inhabited by the people who put them in power. Here’s what Secretary of State Marco Rubio said during a January 30 interview with Megyn Kelly:
The way the world has always worked is that the Chinese will do what’s in the best interests of China, the Russians will do what’s in the best interest of Russia, the Chileans are going to do what’s in the best interest of Chile, and the United States needs to do what’s in the best interest of the United States. Where our interests align, that’s where you have partnerships and alliances; where our differences are not aligned, that is where the job of diplomacy is to prevent conflict while still furthering our national interests and understanding they’re going to further theirs. And that’s been lost.
And I think that was lost at the end of the Cold War, because we were the only power in the world, and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem. And there are terrible things happening in the world. There are. And then there are things that are terrible that impact our national interest directly, and we need to prioritize those again. So it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not — that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.
The Trump administration is not only taking steps to work out a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, but it says it’s working on an “economic development” deal. On Monday, Trump announced he is talking to Putin about “major Economic Development transactions” between the U.S. and Russia.
This is the sort of the thing that drives the neocons mad. McConnell wrote in his essay:
Today’s revanchist powers do not seek deeper integration with the existing international order; they reject its very basis.
If it were up to McConnell, the United States would have gotten into a hot war with Russia:
The George W. Bush administration’s failure to respond forcefully to Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 was a missed opportunity to nip Russian aggression in the bud…. As it became clear that Putin would launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I urged Biden to offer meaningful lethal aid to Ukraine and expand the U.S. military footprint in Europe. But the president demurred.
McConnell’s term ends in 2026. Perhaps by next year, the great people of Kentucky will decide to elect an American First senator who cares about the issues they face more than Ukraine.
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