Right Web

PRA's Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.

David Frum, a White House speechwriter during the first years of the George W. Bush presidency and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is a Canadian-born writer closely associated with U.S. neoconservatism. A frequent contributor to several conservative media outlets—including the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, and Canada's National Post—Frum promotes an aggressive “war on terror” centered on the Middle East and has characterized threats to the United States in existential terms. In the 2003 book An End to Evil, Frum and coauthor Richard Perle write, “For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation's great cause.... There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.” 1

As Frum sees it, the threat of terrorism is the result of an apparently irresolvable conflict between the West and Islam. In a March 2007 opinion piece for Foreign Policy, Frum wrote, "[George W.] Bush argued that terrorism was the work of a tiny handful of extremists, repudiated by the vast majority of Middle Easterners. His fellow Americans no longer believe him. More and more are coming to believe that Islam really is inherently hostile to democracy and the West. Civilizations are clashing. Paul Wolfowitz has lost. Sam Huntington has won." 2

In late 2008, Frum seemed to distance himself from mainstream conservatism, expressing dissatisfaction and disappointment in the U.S. right wing and worrying that the “collapsed intellectual state of the [Republican] party” would hamper its recovery from electoral loses. 3 He reassessed his ideological position, writing, “My fundamental political principles remain the same as ever: free markets, American leadership in the world, and intense attachment to inherited moral and cultural traditions. Yet I cannot be blind to the evidence that we have seen free markets produce some damaging and dangerous results in recent years. Or that the foreign policy I supported has not yielded the success I would have wished to see. Or that traditions must evolve if they are to endure. There are new principes [sic] too that must be included in a majority conservatism: environmental protection as a core value and an unwavering insistence upon competence and integrity in government.” 4

Leaving the National Review

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Frum began to feel that his views on conservatism were diverging from those espoused by the right-wing National Review (NR), where for six years he had authored the blog David Frum’s Diary. Sen. John McCain’s choice of running mates brought this division to the forefront. 5 Frum argued in a September 2008 online discussion hosted by New York magazine that he was “disturbed about the choice [of Gov. Sarah Palin] from the start.… She really could be president! And here's where my fellow conservatives really worry me. They are so attracted by the symbolism of the selection that they show no concern—never mind for her executive competence—even for her views.” 6

Frum’s commentary helped spur a heated—and sometimes mean-spirited—debate on the NR website about conservatism and the future course of the Republican Party. In mid-November 2008, a few weeks after his NR colleague Christopher Buckley (son of NR founder William Buckley Jr.) announced his own departure from the magazine, Frum told the New York Times that he too was leaving on January 20, 2009. He said the split was amicable and that the differences over Palin were “symbolic of a lot of differences” between himself and the magazine. He added, “I am really and truly frightened by the collapse of support for the Republican Party by the young and the educated.” 7 In a follow up NR blog entry, Frum said that he was starting a new website called NewMajority.com in early 2009. 8

Coining the “Axis of Evil”

Frum, born in 1960 in Toronto, Ontario, was exposed early to high-profile journalism by his mother, Barbara Frum, a well-known Canadian media personality who appeared regularly on CBC radio and television. After graduating from Yale University in 1982 and Harvard Law School in 1987—where he served as president of the local Federalist Society chapter—David Frum went on to work on the Wall Street Journal editorial board from 1989 to 1992 and as a columnist for Forbes magazine from 1992 to 1994. During 1995 to 2001, Frum worked at the Manhattan Institute, where he served as a senior fellow. With the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Frum joined the administration as a special assistant to the president for economic speechwriting, a post he held until early 2002. 9

Frum's work at the White House gained media attention in early 2002 after his wife, the anti-feminist writer Danielle Crittenden, bragged to some friends in an e-mail, which eventually circulated to a number of press outlets, that her husband came up with the phrase "axis of evil." President Bush used the phrase in his January 2002 State of the Union address to describe the supposed threats posed by Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. 10

Books

In 2003, Frum published his best-known book, The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush, which offered a firsthand account of the Bush presidency and the influence of the 9/11 attacks on the country and the administration. "George W. Bush was hardly the obvious man for the job. But by a very strange fate, he turned out to be, of all unlikely things, the right man," wrote Frum. 11

In 2004 Frum coauthored with Richard Perle An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, which defended the invasion of Iraq and promoted U.S.-backed regime change in Syria and Iran.  The authors also promoted more aggressive U.S. policies toward North Korea and Saudi Arabia and derided the United Nations for being weak and bureaucratic while heralding the United States as a force for peace. "A world at peace; a world governed by law; a world in which all peoples are free to find their own destinies: That dream has not yet come true, it will not come true soon, but if it ever does come true, it will be brought into being by American armed might and defended by American might, too." 12

The book, which appeared as the U.S. invasion of Iraq began to morph into a bloody counterinsurgency campaign, called into question the rosy prognostications offered by neoconservatives and Bush administration hawks. According to Frum and Perle, however, the problems were a result not so much of the Sunni insurgency and other developments on the ground, but rather of attempts by the "realists" in the State Department and the CIA, and by senior retired and active-duty military officers, to change the approach in Iraq and elsewhere in the region. Perle and Frum lamented: "We can feel the will to win ebbing in Washington; we sense the reversion to the bad old habits of complacency and denial." 13

Commenting on the book, journalist Fareed Zakaria wrote: "Frum and Perle want transformation from 30,000 feet, without the moral taint of compromise. They scorn the diplomats who must deal with foreigners, not to mention the foreigners themselves." 14

In early 2008, Frum published Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again. According to a blurb on the website of the American Enterprise Institute, “Too many conservatives and Republicans have shut their eyes to negative trends. David Frum offers answers. Frum says that the ideas that won elections for conservatives in the 1980s have done their job. Republicans can no longer win elections on taxes, guns, and promises to restore traditional values. It's time now for a new approach.” 15

Repentant over the War?

In November 2006, Vanity Fair published an article by David Rose that listed a number of "the [Iraq] War's remorseful proponents," those erstwhile supporters of invading Iraq who had shifted their views and/or withdrawn their support of the Bush administration after the situation in Iraq steadily worsened. These included Perle, Kenneth Adelman, Michael Rubin, Michael Ledeen, Eliot Cohen, Frank Gaffney, and Frum. Rose reported that, "To David Frum ... it now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because 'the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them.'" 16

But Frum took issue with the magazine’s characterization of his views, proclaiming in the Huffington Post that there was "nothing remorseful" about his views. "It's true I fear that there is a real danger that the United States will lose in Iraq. And yes I do blame a lot that has gone wrong on failures of U.S. policy." Nevertheless, he said, "My most fundamental views on the war in Iraq remain as they were in 2003: The war was right, victory is essential, and defeat would be calamitous." 17