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TWO GENERATIONS OF NEOCONSERVATISM

From the Law of Unintended Consequences to the Cleansing Fire of Violence

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The anti-establishment conservative movement that helped bring Ronald Reagan to power in 1980 was a coalition whose constituent parts shared considerably overlapping agendas, but there were differences. With its moralistic preoccupations, the new Christian right, which had reinvigorated the movement, paid most notice to those issues that focused on the family and dealt with what became known as “social conservatism”: abortion, homosexuality, pornography, gender roles, school curriculum, childrearing practices. True to their roots in business and the Goldwater cause, the new right’s proclivities tended toward economic libertarianism. In this respect the Reagan electoral coalition replicated the old anti-establishment fusion between traditionalism and libertarianism, now under new historical conditions. To be sure, the new Christian right also cared deeply about taxes and regulation and a too intrusive federal government. All the issues of concern to anti-establishment conservatism were united by the underlying, primary concepts of personal responsibility and virtue. Still, each part of the coalition had its priorities. And while the clever Reagan lent rhetorical attention to the issues dear to the social conservatives during his presidency, at the end of the day his administration didn’t actually enact much policy in that domain. What Reagan did do was revive anti-establishment conservatism’s old “rollback” agenda: of the federal government and of international communism.

Rollback was the preoccupation of the final element in the reinvigorated anti-establishment conservative movement: neoconservatism. Neoconservatism was an influential intellectual persuasion that entered the public arena in the 1970s with a forceful critique of government overreach and the unintended consequences of public policy. The first generation of neoconservatives, who began on the political left and moved to the right, provided anti-establishment conservatism with a new set of intellectual hooks for the political struggles in the domestic arena. In their diagnosis of Great Society programs as governmental overreach by a self-serving “New Class,” neoconservatives provided a non-religious explanation for the political ills of the 1960s and 1970s that complemented and thus legitimized the conservative evangelical critique of secular humanism. The crisis of American society was too much government and a culture out of control.

In the foreign policy arena, the neoconservatives brought new fervor to the debates of the post-Vietnam era, arguing for a bold restoration (one could say a re-masculinization) of American political and military dominance in the world. In this respect, too, the militancy of the neoconservatives resonated with the new Christian right’s belief in American exceptionalism, that God had assigned the United States a mission to extend its values to the other peoples of the world. Neoconservatives did not speak of God; rather, they spoke of “history.” It was history that bequeathed to America the universalizing status upon which it must act, calling to mind the originally religious proclamation of Manifest Destiny, that “Providence” had given the United States a mission to spread “the great experiment of liberty.”¹ Forcefully endorsing the theme of America’s historical mission, the neoconservatives were probably the most important constituency in formulating American foreign policy after the attacks of September 11, 2001, including the decision to invade Iraq. This chapter traces the development of neoconservatism and how its distinctive ideological positions linked to the new Christian right and helped forge a new and ascendant anti-establishment conservatism. Particular attention is paid to foreign policy inasmuch as neoconservatives were so important in that realm.

The first generation: Anti-communism, the lessons of Tocqueville and Burke, and “the law of unintended consequences”

The first generation of neoconservatives, largely New York Jews who were the sons and daughters of Russian and Eastern European immigrants, cut their teeth in the debates of the Marxist left in the 1930s and 1940s.² Affiliated with the Trotskyist anti-Stalinist left, after World War II their anti-Stalinism became anti-communism per se. They found themselves part of the liberal anti-communist wing of the Democratic Party, mainstays of the post-war liberal consensus. The writers and editors Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Midge Decter, the academics Sidney Hook, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and like-minded others, championed liberal social reform at home and vigilant anti-communism abroad.³ Fierce debaters and tempestuous polemicists, some neoconservatives articulated the position that Soviet communism was morally indistinguishable from Nazism. In the heated intellectual politics of the 1950s, Irving Kristol especially, in his capacity as a prolific essayist and editor of the influential intellectual magazine Encounter (and later The Public Interest, with a stint as managing editor of Commentary), vilified those who believed that the real enemy of the United States was McCarthyism rather than communism. The failure of liberals to understand the true foe lay at the root of Kristol’s loathing. In his eyes, liberals demonstrated excessive tolerance toward communism and a cowardly unwillingness to make imperative moral distinctions. As Kristol wrote in 1952, the essence of communism is a conspiracy to subvert every social and political order it does not dominate; yet liberals extended tolerance to those who gave voice to the evil ideology.⁴ Communism was “the most powerful existing institution which opposes such changes and reforms as liberalism proposes. … Why, then, should not liberals and liberals especially, fear and hate it?”⁵ Liberals were to be counted among the naïve “children of light,” in the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s phrase, committed to a belief in human goodness and incapable of recognizing evil, particularly the evil of communism.⁶ Yet unlike liberal cold warriors such as Niebuhr and the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., along with the diplomats George Kennan and Hans Morgenthau – men who grasped the evil of communism but counseled a foreign policy of containment – Kristol and some of his intellectual compatriots argued for the rollback of communism. Liberalism was largely betrayed by liberals, the neoconservatives thought. Liberal institutions needed defenders, and the first generation of neoconservatives saw themselves as liberalism’s fierce and hard-headed guardians.

Many members of the first generation of neoconservatives quietly came to disagree with American policy in Vietnam, but they all found themselves appalled at the violence, social disorder, and hot-headed attacks on American institutions that accompanied the anti-war movement and the associated politics of the new left, black militancy, and the counterculture of the 1960s. Although American involvement in Vietnam was, for some neoconservatives, a mistake, for them it did not represent an indictment of the American system as it did for the new left. As in the 1950s, neoconservatives saw the primary threat to liberalism as coming from the left. This time, in the 1960s, the danger came from the new left’s “mindless assault on the civic and social order,” in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s phrase.⁷ Used to the thrust and parry of learned and intricate policy debate, neoconservative intellectuals were aghast at the new left’s essential lack of interest in this level of discussion. “Whenever I have mentioned [Social Security and Medicare] legislation in conversation,” Irving Kristol wrote of his dealings with new left leaders in 1965, “I have received an icy stare of incomprehension and disdain, as if I were some kind of political idiot who actually believed what I read in the New York Times.”⁸ This is what prompted the neoconservatives to conceptualize the new left as an anti-intellectual, anti-liberal cultural movement, populated by true believers and masquerading as a political movement. As such, they believed it to be a movement without political responsibility.⁹

Apart from the civil rights struggle, which they supported more or less unreservedly, the politics of the 1960s, with its concern for all-embracing social justice and assertion of unconditional individual rights and private autonomy, its political and cultural intemperance and more than occasional violence, shocked the neoconservatives deeply. Professors Allan Bloom and Nathan Glazer, among others, railed against the takeovers of university campuses by student radicals and at what they saw as the radicals’ attacks on academic freedom. They thought that campus radicals’ justifications of their actions were alarmingly shallow and duplicitous.¹⁰ And they seethed that older, established liberal intellectuals refused to defend such liberal principles as freedom of speech in the face of attack by campus activists. The neoconservatives were shaken by the new left’s turn against Israel following the 1967 war, and were equally distressed by the increasing anti-Semitism of the black power movement. These factors prompted Jeane Kirkpatrick, the neoconservative professor turned diplomat, to conclude that it was the counterculture that created neoconservatism. The movement’s “passionate rejection – less of what the U.S. did than of what it was – constituted a wholesale assault on the legitimacy of American society,” she wrote, looking back in 2004. “I believe this assault became the foundation of the opposing neoconservative position.”¹¹

The new left saw the crisis of the 1960s as a crisis of American institutions – soulless capitalism, a runaway military-industrial complex, institutional racism, a neo-imperialist national security state operating by technocratic rationality, a shallow advertising-driven and sexually repressed culture, a narrow and restricted form of democracy. The early new left rejected the liberal consensus as hypocritical: the country had not lived up to its promise to recognize equal rights. The later new left and black power movements went further: the liberal consensus was tainted by an original, essential racism and imperialism.¹² Neoconservatives judged these criticisms to be pure cant. To them, the real crisis of America was a crisis of authority and the decline of values and morals. New left radicals and the counterculture were judged to be both symptoms of a culture dangerously out of kilter and agents of its decline. Indeed, among others, Midge Decter assailed the parents of her own generation for pandering to such a spoiled and undisciplined cohort of over-privileged, ungrateful youth whose stock in trade was self-indulgence and the performance of a mindless “adversary culture.”¹³

Jeane Kirkpatrick’s observation was that neoconservatives, unlike the new left and black militants, were not fundamentally alienated from American life and society. Neoconservatives’ trust in liberal institutions meant, as a general proposition, that they favored stability over any far-reaching change. Although they were distrustful of religious fundamentalism and political populism, neoconservatives came to appreciate the value of religion as a basis for virtue and morality, an imperative source of social cohesion. By contrast, they saw in radicalism, especially cultural radicalism, a threat to the liberal democratic order. Of course, some understood that this cultural radicalism was a consequence of the very success of the capitalist order, whose emphasis on consumption could not help but undermine the ascetic Protestant worldview and discipline that originally constituted that order.¹⁴

Although many neoconservatives developed their intellectual chops in discussions about Marxism, it was the republican virtue tradition associated with Alexis de Tocqueville toward which they gravitated. In that intellectual tradition, freedom and community are not in contradiction; rather, individual freedom is nourished and exercised in communities that, in turn, are created and maintained by the voluntary commitments of individuals.¹⁵ Committed to moderation (even as in debate they engaged in heated, even vitriolic polemics), neoconservatives came to champion the intermediary institutions so dear to Tocqueville – the family especially, and the voluntary associations such as churches, neighborhoods, labor unions, universities. These are the settings wherein liberal democratic commitments, values, and behaviors are bred, where virtue is cultivated. These are the institutions that also serve to restrain the state. As it was for Leo Strauss, the University of Chicago political theorist who is often linked to neoconservative thought, individual moral virtue was a key concept and value. Virtue is the basis of the polity.

Many commentators have pointed to the Straussian origins of neoconservatism. Although there are many points of intersection, both at the level of persons and ideas between Strauss and neoconservatism, they are, however, hardly identical. Prominent first-generation neoconservatives who focused on foreign policy, such as Norman Podhoretz and Jeane Kirkpatrick, had little use for Strauss and his preoccupation with ancient and classical political theory. Still, some resonances are strong, and Strauss made a considerable impact on Irving Kristol. Strauss upheld the classical idea of a natural, hierarchic order and derided the modern, liberal idea of rights. The focus on rights, Strauss held, led to a culture of unlimited tolerance and nihilism. The trouble with modernity lay in its denial of truth, particularly moral truth. For these reasons, Strauss and neoconservatives shared an antipathy toward liberals. For neoconservatives, particularly of the second generation, Strauss’s appeal lay in his sense of moral absolutism, which was not tied to any particular religious tradition.¹⁶ Strauss’s influence on foreign policy decision-making is usually discussed in terms of his tendency to view the world as a place where isolated liberal democracies live in constant danger from hostile elements abroad, and face threats that must be confronted vigorously and with strong leadership. And because ideas are hard for the common person to understand, philosophers must exercise strong leadership, and, in the words of one Strauss critic, need to “tell noble lies not only to the people at large but also to powerful politicians.”¹⁷

Despite their ethnic resentments against the American white Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment – Norman Podhoretz, for example, spoke disparagingly of the “WASP patriciate”¹⁸ – neoconservatives paradoxically admired the traditional English Anglo-Saxon virtues that they saw as having defeated the Nazis: duty, honor, patriotism. Winston Churchill was a star in their firmament. But first-generation neoconservatives were decidedly not traditional, “small government” American conservatives. This was one of the features that made them “neo.” They always accepted the New Deal and defended the welfare state as a legitimate means to stem the socio-economic instability and cultural disenchantment that inevitably accompanied industrial capitalism; they considered labor unions a legitimate and important counterweight to the power of the business corporation. They pointedly did not consider the growth of the state, as did the libertarian Friedrich Hayek, to be “the road to serfdom.” Indeed, neoconservatives believed that government must act to promote the good life, and coercion sometimes must be exercised to ensure the triumph of the good. Neoconservatives tended to view hardcore libertarianism as essentially vapid. They shared with classical European conservatism an admiration for Edmund Burke’s notions of historical continuity and the importance of habit, the idea that tradition embodies the wisdom of generations. Public signals through law, custom, and tradition are the key to getting people to behave well.¹⁹ In this regard, neoconservatives aligned with the traditionalist strain of post-World War II conservative fusion of libertarianism and traditionalism: society was a community woven into a web of values and obligations binding individuals to one another. But neoconservatives had no patience with traditionalism’s sometime agrarian nostalgia for the antebellum South. Neoconservatives were unabashed modernists. Thus, although the first generation of neoconservatives occasionally entered into debate with the political right, among other things supporting its anti-communism and condemning its ingrained anti-Semitism, its argument was really with the left.

In keeping with the intellectual pedigree associated with Tocqueville and Burke, neoconservatives came to harbor grave doubts about the welfare state programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. In response to burgeoning anti-poverty programs created in the 1960s, Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell in 1965 launched The Public Interest to study the outcomes of the programs through empirical social science. (Nathan Glazer replaced Bell as Kristol’s co-editor in 1973.) Typically, the studies published in the journal found that the majority of well-intentioned social programs had outcomes rather startling to their architects (if anticipated by more level-headed social scientists like the editors). Mostly, the programs had failed to achieve their goals of poverty reduction and racial integration. Worse, The Public Interest claimed that in their overreach the Great Society programs designed to feed, house, educate, and employ the disadvantaged often exacerbated existing problems or created new ones through unintended consequences. Indeed, governmental overreach and “the law of unintended consequences” of social policy became the watchwords of neoconservatism.

Although Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous report on the African-American family did not appear in The Public Interest, it was emblematic of the kinds of studies that did appear in the journal, and Moynihan himself was a leading member of the neoconservative intellectual universe. “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” was a report written for the Department of Labor in 1965. It noted very high rates of illegitimate births, welfare participation, and single-parent families among African-Americans. Moynihan argued that the rise in single-mother families was due not to a lack of jobs but rather to a destructive trend in ghetto culture that could be traced back to slavery and Jim Crow discrimination. These had produced a “tangle of pathology” of delinquency, joblessness, school failure, crime, and, most devastating, fatherlessness.²⁰ To the extent that government policy provided welfare payments to families with fatherless dependent children, the policy added to the undermining of the basic socializing function of the family. Moynihan suspected that the risks were magnified in the case of African-Americans owing to the history of slavery and discrimination. “In essence,” he wrote, “the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male, and in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.” The Burkean baseline conception of the fundamental importance of the family was plain, as was the sense of the burden of history and the unintended consequences of social policy. The report triggered a furor. Moynihan was denounced in liberal circles for “blaming the victim,” his warning about “family stability” an example of subtle racism. The uproar added greatly to the disgust with which neoconservatives regarded the report’s left-liberal detractors.²¹

A slew of studies of other Great Society programs confirmed for neoconservatives the persistence of habit and settled mores, and the limits of what some began calling the “social engineering” associated with hubristic liberalism. Nathan Glazer and Thomas Sowell diagnosed affirmative action programs not only as a perversion of the original philosophy of nondiscrimination in favor of racial quotas, but as not working because they stigmatized their purported beneficiaries and erected perverse incentives for social advancement. State intervention on behalf of social equality must stop at the point of securing the equality of opportunity, they declared.²² Earlier, in Beyond the Melting Pot, Glazer and Moynihan had argued that because of the continuing hold of racial and ethnic identity in American life, the liberal conception of integration was unlikely to be realized.²³ James Q. Wilson, showing how the role of the police in American cities had changed from maintaining order to fighting crimes, suggested that the forgotten link between order maintenance and crime prevention lay behind the great rise in urban crime in the 1960s.²⁴ In a famous follow-up article written with George L. Kelling, Wilson argued it was imprudent to believe that social policy could get at the alleged root causes of crime (poverty and racism). Rather, effective crime-fighting policies had to reestablish order by attending to short-term symptoms like fixing broken windows and removing graffiti.²⁵ Reflecting basic neoconservative tropes, Wilson argued that criminality is, at bottom, a function of character and socialization: people who acquire a decent degree of self-restraint and a fundamental regard for others tend not to engage in criminal behavior. “But for most social problems that deeply trouble us, the need is to explore, carefully and experimentally, ways of strengthening the formation of character among the very young. In the long run, the public interest depends on private virtue.”²⁶ Again, virtue emerged as a central theme among neoconservatives, one that would bridge its first and the second generations.²⁷ Moynihan’s oft-quoted 1986 aphorism on the relationship between culture and politics captured the intellectually serious, hard-headed approach of the first generation of neoconservatives. “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”²⁸

The critique of the “New Class”

If the Great Society social programs didn’t work as planned, what they did do, according to the neoconservatives, was generate a surfeit of experts and college-educated professionals employed in the public sector to devise them and carry them out. Convinced of their own goodness and efficacy and that of the programs they administered, these professionals became a powerful constituency for yet more programs and ever-larger government outlays. They advanced a perilous culture of entitlement. Indeed, the public sector and welfare state were, in the eyes of many neoconservatives, the liberal community’s means to power. This move, from a serious questioning of liberalism’s well-intentioned overreach to a variety of cheap, anti-intellectual populist critique, was pioneered by Irving Kristol. Drawing on his old Trotskyism, Kristol took as his basis Max Schachtman’s theory of Stalinism as the ideology of a parasitic bureaucratic class that had corrupted socialism, channeling this into a critique of American liberal professionals. He labeled them “the New Class.”²⁹ New Class theory didn’t simply reflect a hidden, transformed Trotskyism, of course. The left-leaning populist tradition had long lauded virtuous “producers”: that is, those who create tangible goods against the depredations of a white-collar elite that sponges off the producers’ self-reliant efforts.³⁰ By the 1960s, moreover, distrust of the technocrats and the military and political elites who ran the Vietnam War was widespread among the left. The distrust on the left of experts reflected the broad cultural revolt against authority in the 1960s and was observable in egalitarian-based challenges to established authority in nearly every area of social practice.³¹ What is curious was how the populist anti-elitist impulse migrated by the 1970s from the political left to the political right. The new manifestation of virtuous producers consisted of business and the (primarily white) working class, who were being victimized by a counterculture-influenced anti-capitalist elite cadre of public sector professionals, lawyers, teachers and academics, union officials, mass media, and liberal think tanks and foundations. It was the New Class that took over the Democratic Party under the banner of 1972 presidential nominee George McGovern, transforming liberalism, in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s phrase, into “an ideology of the privileged.”³² The New Class oppressed virtuous producers from above; the recipients of the entitlements created by New Class-engineered government programs oppressed virtuous producers from below.

In his skewering of the New Class, Irving Kristol also attacked the idea of disinterested social science in the service of the national interest, a principle that had rested at the core of the post-World War II liberal consensus. The liberal consensus required an ethic of public duty on the part of America’s elite, of securing the common good through disinterested government service.³³ But when New Class professionals and experts presented themselves as defenders of objective social science and champions of universal principles such as equality, they were disguising their true intentions, in Kristol’s view.

This “new class” consists of scientists, lawyers, city planners, social workers, educators, criminologists, sociologists, public health doctors, etc. – a substantial number of whom find their careers in the expanding public sector rather than the private. The public sector, indeed, is where they prefer to be. They are, as one says, “idealistic,” i.e., far less interested in individual financial rewards than in the corporate power of their class. Though they continue to speak the language of “progressive reform,” in actuality they are acting upon a hidden agenda: to propel the nation from that modified version of capitalism we call “the welfare state” toward an economic system so stringently regulated in detail as to fulfill many of the traditional anti-capitalist aspirations of the Left.³⁴

The New Class’ “zealotry” for environmental protection and worker safety and the strict regulation of business revealed its true interests, wrote Robert L. Bartley, editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page:

In the midst of this kind of zealotry, it is not hard to locate the interests of the New Class, whose members populate, draw economic support from, and above all wield power in the name of the “public interest” groups and regulatory agencies. Indeed, when activists advocate a “no-growth economy,” one in which the power of the business class would necessarily fall, and anyone with an upper-middle class income would be secure from the threat of social mobility, their intentions are quite clear: a society in which rewards would no longer be distributed in wealth, but in power and status, to be won by precisely those skills (abstraction, moralistic rhetoric, manipulation of symbols) in which the highly educated New Class excels.³⁵

What began as sober empirical social science assessment of the outcome of specific public policies slipped into a broad, fairly malicious ideological critique not only of the efficacy of government in general, but also of the devious, self-serving nature of those who design, advocate, and carry out such policies. In their critique of the New Class, Kristol et al. ended up disparaging the entire edifice of progressive public policy since the Social Gospel, in effect exposing it as a fraud. Social science and liberal public policy had no objective basis, they insinuated; “expertise” was simply a mask for the elitist will to (leftist) power. Of course this attack on certain kinds of intellectuals and their so-called expertise couldn’t be confined. The New Class critique fueled what became the anti-establishment conservative war on expertise and, eventually, in some hands, a war on evidence-based inquiry, including science itself.³⁶ The roots, in our time, of, for example, the climate change deniers, those who denounce the science of climate change as a political hoax, in no small measure lie in the neoconservative critique of the New Class.

The New Class thesis formed an intellectual bridge to other targets of conservative criticism that bubbled up in the 1970s. It piggybacked effortlessly onto the attack on the growth of government (particularly the federal government), as well as the hazards, futility, and outsized costs of the regulation of business.³⁷ The New Class critique not only rebuked the public sector and the culture of entitlement, it also channeled a new appreciation for businessmen and the virtues of market capitalism. For, unlike New Class spongers and welfare recipients, business and businessmen created value.³⁸ All these tropes were part of a broader narrative of recuperation of capitalism’s reputation. Business had been put on the defensive in the late 1960s and early 1970s, criticized by the civil rights and public interest and consumer movements for racial discrimination, environmental pollution, unsafe products and workplaces. The increase in the number of regulatory agencies and the broader purview of regulatory oversight of business were testaments to this liberal democratic, if not anti-corporate, political mobilization.³⁹ By the mid-1970s, business was engaged in a counter-offensive through new lobbying organizations and the funding of new organs of intellectual production, including distinctly conservative legal foundations.⁴⁰ The formation of the Business Roundtable and a reinvigorated Chamber of Commerce, the new conservative think tanks and political lobbies described in chapter 2, were a major part of this business counter-offensive.

The alliance with the religious right

Another strain of the counter-offensive focused on the New Class’s permissiveness in the arenas of culture and personal behavior. The cultural excess of the New Class, its narcissism, its unbounded pleasure seeking – all features of the “untrammeled self” that exposed the New Class’s overall lack of virtue – tainted virtually all the areas of the culture touched by its members.⁴¹ Ultimately, neoconservatives began to blame the “crisis of the 1960s” on the adversarial, decadent, subversive, and fundamentally naïve New Class. For the neoconservatives, the crisis of contemporary America – and to neoconservatives the United States since the 1960s seemed always to be in crisis – was a crisis of values, morals, and manners. America’s liberal capitalist order was precarious, threatened by the nihilism of the counterculture. It was natural, then, that neoconservatives, Irving Kristol foremost, began sidling up to the religious right. This alignment was perhaps initially more for strategic political purposes than true intellectual ones, but eventually it became so on the merits. Kristol’s longstanding wariness of populist movements vanished by the 1980s. Because he saw religion as an indispensable constraint to antisocial impulses, and thus a utilitarian foundation for liberal democracy, he and others began to view the religious right with favor. Kristol found in contemporary conservative movements, including the new Christian right, an expression of the “common sense – not the passion, but the common sense” of the American people against the “un-wisdom of its governing elites – whether elected, appointed, or (as with the media) self-appointed.”⁴² Lending support to conservative evangelicals’ objection to the teaching of evolution in the public schools, Kristol echoed its canard that Darwinism was simply a “theory,” far from an established scientific fact.⁴³ Joining with the Moral Majority and its allies in conservative Catholic circles (the author Michael Novak and the priest and writer Richard John Neuhaus most prominently), Kristol agreed that secular humanism was the real danger to the United States.⁴⁴ He came to champion conservative evangelicals because, in his view, they “see, quite clearly and correctly, that statism in America is organically linked with secular liberalism – that many of the programs and activities of the welfare state have a powerful antireligious animus.”⁴⁵ Kristol thus echoed the charge that religion was subject to discrimination in contemporary America, that the religious were victims of secularism. Like the progressivism of the New Class, secularism was simply another self-serving belief system – but a devious one because it rested on claims of universality.

Conservative evangelical support of Israel was another important element in winning the allegiance of many neoconservatives. A pro-Israel Realpolitik found Kristol defending the public anti-Semitic remarks of preachers Bailey Smith and Jerry Falwell in 1984. “After all, why should Jews care about the theology of a fundamentalist preacher when they do not for a moment believe that he speaks with any authority on the question of God’s attentiveness to human prayer? And what do such theological abstractions matter as against the mundane fact that this same preacher is vigorously pro-Israel?”⁴⁶ Other neoconservatives adopted Kristol’s reasoning. Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, for example, posted apologies for Pat Robertson’s anti-Semitism, claiming it was unimportant, trumped by his and the Christian Coalition’s support for Israel.⁴⁷

Kristol was hardly alone in allying with the new Christian right agenda. Commentary, for decades a serious magazine dedicated to probing contemporary politics and culture, also began to reflect the increasing ideological convergence between neoconservatives and the new Christian right. Transformed under longtime editor Norman Podhoretz into a vehicle of neoconservative thought, Commentary consistently published pieces “exposing” the left and political correctness, attacking feminism, and savaging the homosexual lifestyle. Homosexuals, exclaimed Commentary, were intent on destroying the family and, with it, western civilization. The magazine featured articles on religion as underpinning freedom and extolling the vital role of religion in the blessed American ethos. Contributing writers railed against pornography and homosexuality, reviled the critics of Israel, and blamed AIDS victims for their condition. These were nothing if not hot buttons in the culture war pressed by the new Christian right. In short, neoconservative polemics on values and virtue echoed the positions of the religious right. The public discourse of both the neoconservatives and the intellectuals of the religious right evinced a similar lacerating rhetorical style of attack and, increasingly, similar content.

If the linkages between the new Christian right and neoconservatives began as intellectual affinities, the groups soon began to share material resources, including funding sources and institutional networks. Among other organizations they formed the well-funded Washington-based Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), whose stock in trade was the slashing media-savvy attack on the foreign policy positions and foreign mission programs of mainline Protestant denominations. The IRD was especially vicious about mainline Protestant objections to Reagan administration policies in Central America, including administration support for the Nicaraguan Contras. The IRD’s attacks were designed to delegitimize mainline criticism of American foreign policy – in many respects a continuation of the decades-long conservative evangelical denunciation of mainline liberalism in the foreign policy arena.⁴⁸ One informed commentator called the IRD’s particular combination of Christianity and democracy an effort to “baptize Reaganism.”⁴⁹ Established in 1981, the IRD received almost $5 million between 1985 and 2005 from the same conservative foundations (Sarah Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Carthage) that bankrolled the conservative think tanks.⁵⁰

The IRD was just one of the more visible organizations in a broad effort by the right to undermine liberal institutions in the political sphere and take them over in the religious sphere. Steven Tipton’s Public Pulpits provides an in-depth account of the effort of conservative evangelicals to take over the leadership of the United Methodist Church.⁵¹ Damon Linker traces the many connections – intellectual and material – among the circle of the religious intelligentsia and neoconservative-affiliated magazines and think tanks, and the foundations that supported both groupings.⁵² A prominent figure in both camps was Richard John Neuhaus. Neuhaus fashioned himself a bridge between the religious right and neoconservatives, on one hand, and between conservative Catholics and right-wing Protestant evangelicals, on the other. He and his Catholic intellectual compatriot Michael Novak began their intellectual journeys as religious supporters of the new left. They shifted to a religious political conservatism in the 1970s. Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism was an effort to show that the system of American capitalism embodied biblical precepts and was an expression of divine beneficence.⁵³ Neuhaus’s The Naked Public Square was a bold manifesto condemning the fact that public discourse in the United States had been shorn of religious reason. The fundamental mistake, Neuhaus declared, is the assumption that the United States is a secular society. Secularism poses the gravest of dangers to the country. The Naked Public Square essentially put in more moderate, acceptably scholarly form the arguments proffered by new Christian right stalwarts Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye.⁵⁴ A seemingly reasonable, quiet extremism was Neuhaus’s particular talent, which he played out regularly in his journal, First Things. With former Watergate felon-turned-prison evangelical Charles Colson, Neuhaus initiated the high-level consultation between Catholics and evangelical Protestants that resulted in “Evangelicals and Catholics Together – The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium” (1994), pledging to pass laws against abortion, euthanasia, and pornography. Neuhaus’s Institute on Religion and Public Life provided intellectual heft for the religious right agenda, especially through First Things.⁵⁵ Between 1989 and 2005, the Institute on Religion and Public Life received over $8 million from the conservative foundations.⁵⁶

Foreign policy: The tough anti-communist realism of neoconservatism’s first generation

The neoconservative orientation toward foreign policy was usually coupled to its diagnosis of the domestic crisis in the United States. Radicalism at home undermined the pivotal struggle against communist expansionism abroad. Communism, and particularly the Soviet Union, posed an existential threat to freedom. As Norman Podhoretz put it in his 1980 book, The Present Danger, “[T]he Soviet Union is not a nation like any other. It is a revolutionary state, exactly as Hitler’s Germany was, in the sense that it wishes to create a new international order in which it would be the dominant power and whose character would be determined by its national wishes and its ideological dictates.”⁵⁷ If Irving Kristol was the leading voice in domestic affairs for the first generation of neoconservatives, Podhoretz was that voice in foreign policy. Podhoretz, too, began on the political left. During his first years as editor of Commentary, the magazine reflected his interest in the left avant-garde, featuring articles by the likes of Paul Goodman, Michael Harrington, Staughton Lynd, and James Baldwin. By the late 1960s, Podhoretz broke with the left, and Commentary reflected his rightward shift. The Present Danger expressed in more measured tones the heated foreign policy positions – diatribes even – which he had expounded for many years in Commentary and other publications.⁵⁸

The Present Danger provides a window on neoconservatism’s foreign policy outlook. Podhoretz’s text constructs a succinct overview of post-war American foreign policy and the rise of a weak and dangerous policy of “appeasement.” The book begins with praise for President Harry Truman’s policy of containment and its early manifestation in the establishment of NATO. Truman and Eisenhower’s commitment of American troops to repel North Korea was also commended – but for the fact that their administrations stopped at containment rather than a rollback to liberate subject peoples under communist oppression. American entrance into Vietnam under President Kennedy was consonant with containment policy. Podhoretz believed that containment policy derived from the “lesson” of Munich: never appease aggression. But the containment of communism in Vietnam, according to Podhoretz, was rendered problematic by the overlay of the Vietnamese fight against French imperialism. America’s involvement in Vietnam was not discolored by the stain of imperialism, however; U.S. intervention stemmed from the sincere, altruistic desire to repel communism.⁵⁹ For Podhoretz, the grievous American defeat in Vietnam was due to circumstance (not the least of which was the domestic anti-war movement), not from bad motives or morals.

It was the aftermath of the Vietnam War that preoccupied Podhoretz. In the face of eventual defeat in Vietnam, the Nixon administration initiated a policy of “strategic retreat” – not just from Vietnam but from containment policy in general, in Podhoretz’s view. Nixon and Kissinger championed détente with the Soviet Union. Détente meant cooperation, rather than confrontation, between the two superpowers. In Podhoretz’s interpretation, Nixon believed – or hoped – that a linkage of surrogate force and positive economic and political incentives would be enough to restrain Soviet adventurism. But this hope was desperately naïve, for the Soviet Union had entered into a period of imperial dynamism and was building up its arms and lining up its proxies to engage in subversion all over the globe. The United States, plagued by post-Vietnam syndrome, was recklessly cutting its military arsenal and entering into arms limitation treaties that favored the Soviet Union. By the time Jimmy Carter occupied the White House, containment policy was a relic, according to Podhoretz. The absence of American reaction to Soviet military interventions in the horn of Africa in the mid- to late 1970s confirmed to neoconservative critics that the United States was making too many concessions in order to safeguard détente. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the fall of the Shah in Iran (which Podhoretz intimated would end with Iran allying with the Soviet Union) confirmed the bankruptcy of post-Vietnam foreign policy: “[T]he United States had lost its nerve and could now be taken on with impunity.”⁶⁰

Podhoretz’s unyielding support of U.S. policy in Vietnam differed from some of his neoconservative compatriots, but his savage critique of the anti-war movement and his disgust with former Cold War liberals who found themselves chastened by the Vietnam debacle resonated strongly with most neoconservatives and others on the political right. In Podhoretz’s view, the domestic anti-war (and later nuclear freeze) agenda had triumphed, instantiating in the political culture a malevolent combination of pacifism, anti-Americanism, and isolationism. This represented a “culture of appeasement.” It meant the essential capitulation of the United States in the face of Soviet expansionism. In characteristically overheated prose, Podhoretz wrote in The Present Danger:

Soon enough, perhaps by the date chosen by [George] Orwell’s prophetic soul – when to their political ambition to dominate the West would have been added the Soviets’ own economic need for Middle Eastern oil – the President of the United States, whoever he might be, would have to choose between nuclear war or Soviet control over the oil supply of the West. By then the vulnerability of our missiles to a Soviet first strike would automatically dictate surrender – checkmate by telephone, as someone has called it.

[W]e would know by what name to call the new era into which we have entered (though it would be an essential feature of that era that we would be forbidden to mention its name aloud): the Finlandization of America, the political and economic subordination of the United States to superior Soviet power.⁶¹

Podhoretz articulated the key lesson that neoconservatives drew from the history of American foreign policy: bad things happen because of American weakness. The post-Vietnam culture of appeasement reflected and reinforced the enormity that America had lost faith in itself and its values. This theme recycled a central premise of Barry Goldwater’s 1960 campaign book, Conscience of a Conservative, and thus began to reveal that on some key foreign policy principles there was increasingly little ideological distance between neoconservatives and Goldwater conservatives. Anxious about its role in the world and insecure in the use of its military, the United States was beset by cowardice; it had become the “pitiful, helpless giant” that President Nixon had warned about in 1970.⁶² The culture of appeasement was not simply the result of the influence of the new left and the peace wing of the Democratic Party. The reviled culture of appeasement was due – again, the familiar trope – to the failure of liberals to defend liberalism. Neoconservatives disparaged liberal intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith, whose support of the anti-war wing of the Democratic Party was seen as apostasy.

The Vietnam War, of course, exploded the liberal foreign policy consensus that had married liberal internationalism with balance-of-power realism in the paramount aim of containing communism. The presumed “capture” of the Democratic Party by George McGovern’s anti-interventionist peace wing led neoconservatives to conclude that Democrats had gone soft and now shrank from the duty to confront Soviet aggression. Some neoconservatives abandoned their historic loyalty to the Democratic Party and supported Richard Nixon for president in 1972. Many eventually defected to the GOP permanently. The perceived weakness of the United States was highlighted by the maddening and cynical diplomacy that took place at the United Nations. Neoconservative writing in the 1970s and 1980s displayed exasperation at the anti-American and anti-Israel posturing in U.N. forums by communist and Third World governments. No instance more exercised neoconservatives than the 1974 U.N. resolution condemning Zionism as a form of racism, a campaign led by Ugandan strongman Idi Amin. Such appalling resolutions were adopted because, in the absence of a clear U.S. foreign policy after Vietnam, duplicitous communist and Third World dictators could successfully manipulate the diplomatic process. In this respect, Soviet and Third World manipulation of diplomacy was, again, a consequence of the inability or unwillingness of American liberals to defend liberal, realist principles. As Irving Kristol lamented, the problem with American diplomacy was that it had taken a “global point of view” rather than an American one. That perspective, he argued, was the legacy of “a debased and vulgarized Wilsonianism” wedded to “the utopian notion that the ultimate and governing purpose of American foreign policy is to establish a world community of nations all living amiably under the rule of law.”⁶³ As Kristol put it, “We are a strong nation, and they [Third World nations] will respect our strength, as well as our loyalty to our own political and social ideals, when we behave in a self-respecting way.”⁶⁴ Capitulating to bad people and bad nations via diplomatic blandishments simply emboldens them.

Implacably anti-communist and realist in foreign policy orientation, the first generation of neoconservatives battled détente and arms control agreements throughout the 1970s and formed organizations calling for the massive rebuilding of the American military. Three organizations in particular reflected neoconservative aims to beat back the culture of appeasement and restore American fortitude: the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), and “Team B.” The Coalition for a Democratic Majority was a group formed under the leadership of Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson to take back the Democratic Party from its peace wing.⁶⁵ Jackson had long served as a hawkish focal point within the Democratic Party for the continuance of Cold War liberal anti-communism. Several young neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, and Douglas Feith – the second generation of the neoconservative movement – got their start in Washington politics working in Jackson’s offices over the years, toiling against détente and arms control. The Committee on the Present Danger, formed to warn that America’s defenses were disintegrating in the face of strong Soviet threat, revived a moribund organization begun in the 1950s. Founding members were Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Nitze and former Under Secretary for Political Affairs Eugene Rostow, and included Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, William Casey, Richard Allen, Norman Podhoretz, Lane Kirkland, Richard Pipes, and Max Kampelman, representing an alliance of realist hawks, neoconservatives, and a smattering of Cold War anti-communist liberal internationalists who opposed arms limitation agreements with the Soviet Union. The CPD contended that like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union was by nature expansionist, and thus arms control only hindered the ability of the United States to protect itself.⁶⁶ Détente only served to legitimize Soviet communism, and allowed the USSR to keep itself on a military par with the vastly more economically productive United States.

The revitalization of the Committee on the Present Danger grew out of the creation of an independent group authorized in 1976 by President Gerald Ford to develop an independent judgment of Soviet capabilities and intentions. The same political environment propelled the formation of “Team B.” Team B was organized by then CIA Chief George H.W. Bush to review charges leveled by Albert Wohlstetter, the RAND Corporation and University of Chicago military intellectual who in the late 1950s had been part of an effort warning the Eisenhower administration of a “bomber gap” and “missile gap” vis-à-vis the USSR. Wohlstetter accused the CIA in 1974 of systematically underestimating Soviet missile deployment.⁶⁷ Bush tasked an independent set of analysts (“Team B”) to check the research of the CIA (“Team A”). Headed by Harvard historian and détente critic Richard Pipes, the group included several hard-line military policy and hawkish arms negotiation veterans, including retired Army Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Nitze, and defense staffer Paul Wolfowitz. Team B argued that the CIA had assumed a fundamentally false mirroring of motives of the United States and the Soviet Union, whereas in fact the USSR had never altered its long-held goal of world domination. Unlike the United States, the Soviet Union planned to fight and win a nuclear war.⁶⁸ Team B’s finding that the Soviets were moving ahead of the United States in military capabilities, and its recommendation for the immediate massive build-up of American armed forces, reflected much of what defense hawks and neoconservatives had been arguing for years. In fact, Team B’s projections of Soviet military strength turned out to be vastly exaggerated. The report projected that by 1984 the Soviets would have 500 Backfire bombers; they built 235. Team B predicted that by 1985 the Soviets would have replaced 90 percent of their long-range bombers and missiles; they replaced less than 60 percent. Despite warnings of huge Soviet military outlays, in fact the growth in Soviet military spending slowed in the mid-1970s and was flat for the next decade.⁶⁹

The Committee on the Present Danger, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, and Team B duly reflected the hawkish realist position on military strategy since the end of World War II – that the Soviet Union, evil and expansionist, was outstripping America’s military, particularly its nuclear arsenal. In response, neoconservatives and other hawks maintained, the United States had to increase its arsenal and plan counterforce measures, including possible first-strike capability. The latter policy was rooted in the conviction that a nuclear war could be limited and was winnable. This position, based on the abstract game theory modeling championed by the RAND Corporation and on self-serving and grossly exaggerated estimates of Soviet strength by the Air Force and the Navy, justified massive increases in military spending.⁷⁰

Together, these groups constituted a conservative policy echo chamber and an influential shadow defense establishment during the Carter years. The Team B report was released a month after Jimmy Carter won the 1976 election, and the Republican right used it against him throughout his presidency.⁷¹ Conservatives of all stripes objected to the Carter administration’s liberal internationalist focus on human rights and its drift from foreign policy realism. Carter’s insistence on human rights as a central plank in American foreign policy represented an intrusion of religious sensibility into the usually cold, calculating, amoral realist foreign policy paradigm, and was met initially with outrage and scorn from neo- and other conservatives. First-generation neoconservatives saw Carter as having a leftist hidden agenda that dangerously skewed foreign policy in ways that penalized America’s allies and thus undermined vigilance against Soviet expansion. They judged both foolish and perilous Carter’s conceptual shift in foreign policy from East–West superpower rivalry to North–South economic development issues. The most prominent exemplar of this stance was Jeane Kirkpatrick. Her essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” about the fundamental difference between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and published in Commentary in 1979, brought her to the attention of Ronald Reagan and was responsible for her subsequent appointment as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

A foreign policy based on human rights lost us Iran, wrote Kirkpatrick, and was about to lose us Nicaragua. Both the Shah of Iran and Nicaraguan president Anastasio Somoza were traditional rulers of traditional societies, corrupt but fiercely anti-communist and friendly toward the United States. Their fates fit a distinctive political pattern, Kirkpatrick lamented. The pattern went roughly like this: internal subversion, usually by communists, and the repressive reaction to it by the government in power, results in widespread violence in a moderately authoritarian, pro-U.S. country. In the wake of this violence, the absence of an opposition party prompts American liberals to question the morality of continuing aid to the rightist dictatorship. U.S. aid and backing are now seen as inconsistent with our support for democracy and human rights. Aid is withheld, weakening the leader, but efforts at engineering a moderate replacement come to nothing. Anarchy reigns and the insurgents take over. In sum, liberal misunderstanding of the situation inadvertently leads it to assist in deposing an erstwhile friend and ally and installing a proto-communist government hostile to American interests.⁷²

In Kirkpatrick’s eyes, President Carter and his foreign policy team failed to understand the fundamental truth that communism is different. Authoritarian regimes may be corrupt, but they permit the rudiments of civil society, including, nominally, political parties, an independent press, and voluntary associations. But because totalitarian regimes by nature are in the utopian business of remaking human beings, they destroy civil society and the independent institutions that form the foundations for democracy. In Kirkpatrick’s view, “Only intellectual fashion and the tyranny of Right/Left thinking prevent intelligent men of good will from perceiving the facts that traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies, that they are more susceptible of liberalization, and that they are more compatible with U.S. interests.”⁷³ Communist and left-leaning regimes are never held to the human rights principles the United States applies to right-wing authoritarian regimes – hence the “double standard.” Irving Kristol opined similarly, “It would also be nice if the Carter administration would disengage itself from the double standard, whereby left-wing governments are given the benefit of every doubt as concerns human rights while right-wing regimes are continually indicted. Nothing could more effectively make a mockery of the entire issue.”⁷⁴ The Carter administration’s naïve commitment to a foreign policy outlook of liberal internationalism led it to accept at face value the claim of revolutionary groups to represent “popular” aspirations and “progressive” forces – and thus deliver troubled U.S. allies into the hands of the Soviets.

In point of fact, Carter’s foreign policy still rested on the time-honored view that the United States had a responsibility to spread liberal democracy and American values. He just didn’t trumpet the overt military commitment of his predecessor exceptionalists. But Carter reconsidered the wisdom of détente late in his presidency and, under the influence of his National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, began increasing military spending and supporting groups that opposed Soviet proxies in Africa and Asia.⁷⁵ Nonetheless, his right-wing critics had defined him, and Carter’s late hawkishness was not enough to dispel the perceptions of his own weakness and the weakness of the United States under his guidance. For a variety of reasons, not least the ramifications of the 1979 Iranian revolution and hostage crisis, and the widespread belief that the Soviet Union’s interventions in the Third World (especially the invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979) had to be stopped, Ronald Reagan trounced Carter in the 1980 election.

Neoconservatives now had a say in Washington. Podhoretz’s The Present Danger was reputed to have been influential in the new Reagan White House, and several Commentary contributors and other neoconservatives became high-level functionaries in that administration. In the account of one scholar, thirty-two members of the Committee on the Present Danger were appointed to key posts in national security-related portfolios.⁷⁶ Reagan had long been a determined critic of détente and of the Soviet Union, and he set confronting Soviet expansion in the Third World as a top foreign policy priority. But, although they lauded Reagan’s presidency and tried to claim his mantle later, many neoconservatives complained about Reagan almost as much as they did Jimmy Carter. They adored Reagan’s build-up of the American military, his administration’s campaign to destroy leftist movements in Central America, its wariness of the nuclear freeze movement, and the president’s occasional oratorical bluster about the “Evil Empire” (a signature speech given to the 1983 annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals).⁷⁷ But as the historian John Patrick Diggins and others argue, Reagan was a shrewd politician whose hard-line rhetoric often masked a foreign policy pragmatism. Reagan actually believed in arms control; he employed the soft diplomacy of dialogue to this end. His administration’s military build-up served to better position the United States in arms control negotiations with the Soviets – which was always the goal, and not, as neoconservatives wanted, the rollback of communism.⁷⁸

Through much of the 1980s, neoconservatives fretted, wrung their hands, and declared disappointment with Reagan. Norman Podhoretz in particular lamented that among other disappointments Reagan had failed to commit troops to battle against Soviet expansionism in Latin America and Africa, did not establish an economic embargo against Poland and the Soviet Union in support of the Solidarity Trade Union uprising in the Polish crisis of 1981–2, and had condemned Israel’s settlement policy in occupied Palestinian territory.⁷⁹ When Reagan began negotiating with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev over reductions in nuclear arsenals and possibly sharing missile defense technology, neoconservatives veritably blanched in horror. They were appalled at Reagan’s naïveté. The Soviet Union was irredeemably evil and supremely powerful; Gorbachev was a cunning Leninist who had figured out how to strengthen the Soviet empire and psychologically disarm the West.⁸⁰ As Diggins notes, although neoconservatives questioned the use of state power in the domestic sphere, they never thought to question it in foreign affairs. Reagan did, to their great chagrin. It was only with the surprise demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 (largely as a consequence of Gorbachev’s efforts to reform the Soviet system from within) that neoconservatives changed their tune on Reagan and clamored to anoint themselves his heirs.⁸¹ In their revised view, Reagan not only had always been a stalwart in the effort to demolish the Soviet Union, it was his administration’s tough actions that accomplished the monumental deed. This was encapsulated in the triumphal motto that “Reagan won the Cold War.” This shorthand embodied Jeane Kirkpatrick’s fallacious conclusion that communist regimes were incapable of internal change and that only American will and steadfast coercion could have transformed the Soviet Union.

The post-Cold War neoconservative rift: Reserved realism vs. crusading internationalism

The disintegration of the Soviet bloc and the implosion of the USSR created a generational rift within neoconservatism. With the end of the Cold War, the first generation of neoconservatives, relentlessly and unbendingly anti-communist, drifted back to a more reserved foreign policy realism and began to advocate a more modest American presence in the world. Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote in 1990 that America’s purposes are “mainly domestic.” “It is not within the United States’ power to democratize the world. … The time when Americans should bear unusual burdens is past. With a return to ‘normal’ times, we can again become a normal nation. … Most of the international obligations that we assumed were once important are now outdated.”⁸² Nathan Glazer argued similarly. “In promoting and recommending those universal principles to which we are attached,” he wrote, “it is now time to withdraw to something closer to the modest role that the Founding Fathers intended.”⁸³ American foreign policy should now identify vital national interests, pay nominal attention to other matters and events, and give up its crusading moralism, Irving Kristol opined.⁸⁴ To the extent that the administration of Bill Clinton followed the human rights-based liberal internationalism begun under Jimmy Carter, the first generation of neoconservatives criticized it as simply more crusading Wilsonianism, captured perhaps best in the contemptuous phrase of Michael Mandelbaum (not a neoconservative), “foreign policy as social work.”⁸⁵

But for the second generation of neoconservatives, figures such as Richard Perle, William Kristol (Irving’s son), Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Joshua Muravchik, Carl Gershman, Ben Wattenberg, Zalmay Khalilzad, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, Lawrence Kaplan, and Daniel Pipes (Richard’s son), to name the most visible, the human rights-based interventionism of Clinton’s foreign policy was a feature to be applauded. Against the foreign policy establishment realists and, for that matter, most of their own neoconservative forebears, the second generation advocated moralism and idealism in foreign policy. It was foreign policy that preoccupied them. Domestic politics seemed almost an afterthought for them, a subject worthy of attention only to the extent that it put the right people in office.

Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay, “The End of History?” set the tone. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the emergence of marketization of the economy in China, the end of the twentieth century marked the triumph of the West. Fukuyama labeled it “the end of history”: that is, the unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism that marked the conclusion of the long struggle between rival ideological systems. This outcome was definitively not the result of any deterministic materialism or the material superiority of capitalism. Rather, paying homage to the nineteenth-century German philosopher Hegel, Fukuyama argued that this outcome was the result of victory in the realm of consciousness and values. He was careful to state that the triumph of liberalism did not mean the end of conflict. Religious fundamentalism and nationalism still had punch and could foment terrorism and wars of national liberation. Still, large-scale conflict was now a thing of the past because the great states necessary for it were passing into “post-history.”⁸⁶ And implicitly, because the dangers of large-scale conflict were disappearing, U.S. foreign policy could be geared toward calming international hot spots purely on the basis of liberal values.

This second generation of neoconservatives, who had none of the lingering attachment to the Democratic Party of their forebears and no ambivalence identifying with the right, paradoxically tended to support Bill Clinton over George H.W. Bush in the presidential election of 1992. Bush hewed to a classic realist foreign policy. Whereas he had galvanized the international community to invade Iraq in the 1990–1 Gulf War, his administration refused to march American troops to Baghdad to overthrow Saddam Hussein or provide backing to the Kurdish and Shiite rebellions against Saddam’s regime. Bush administration realists had no truck with calls to intervene in Somalia or Bosnia, or tangle with China in response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Their cautious realism was anathema to the emerging vision of neoconservatism’s second generation, which displayed an expansive faith in American power.⁸⁷ U.S. global leadership had to “challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values” and “promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad,” according to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), perhaps the most important umbrella group of the new muscular, post-Cold War orientation. PNAC’s Statement of Principles married some of the main tenets of liberal internationalism to neoconservative goals. Now the sole superpower at the end of the Cold War, the United States should permit no military rival, and needed to remain the “unipolar” power. The United States had “a unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.”⁸⁸ In practical terms, this translated into calls for substantial increases in the military budget, support for missile defense systems, and a foreign policy dedicated to transformation, not coexistence; for “regime change,” not mere stability and containment; for an aggressive unipolar internationalism rather than a balance of power realism. The fall of the Soviet Union created the possibility of a unipolar peace, a Pax Americana.⁸⁹ Because American interests were tied inextricably to universal liberal values, any transformation of bad political regimes was a blessing to the world as well as a benefit to the United States.

This view had surfaced publicly for a brief moment in 1992 in the form of the Defense Department Planning Guidance (DPG) document, written by a team under the imprimatur of then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney during the George H.W. Bush presidency. The document stressed that the United States should not allow the emergence of a new rival power and should be prepared to strike unilaterally and preemptively at any nation’s capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The DPG paper further maintained that the United States no longer needed alliances and should build a Strategic Defense Initiative (missile defense) system. In other words, the document dumped the post-World War II policy of collective internationalism in favor of a policy of unipolarity and (“benevolent”) domination by the United States. The classified document circulated for several weeks at senior levels in the Pentagon, but controversy erupted after it was leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post, and the White House ordered Defense Secretary Cheney to rewrite it.⁹⁰ The congruity between PNAC’s Statement of Principles and the DPG report was not accidental. The DPG report was drafted principally by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz with strong input from I. Lewis Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad – all of whom later signed the PNAC document (and all of whom, with Cheney, went on to positions of high responsibility in the administration of George W. Bush).

One specific expression of the distinctively neoconservative combination of moralist idealism and unipolar militarism was the demand to topple Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. Second-generation neoconservatives judged unpardonable the senior Bush’s decision not to send troops to Baghdad to take out Saddam Hussein at the close of the Gulf War. Saddam’s murderous regime was so discredited, deceptive, and dangerous, wrote Richard Perle among others, that it no longer could be considered a legitimate government. Long-term stability in the region required an American strategy to bring down Saddam and rid the Middle East of his weapons of mass destruction.⁹¹ The failure to do so during the Gulf War was a missed opportunity. Indeed, younger neoconservatives judged it the worst feature in a “squandered decade.” The United States could have shaped the international system in the 1990s in ways that would advance its values and interests without opposition from a powerful, determined adversary, but had failed to do so.⁹² It wasn’t that Democrats and liberals didn’t also cleave to the hoary messianic chestnuts of American exceptionalism and the transformative power of democracy. The Clinton administration recognized the sole superpower status of the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union – Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke often of the United States as the “indispensable nation.”⁹³ But in the eyes of the neoconservatives, Clinton did not follow through on the proper implications of unipolarity. His foreign interventions were both anemic and fatally flawed because they relied on international institutions. Paul Wolfowitz, a future architect of the Iraq War, was scathing in his criticisms of Clinton’s vacillating policy toward Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, and condemned Clinton’s failure to deploy the American military in those situations.⁹⁴

Second-generation neoconservatives called for intervention in the Balkans to stop Serb aggression. In this they shared the moral motivations of liberal internationalists but rejected the latter’s stance of working through multilateral institutions. In effect, neoconservatives drew sustenance from the human rights-based policy of military intervention pursued desultorily by the Clinton administration, even as they savaged Clinton’s actual practice of it. The failure of NATO and the United Nations to halt Serb aggression and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans was, to second-generation neoconservatives, an object lesson in why the United States had to exercise military power on its own. The neoconservatives felt utterly vindicated after the Balkan wars ended. The international institutions such as UNPROFOR and NATO had presided over a series of disasters. Only the U.S. military, with its unambiguous command structure and precision-guided bombs capable of inflicting heavy damage with limited civilian casualties, had proved capable of deterring the Serbs.⁹⁵ Further, the lesson about precision bombs proved correct the theories of Albert Wohlstetter, who had mentored several of the younger neoconservatives. Wohlstetter, the hugely influential defense analyst, had consistently argued over the years that Mutually Assured Destruction nuclear policy made for insufficient protection. Genuine safety lay in always finding more effective ways to use force. It was the new military capability of smart bombs that reinforced the idea among second-generation neoconservatives that the exercise of American military power was a policy option of the first order (and that later convinced Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that the United States could conquer Iraq quickly, with limited military forces, and on the cheap).⁹⁶

The Balkan experience’s confirmation of the uselessness of international institutions, in turn, reinforced neoconservative beliefs in U.S. unipolarity and the rightness of the American rebuff of old European allies. Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power best captured this sentiment (although his articulation was far milder than the often pejorative neoconservative denunciations of Europe). In this view, Western Europe is a “free rider,” comfortably benefiting from the U.S. military umbrella after a horrific century of bloody conflict. Europe has generated a set of beliefs and multilateral institutions that play down conflict and protect its social democratic prosperity and quiet. Increasingly, Europe and the United States find themselves in conflict over international relations and the perception of dangers. Europe sees the United States as high-handed, unilateralist, and unnecessarily belligerent; the United States sees Europe as spent, unserious, and weak – a legacy of its free riding since World War II.⁹⁷ In neoconservative eyes, the European worldview reflects a nihilism characteristic of late modernity or postmodernity, of the soft, effete, and effeminate strain in contemporary western culture. To the extent that the Clinton administration looked to the world community and its institutions as the ultimate source of international legitimacy, it partook of this unserious, feminine European worldview. In the judgment of young neoconservatives, Clinton’s foreign policy demonstrated an immature mistrust of military power and a parallel quixotic, legalistic faith in the shibboleths of “collective security” and the liberalizing influence of commerce and technology to accomplish strategic ends. War, in contrast, focuses the mind, rids the body politic of softness, and restores the manly virtues.⁹⁸ Second-generation neoconservative preoccupation with manly virtue, physical and philosophical courage, and the personal and national assertion of risking lives in order to save lives was in keeping with a prominent strain of conservative theory.⁹⁹ Of course, none of the second generation of neoconservatives had ever been to war or had even served in the military. Their manliness played out in a realm of theory, rhetoric, and fantasy. War, for them, was no longer a last resort against the worst evils but an instrument of human progress, a fast way to improve the world – a stance some labeled “Jacobin,” after the French Revolution’s conviction that the past could be left behind in an all-encompassing transformation of society.¹⁰⁰

For the second generation of neoconservatives, then, liberal internationalism properly adopted human rights as a basic principle of foreign policy. The internal nature of other states matters profoundly. But in embracing multilateral institutions, especially the United Nations, the liberal internationalist approach embraced weakness. And, because it forswears the use of military force if at all possible, the approach ultimately results in retreat and isolationism. Realism, historically viable but hard-hearted and selfish, no longer works in the post-Soviet (let alone the post-9/11) world. Realist suppositions about deterrence always depended on the assumption that (Soviet) leaders were fundamentally rational actors – rational in the sense of a foe that would respond rationally to the threat of overwhelming force. Rational opponents do not want their country laid waste in a nuclear exchange and will adjust their strategies accordingly. This logic underlay the long-held policy of Mutually Assured Destruction. But the assumption of rationality cannot apply to rogue states such as Saddam’s Iraq and non-state actors such as al-Qaeda. The “just war” tradition requires that proper authority declare war only as a last resort to defend against imminent armed threats with the clear promise of proportionality in protecting against even greater harm.¹⁰¹ But, neoconservative theorists retorted, weapons of mass destruction wielded by non-rational actors blur the distinction between immediate and looming threats. When dealing with non-rational actors under such conditions, military preemption is thus warranted. It is justifiable to preempt rogue states and terrorists because, as irrational actors, they do not respond to threat of their destruction. Again, in the neoconservative intellectual universe, correct foreign policy doctrine returns to Munich, not Vietnam, as the cautionary lesson: enemies must be met with quick and unrelenting force. The purpose of American foreign policy should be to preserve America’s dominance.

But the world should not fear that dominance, insisted second-generation neoconservatives, because the United States seeks no empire. America’s interests and values are identical, and in fact are universal. The United States is a model for the world because, as Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol put it in their 2003 book, The War over Iraq, “[f]aith in the universal ideal of freedom, not a blood-and-soil nationalism, is what defines the American ideal.”¹⁰² The United States, in this logic, is at one and the same time exceptional and universal, its values shared and cherished by all (well-meaning) peoples, its power both awesome and benevolent. Because of these characteristics, withholding America’s transformative power would both be selfish and dangerous.

[U]nlike past imperial powers, if the United States has created a Pax Americana, it is not built on colonial conquest or economic aggrandizement. As George Bush put it in a 2002 speech, “America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish.” Rather, what upholds today’s world order is America’s benevolent influence – nurtured, to be sure, by American power, but also by emulation and the recognition around the world that American ideals are genuinely universal. As a consequence, when the world’s sole superpower commits itself to norms of international conduct – for democracy, for human rights, against aggression, against weapons proliferation – it means that successful challenges to American power will invariably weaken those American-created norms. Were we – through humility, self-abnegation or a narrow conception of the national interest – to retreat from the position that history has bequeathed us, the turmoil that would soon follow would surely reach our shores.¹⁰³

Other neoconservatives acknowledged American actions as imperialist, but benevolently imperialist.¹⁰⁴

Bush, neoconservatism, and 9/11: Ideas, networks, and resonant historical tropes

George W. Bush, though insistently unilateralist in foreign policy orientation, echoed the realism of his father’s administration during the 2000 presidential campaign. On the campaign trail, the junior Bush emphasized the need for the United States to conduct a “humble” foreign policy based on American interests, navigating between isolationism and the exercise of dominance. It was a vision pointedly to avoid the “Clintonian” assertion of values through humanitarian interventions, such as those in Somalia and Haiti, and the use of the U.S. military for nation-building, as in the Balkans.¹⁰⁵ Recall the distinction in foreign policy between interests and values. Interests refer to the defense of nation and the hard-headed expansion of national power and influence in the international competition between states. Interests are usually associated with the realist school of foreign policy, in which the internal nature of a particular foreign government is far less important than its power and its ability to help or thwart U.S. national aims. But America has also understood itself as a nation that stands for particular values – freedom, democracy, and humanitarianism foremost – and should conduct its foreign policy according to these high-minded principles. Values are usually associated with the foreign policy school of liberal internationalism. Interests and values are usually understood to be in tension, if not mutually exclusive. Bush began his presidency with a foreign policy of unilateralist realism. His administration pulled the United States out of the Kyoto protocols on climate change and the agreements on the International Criminal Court. Then came September 11, 2001. “Everything” didn’t change after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but the approach to foreign policy surely did.

Barely a week after the attacks, a large group of prominent neoconservatives (and others who may not have so identified) outside government sent an open letter to the White House. Endorsing the war on terrorism that the president had announced after the attacks, the letter demanded that Bush bring Osama bin Laden to justice. But the letter went much further. The signatories charted an entire Middle East foreign policy. They urged the president to pressure Syria and Lebanon to sever ties with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, suspend assistance to the Palestinian Authority if it did not move decisively against terrorism, and strike Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein – even if evidence did not link Iraq directly to the 9/11 attacks.¹⁰⁶ Bush didn’t need much prodding with regard to the latter. The day after 9/11, he pressed counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke to find a connection between Saddam and the attacks.¹⁰⁷ It has become conventional wisdom that after 9/11 the Bush administration adopted much, if not most, of the neoconservative foreign policy agenda. As we have seen, that program asserted the ability – even the moral duty – of the United States to attack evil states and terrorists preventively. It seemed to go beyond unilateralism – that the United States will act on its own without hindrance by the U.N. or other international bodies – to embrace the “unipolar” doctrine that America will act to prevent the rise of any possible competing superpower. The 2002 National Security Policy of the United States, which encoded in precise terms the foreign policy doctrine that emerged in the wake of 9/11, put the matter plainly:

The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology. Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and evidence indicates that they are doing so with determination. The United States will not allow these efforts to succeed. We will build defenses against ballistic missiles and other means of delivery. We will cooperate with other nations to deny, contain, and curtail our enemies’ efforts to acquire dangerous technologies. And, as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed. We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best.¹⁰⁸

The policy mirrored neoconservative debating points. Facing a dangerous world of rogue states run by irrational dictators, and of failed states wherein terrorists fester, the United States will act both preemptively and preventively against immediate security threats. Preemptive military action seeks to eliminate an immediate and credible threat of grievous harm; preventive military action is undertaken when a state believes that war with a potential adversary is possible or likely at some future date – even though the threat is not imminent or even certain to materialize.¹⁰⁹ The doctrine of preventive action for the most part was new (although it harkened back to the ideas of the anti-communist preventive “rollback” conservatives of the 1950s).

Post-9/11 national security policy denied any conflict between interests and values. When the United States acts in its interests in the international arena, its actions ineluctably unleash and satisfy the universal yearning for the freedom long denied oppressed peoples. And because democracy both taps into the inherent longing of all people’s will to freedom and serves as a barricade against terrorism, the United States will act to champion aspirations for human dignity and foster a new era of global economic growth through privatization, free markets, and free trade. In the words of the 2002 National Security Policy document,

The U.S. national security strategy will be based on a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests. The aim of this strategy is to help make the world not just safer but better. Our goals on the path to progress are clear: political and economic freedom, peaceful relations with other states, and respect for human dignity.

This was the position that neoconservatives had been pushing for years.

Nothing better captured the identity of neoconservative doctrine and the foreign policy of George W. Bush’s administration better than Bush’s second inaugural address, four years after 9/11:

We have seen our vulnerability – and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny – prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder – violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.¹¹⁰

In short, Bush seemed to have become a dyed-in-the-wool neoconservative. His administration had hijacked liberal internationalism’s preoccupation with values and ethical appeals and married them to realism’s fixation on interests, which meant not only justifiable war against Iraq, but also potentially war without end inasmuch as “[t]he survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.”

How did this come to be? After all, for the first year of his presidency, Bush followed a realist foreign policy line. Neoconservatives had gained a number of appointments in the new Bush administration, but their influence wasn’t inordinate; none occupied the highest tier of government positions.¹¹¹ Here circumstance – the shock of 9/11 – and the extensive, embedded networks of neoconservatism were propitious and reinforcing. The realist foreign policy paradigm did not appear capable of addressing suicidal terrorism; liberal internationalism in the end would merely coddle it; paleo-conservative isolationism would just force the United States to sit back and wait to be attacked. Neoconservatism’s new influence followed the recalibration of risk in the aftermath of 9/11. Neoconservative positions claimed to address the heightened perception of risk, especially from seemingly irrational adversaries. All-important were the climate of fear and the projection of neoconservative efficacy in that context.

The invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 marked the first instantiation of the new neoconservative-inspired foreign policy doctrine. The stated goal of destroying al-Qaeda and ending its use of Afghanistan as a base of operations was joined by the aim to remove the Taliban from power and create a democratic Afghan state. But this was not yet the full realization of neoconservative policy. As a response to the 9/11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan was not preventive war. Rather, the 2003 invasion of Iraq represented the real triumph of the neoconservative vision.

It is important to probe the nature of neoconservatism’s foreign policy vision, inasmuch as it ties back to broader neoconservative themes that also link to the new Christian right. Although neoconservatives had a bold, detailed set of foreign policy positions, especially with regard to the Middle East, there was a sense that the deepest focus of their attention was not other countries or world affairs but rather the United States itself. The underlying agenda was about rescuing the United States from its own effete, “postmodern” liberalism. Decadent liberalism is both frail and perilous – even treacherous – because it undermines the mission of America. As Kagan and Kristol put it, “The main threat the United States faces now and in the future is its own weakness. American hegemony is the only reliable defense against a break-down of peace and international order.”¹¹² Thus, for all of the horrors of 9/11, the terrorist attacks had a silver lining for the neoconservatives and the religious right. September 11 marked the restoration of “moral clarity,” of a serious attitude to life. As Leon Kass, a neoconservative who usually writes about medical ethics, intoned after 9/11, “In numerous if subtle ways, one feels a palpable increase in America’s moral seriousness, well beyond the expected defense of our values and institutions so viciously under attack. … A fresh breeze of sensible moral judgment, clearing away the fog of unthinking and easy-going relativism, has enabled us to see evil for what it is … .”¹¹³ This sentiment was echoed by the “theocon” Richard John Neuhaus. The September 11 attacks, Neuhaus wrote, would “inaugurate a time of national unity and sobriety in a society that has been … on a long and hedonistic holiday from history.”¹¹⁴ September 11 thus revived the Manichaean worldview in which America embodies the good in a “clash of civilizations” with evildoers.¹¹⁵ The plane attacks solved a problem posed by the end of the Cold War: they provided the United States with a clear-cut enemy around which to mobilize its exceptionalism.

For American exceptionalists, whether of religious or secularist inclination, the United States is always the embodiment of the spirit of freedom. The form of nationalism that the religious right and neoconservatism share is one that locates the messianic future greatness of the country in an idealized national past. America is the exceptional nation, innocent of the ills that beset other nationalisms.¹¹⁶ From Governor John Winthrop’s characterization of the Massachusetts Bay colony as a “city on the hill,” transformed by later politicians as America’s “manifest destiny” to perfect and extend civilization around the globe, to William McKinley’s assertion that war against Spain conferred “the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples,” to Woodrow Wilson’s belief that the United States served the common welfare of mankind rather than its own imperial ends, to Harry Truman’s conviction that God had graciously given America a second chance “to get the right sort of peace in the world,” the assertion that God chose America as the agent of His special purposes in history is a longstanding, powerful theme in the nation’s ideological narrative.¹¹⁷ Recent survey data confirm these historic inclinations. Among white evangelicals, 84 percent believe that God has granted a special role for the United States in human history.¹¹⁸ It was the perceived departure from and denigration of that idealized national past that fueled the vehemence of the shared religious right–neoconservative perspective. Thus for all of the myriad reasons articulated to justify the invasion of Iraq, for neoconservatives the war was not really about terrorism per se; rather it was about the pivotal relationship between Saddam Hussein and the assertion of American power. Saddam provided the opportunity to clarify the United States’ global objectives and moral obligations. Between the senior Bush administration’s too-cautious realism and Clinton’s wishful, feeble liberal internationalism, Saddam’s continued survival in power was a metaphor for all that had gone wrong with American foreign policy since the fall of the Soviet Union. Saddam had rejected American liberal values; Iraq was the arena in which to demonstrate the crucial tenets of neoconservative doctrine.

Invading Iraq

The George W. Bush administration invaded Iraq in order to project and consolidate American power in the Middle East. Overthrowing Saddam and bringing democracy to Iraq through military means – a Jacobin version of Joseph Schumpeter’s economics-based concept of “creative destruction” – would, the administration believed, change the political culture of the Arab world and bring it under the sway of American values. These aims represented the dearest dreams of second-generation neoconservatives, and constitute the most persuasive explanation for why the United States went to war on Iraq. Other explanations for the war in Iraq are simply not convincing, at least as primary accounts. Bush’s idiosyncratic (some said Oedipal) obsession with Saddam Hussein is not a plausible explanation for the war.¹¹⁹ Removing Saddam had been a considered foreign policy option since the Gulf War, and when Bush pushed for war in 2002 most of the foreign policy establishment and politicians of both parties backed his bid. That the war was fought at Israel’s direct behest is also not a serious proposition.¹²⁰ While the U.S. foreign policy establishment has long committed itself to the protection of Israel’s security, and Saddam did pose a threat to Israel, the benefits of ridding the region of Saddam were surely outweighed in Israel’s strategic calculations by the risk of generating an out-of-control regional conflagration. Moreover, the Israel explanation makes the United States a simple agent of, even patsy to, Israel – and thus violates the fundamental realist tenet that states pursue their own self-interest and do so rationally.

The war-for-oil thesis, that the war was designed to bring control of Iraq’s vast oil reserves to American oil companies and alleviate the U.S. national security problem of declining access to the essential resource, is powerful, but is not a plausible explanation at least as a single, direct cause.¹²¹ While the United States is of course critically concerned about oil supply, the government is not the mere agent of oil companies; power at the level of the U.S. government is rarely if ever exercised that easily, directly, or simply. Moreover, whereas Iraq had large reserves, its actual petroleum industry was in shambles; it would take a decade just to double its 3 percent of world production. As one long-time oil policy scholar argued, “No U.S. administration would launch so momentous a campaign just to facilitate a handful of oil development contracts and a moderate increase in supply – half a decade from now.”¹²² For neoconservatives and the Bush administration in general, oil wasn’t an overt and distinct goal; it was more an assumption that American access to Middle Eastern oil was a given and hence was woven into the broader national security agenda of a strong America. The United States, by force of its importance as a great democratic power and guarantor of world security, must, by right, have and maintain access to the vital energy resources. As Norman Podhoretz wrote in The Present Danger in 1980, American access to Middle Eastern oil is essentially a given. Almost unstated was the assumption that part of America’s belligerence toward the Soviet Union in the 1980s was to make sure the communist superpower could not hold the West hostage by cutting off its access to Middle Eastern oil. Hence, yes, a central goal of the American invasion of Iraq was the control of Iraq’s oil reserves. But that was simply one objective, as was the protection of Israel’s security. And war would also likely have a side benefit in domestic politics of keeping the country on a war footing, rallying the electorate around the flag and current administration, and thus ensure an indefinite period of Republican control. These were all ancillary factors in the overarching explanation: the utopian ambition to remake the Middle East through the apocalyptic cleansing fire of violence, to spread democracy and markets and thus make a new world, and, in so doing, fulfill America’s sacred mission. That this ambition aligned with what many saw as Israel’s interests, U.S. access to oil, and Republican electoral control were added bonuses.¹²³

Needless to say, the main publicly stated reason for the invasion, Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, was largely a smokescreen. The intelligence on Iraq’s WMD was cooked to fit the predetermined war policy, despite what Donald Rumsfeld claims in his autobiography.¹²⁴ The secret Downing Street Memo of July 23, 2002 from British foreign policy aide Matthew Rycroft to the most important members of Tony Blair’s government revealed conclusively that the Bush administration decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein in the summer of 2002 – before there was any claim of WMD in Iraq. Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, MI6, gave an assessment of his talks in Washington: “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”¹²⁵ Dearlove’s assessment was ratified by Baroness Manningham-Buller, former director-general of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, in testimony before a 2010 panel investigating the events leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. “There was no credible intelligence to suggest a connection” linking the government of Saddam Hussein to the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, “and that was the judgment, I might say, of the CIA. … It was not a judgment that found favor with some parts of the American machine. … That is why Donald Rumsfeld started an alternative intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment.”¹²⁶ Rumsfeld’s alternative intelligence unit was the Office of Special Plans, headed up by the redoubtable neoconservative Douglas Feith (labeled, memorably, “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth” by General Tommy Franks).¹²⁷ The modus operandi of the unit was, in effect, to reject the empirical evidence accumulated by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency in favor of unverified information provided by sources connected to the favored exile group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), headed by Ahmad Chalabi. Of course the lifeblood of the INC, in a tight, self-serving circle, rested on providing a picture of Iraq that suited Bush administration presumptions. The information provided by INC-affiliated sources proved fabricated.¹²⁸ The Office of Special Plans can only be described as a gambit within the executive branch, reminiscent of the decades-earlier hawkish claims of bomber gaps and missile gaps, to justify war on Iraq. But why was WMD presented as the reason for war? Because of the administration’s calculation that the fundamental policy goal, regime change in Iraq (and beyond) in accordance with the doctrine of preventive war, needed a concrete causus belli. Without it, preventive war was still too controversial and too thin a reed to rally Congress, other foreign policy elites, and the American people.¹²⁹

The influence of the neoconservatives lay in the fact that they were organized, institutionally potent, and had in place a set of policies that addressed the fear and the new risk calculus after 9/11. They in effect called up the shadow defense establishment instituted during the Carter presidency and evolved during the Clinton years across a number of think tanks, policy institutes, and media. This shadow establishment over the years developed a notable neoconservative cast, in terms of both discourse and personnel. A large number of second-generation neoconservatives with histories in government policy-making bureaucracies in the Defense or State departments, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, had been housed as analysts and commentators in high-level conservative think tanks, notably the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. They came back into government with the victory of George W. Bush in the 2000 election. Others, such as Charles Krauthammer, David Frum, and William Kristol, were high-profile columnists in elite print and broadcast media. The connections among these think tanks, government, and media were key, as was the funding that facilitated these networks. The Washington think tanks and lobbying shops, including the Project for a New American Century, received funding from conservative foundations such as Olin, Bradley, Scaife, and Smith Richardson, and functioned to employ neoconservative analysts and functionaries in years when the Republicans were out of political power.¹³⁰

Indeed, neoconservatives had done so well that the paleo-conservatives complained the neocons had stolen away their conservative funders. The Weekly Standard, founded by William Kristol, became the flagship publication of the neoconservative movement when it was launched in 1995. Underwritten by News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch, the editors and writers for the Weekly Standard, as well as fellows at the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage, and other like-minded think tanks, had become mainstay contributors and interviewees on Fox News and the right-wing radio talk shows by the mid-1990s. Even the National Review, since the mid-1950s the showplace journal of anti-establishment conservatism, by 1997 moved over to the neoconservative camp. Gary Dorrien notes that by the 1990s neoconservatives controlled most of the right’s advocacy and policy organizations: Weekly Standard, Policy Review, Commentary, The Public Interest, First Things, National Interest, National Review, American Spectator, Claremont Review of Books, American Enterprise, Journal of Democracy, Public Opinion, Orbis, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Manhattan Institute, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Center for Security Policy, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and, off and on, The New Republic.¹³¹ And although neoconservatives did not occupy the highest positions in the Bush administration, either they converted the defense hawks who had not been strongly identified with the discourse, such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, or the latter found that their unipolar interventionist stance overlapped enough with neoconservatism that any differences were trivial.¹³²

We see here an intricate, intimate relationship between ideas and institutions. It is perhaps of no great theoretical moment to suggest that the triumph of a set of ideas rests upon a confluence of factors beyond the salience of the ideas in and of themselves. Ideas and the people propagating them need institutional supports and responsive reverberations inside and outside the formal institutions of political power. Mass media and think tanks, “shadow” cabinet posts and the legitimacy to comment and declaim publicly – all of which require considerable financial resources – very often are the factors that give life to ideas in a liberal democracy and sustain them when their bearers are out of power. Here lay the signal importance of Irving Kristol, intellectual-political entrepreneur par excellence. Kristol’s skill lay in establishing the intellectual networks, guiding the connections among intellectuals, politicians, and big conservative contributors, cultivating talented young neoconservatives and securing their employment first within his association of journals and then at the think tanks that he helped grow – a kind of neoconservative vanguardism. The other great visionaries of the conservative counterrevolution, mentioned in chapter 2, were Wall Street mogul and Nixon Treasury Secretary William E. Simon and Supreme Court justice-to-be Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Simon helped establish and reorient conservative foundations to sow the conservative think tanks that, in turn, created conservative centers of intellectual life and media intervention in the public arena. Powell can be seen as a father of the conservative legal movement. Corporate gifts to conservative foundations, think tanks, and conservative media helped create a potent network of institutions, largely outside of academia, to recruit, house, succor, and eventually place in government a stable of conservative intellectuals and publicists. Scott McConnell, a former contributor to Commentary and editor at the National Interest, offered an astute observation on the structure and reach of the neoconservative Washington network:

With the fledgling Fox News network, the [Weekly] Standard soon emerged as the key leg in a synergistic triangle of neoconservative argumentation: you could write a piece for the magazine, talk about your ideas on Fox, pick up a paycheck from Kristol or from AEI. It was not a way to get rich, but it sustained a network of careers that might otherwise have shriveled or been diverted elsewhere. Indeed, it did more than sustain them, it gave neocons an aura of being “happening” inside the Beltway that no other conservative (or liberal) faction could match.¹³³

Michael Lind, another former insider, reveals much the same:

The neocon network orchestrated by the foundations resembled an old-fashioned political patronage machine, or perhaps one of the party writers’ or scholars’ guilds in communist countries. A shared pool of right-wing writers and scholars in receipt of foundation grants from the same program officers was established into which conservative journals like Commentary, American Spectator, Policy Review, Public Interest, National Interest, New Criterion, and Wall Street Journal regularly dipped. Washington had come to resemble Hollywood, with the foundations playing the role of the big studios, the program officers acting as producers, editors playing directors, and the talent – policy wonks, publicists – divided between a few well-paid superstars and legions of poorly paid wannabes.¹³⁴

This is not to claim that a cabal of highly networked policy activists somehow took control of American foreign policy and steered it in ways that were anathema to the general tide of American history. As American conservatives have always insisted, ideas matter. But the ideas that matter must have both institutional supports and resonance with contemporary challenges and historically laden tropes. The crusading moralism embedded in neoconservative Iraq policy and neoconservative insistence that America’s interests and values are one and the same, as we have seen, constitute an entirely recognizable strain in the history of American foreign policy and American self-understanding. It means that the United States’ exercise of military power is by definition in the service of liberty. What was new – again, set in motion by the attacks of September 11 – was the doctrine approving preventive wars against more distant threats and legitimating the policy not simply by tweaking the just war doctrine, but with recourse to American exceptionalism and the unique, triumphalist mission of the United States to spread political and economic freedom. The strength of the institutional base of neoconservative presence in the elite debates over foreign policy allowed neoconservatives to seize the discourse after 9/11.

A final observation in this regard. Implicit (and sometimes explicit) in much neoconservative policy analysis and prescription in the aftermath of 9/11 was the utopian, ultimately Jacobin, notion that violence can create a new world. This is a central observation of the British political philosopher John Gray.¹³⁵ The Jacobin urge of the French Revolution is but a secular version of Christian eschatological thought: violence can be an instrument for perfecting humanity. Underscoring Gray’s point, various neoconservatives compiled competing lists of the countries the United States should invade and the regimes ripe for overthrow beyond President Bush’s “axis of evil” inventory of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.¹³⁶ Lists included, beyond the evil troika, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, the Palestinian Authority, Hezbollah, even Saudi Arabia and Egypt.¹³⁷ As the political scientist Kenneth Jowitt suggested, such lists revealed neoconservatism to be an American form of Leninism, which formulated a vanguardist foreign policy designed to speed history along through military action, legitimized by the benevolence of American values.¹³⁸ And the historical endpoint? A new, harmonious democratic capitalist world under the beneficent umbrella of the United States. Suffice it to say that this neoconservative vision was entirely consonant, in both structure and endpoint, with the premillennialist evangelical Protestant vision of the end-times. Neoconservatism’s design to remake the Middle East through the cleansing fire of violence paralleled premillennialist Protestantism’s focus on Armageddon as a clearing away of the evil of this world in order to speed Christ’s second coming.

A second order of paradoxes, unintended consequences, and limits to social engineering: The debacle of Iraq

The Bush administration and the neoconservatives pictured democracy as a default condition to which societies would revert once liberated from dictators.¹³⁹ Overthrowing Saddam would rid Iraq of a murderous dictator and a threat to the region. A conquered Iraq represented the best hope for a democratic model in an Arab country. Richard Perle articulated this view plainly:

I think there is a potential civic culture in Arab countries that can lead to democratic institutions and I think Iraq is probably the best place to put that proposition to the test because it’s a sophisticated educated population that has suffered horribly under totalitarian rule, and there’s a yearning for freedom that, you know, I think we find everywhere in the world but especially in subject populations.¹⁴⁰

To the extent that there was a theoretical basis to the democracy claim in this context, it rested in large part on the scholarly work of Princeton historian Bernard Lewis. Although some of his writings cast doubt on the ability to impose democracy on Islamic nations, in others Lewis argued that the violent, retrograde condition of Arab countries was a result of the failure of their leaderships to modernize. The model of success for Lewis was Turkey and Kemal Atatürk’s imposition of modernity and secularism from above. With Lewis’s understanding of Atatürk as the guide, the Bush administration inferred that the West could sow democracy in the Middle East.¹⁴¹

But, of course, the record of jump-starting democracy is problematic, and impressing it on other countries has proved fairly dismal. Herein lies the great irony that the second-generation neoconservatives violated the cardinal principle of their first- generation forebears: the overreach of policy, the law of unintended consequences, the dangers and ultimate failure of social engineering. This is not the place to engage in a detailed history of Iraq or enter the debate over whether colonial boundary determinations can make a modern, viable nation-state. The point rather is to highlight how inappropriate was Saddam’s Iraq as a potential model of democracy and how fanciful, extravagant, even preposterous were neoconservative aspirations for the “liberated” country. According to Kanan Makiya (writing under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil), a prominent anti-Saddam exile intellectual, the Iraqi Ba’ath Party was most akin to Stalinism, the Iraqi state a police state in service to Saddam’s personal power. All vestiges of civil society – even personal trust – had been extinguished in the effort to prevent the rise of political rivals. “The Ba’ath turned fear into the precondition for their legitimacy. … This is a polity whose ideal is the transformation of everybody into an informer,” Makiya wrote in 1989.¹⁴² That Saddam’s Iraq was a ghastly totalitarian state was among the reasons why neoconservatives urged its overthrow by the American military. But a police state defeated by an external force does not leave the society with the institutions and social capital upon which to construct a viable democracy. To the extent that it is permissible to generalize, police states that have a chance for democracy usually must be defeated from within, for it is in the indigenous groups willing to resist the former regime that one locates (potentially, and certainly not always) the seeds of democratic values and institutions.¹⁴³ Indeed, a case can be made that the neoconservatives planning for the Iraq War and its aftermath, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in particular, either had some inkling about the weakness of domestic Iraqi civil institutions or demonstrated closet contempt for the actual process of instituting democracy. This can be seen in the Defense Department’s effort to install the exile millionaire Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress in power in post-invasion Iraq as a latter-day Iraqi Atatürk. But with no institutional base or legitimacy in Iraq, the Chalabi provisional government gambit proved a quick failure.¹⁴⁴

The importance of civil society and the difficulty of establishing democracy are basic principles of political science taught to undergraduates in western universities. These truisms concerning democracy were watchwords for the first generation of neoconservatives. Here’s Jeane Kirkpatrick in her famous “Dictatorships and Double Standards” article discussed earlier:

Although most governments in the world are, as they always have been, autocracies of one kind or another, no idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances. This notion is belied by an enormous body of evidence based on the experience of dozens of countries which have attempted with more or less (usually less) success to move from autocratic to democratic government. Many of the wisest political scientists of this and previous centuries agree that democratic institutions are especially difficult to establish and maintain – because they make heavy demands on all portions of a population and because they depend on complex social, cultural, and economic conditions.¹⁴⁵

Needless to say, Kirkpatrick’s admonitions applied to Iraq – in spades. As detailed in chapter 1, the direct American combat role in the Iraq War proceeded for nearly nine years, with high casualties, immense long-term costs, and secured barely a fragile political accommodation in Iraq itself. Inter-community violence has never really abated and could spark the resurrection of civil war or partition. A weakened Iraq is no longer a counterweight to Iran; indeed, many analysts point to Iran’s influence on Iraq’s ruling parties. Intelligence agencies concluded that the Iraq conflict was a prime source of recruitment for the global jihadist movement. The Iraq war was a fiasco, a colossal drain on American and Iraqi lives and treasure, and a dreadful monument to the “laws” of overreach and unintended consequences.

As we have seen, neoconservatism and the Christian right share many specific features and preoccupations. More deeply, they share a utopian, dogmatic approach to the world: an insistence on the palpable, embodied existence of evil, a tendency to demonize Islam as an inherently violent religion, an unquestioning support of Israel, a hatred of liberals, an insistence on American exceptionalism, a conviction that American power can positively remake the Middle East, and an embrace of military force that reflects reverence for a particular version of masculinity and an impatience with ideas or positions that feel feminine. But these features are anathema to the give and take of democratic politics.

Notes

1 The quote is from the famous 1845 New York Morning News column of the influential journalist and Democratic Party activist John L. O’Sullivan. Cited in Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), p. 42.

2 Technically, one should refer to them as “nascent” neoconservatives, because the neoconservative label appeared only in 1973, when the democratic socialist Michael Harrington attached the name to the intellectual movement in a critical article in the journal Dissent. Harrington, “The Welfare State and Its Neoconservative Critics,” Dissent, Vol. 20, No. 4 (September 1973), pp. 435–54. The name stuck, although some associated with the intellectual movement, such as Daniel Bell, always rejected the label.

3 Others associated with the first generation of neoconservatives included Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Jeane Kirkpatrick. Robert Tucker, Walter Laqueur, and Peter Berger were often considered associates. It is difficult to declare who was a bona fide neoconservative and who was a fellow traveler. Neoconservatism wasn’t a movement per se; there was no statement of principles to sign on to. As Irving Kristol was fond of saying, neoconservatism was, rather, a “persuasion.”

4 Irving Kristol, “ ‘Civil Liberties,’ 1952 – A Study in Confusion: Do We Defend Our Rights by Protecting Communists?” Commentary (March 1952), pp. 228–36.

5 Kristol, “On Negative Liberalism,” Encounter (January 1954), p. 2.

6 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944).

7 Cited in Elsie O’Shaughnessy, “The Moynihan Mystique,” Vanity Fair (May 1994), p. 58.

8 Irving Kristol, “What’s Bugging the Students?” Atlantic Monthly (November 1965), p. 108.

9 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Politics as the Art of the Impossible,” The American Scholar (Fall 1969), pp. 573–83.

10 Nathan Glazer, “The Campus Crucible: Student Politics and the University,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1969), pp. 43–53; Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).

11 Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Neoconservatism as a Response to the Counterculture,” in Irwin Stelzer, ed., The Neoconservative Reader (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 239.

12 Students for a Democratic Society, “Port Huron Statement” (1962), at http://www.h-net.org/∼hst306/documents/huron.html as of October 2012; Stokley Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).

13 Midge Decter, “A Letter to the Young (and to Their Parents),” Atlantic Monthly (February 1975), at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1975/02/a-letter-to-the-young-and-to-their-parents/4096/ as of October 2012. The notion and phrase “adversary culture” came from Lionel Trilling, the important mid-century literary critic who was something of a mentor to a few of the first generation of neoconservatives.

14 Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976); Bell, The Winding Passage: Essays and Sociological Journeys, 1960–1980 (Cambridge, MA: Abt Books, 1980).

15 Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1996), pp. 9–10.

16 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).

17 Seymour M. Hersh, “Selective Intelligence: Donald Rumsfeld Has His Own Special Sources. Are They Reliable?” New Yorker (May 12, 2003), quoting Stephen Holmes, a Strauss critic at New York University School of Law.

18 Owen Edwards, “The New York Wasp is Not an Endangered Species,” New York (August 12, 1974). Jacob Heilbrunn, among others, makes a strong case that first-generation neoconservatives resented the American WASP establishment. WASPs, in their view, ignored the Holocaust and excluded Jews from the establishment. Even among second-generation neoconservatives, such as Douglas Feith, some resentment continues, especially of the State Department, which, supposedly, is historically run by WASPs. Jacob Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (New York: Doubleday, 2008), pp. 11–12, 58, 73, 83.

19 Melanie Phillips, “The Politics of Progress,” Jewish Chronicle (January 1, 2004), at http://www.melaniephillips.com/the-politics-of-progress-with-link-to-limmud-talk as of October 2012.

20 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor (March 1965).

21 Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancy, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy: A Trans-action Social Science and Public Policy Report (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967).

22 Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Thomas Sowell, “Colleges Are Skipping Over Competent Blacks to Admit ‘Authentic’ Ghetto Types,” New York Times Magazine (December 13, 1970); Sowell, “ ‘Affirmative Action’: A Worldwide Disaster,” Commentary (December 1989), pp. 21–41.

23 Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970).

24 James Q. Wilson, “What Makes a Better Policeman,” Atlantic Monthly (March 1969), pp. 129–35.

25 James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” Atlantic Monthly (March 1982), pp. 29–38.

26 James Q. Wilson, “The Rediscovery of Character: Private Virtue and Public Policy,” The Public Interest (Fall 1985), p. 16.

27 Irving Kristol, “Human Nature and Social Reform,” Wall Street Journal (September 18, 1978); William Kristol, “The Politics of Liberty, the Sociology of Virtue,” in Mark Gerson, ed., The Essential Neoconservative Reader (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996), pp. 434–43; William J. Bennett, ed., The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).

28 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 63.

29 Irving Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978), pp. 3–70. Notwithstanding Kristol’s American version, the most famous of the New Class critiques was that of Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York: Praeger, 1957). And still another intellectual forebear of Kristol’s New Class was James Burnham, the Marxist-turned-National Review conservative who, himself channeling a version of Robert Michels’s “iron law of oligarchy” perspective on bureaucracy, argued that managerial capitalism created a new class that had little commitment either to traditional social and political institutions or to the very existence of the nation-state. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (New York: John Day, 1941); Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, Eden and Cedar Paul, trans. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1915). Moreover, virtually every social theorist worth his or her salt had been trying to make sense of the rise of the educated workforce, highly skilled in scientific, technical, and communicative or symbolic enterprises in the post-World War II period. Some theorists believed this development was a good one, others not. The neoconservatives clearly thought not. See Michael Harrington, “The New Class and the Left,” in B. Bruce-Briggs, ed., The New Class? (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1979), pp. 123–39.

30 Michael E. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

31 Michael Schudson, Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), pp. 108–25.

32 Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, “The Revolt of the Masses,” Commentary (February 1973), pp. 58–72.

33 John B. Judis, The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust (New York: Pantheon, 2000).

34 Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism, p. 15.

35 Robert L. Bartley, “Business and the New Class,” in Bruce-Briggs, ed., The New Class?, p. 59.

36 Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).

37 Sam Peltzman, The Regulation of Automobile Safety (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1975); A.L. Nichols and Richard Zeckhauser, “Government Comes to the Workplace: An Assessment of OSHA,” The Public Interest (Fall 1977), pp. 39–69; Murray Weidenbaum and Robert DeFina, The Cost of Federal Regulation of Economic Activity (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1978).

38 Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism; Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). Kristol, who retained a sense of capitalism’s destructive side, gave the free enterprise system two cheers; Novak’s ever-sunny identification of capitalism and democracy gave it all three huzzahs.

39 Robert B. Horwitz, The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 196–212; David Vogel, Lobbying the Corporation: Citizen Challenges to Business Authority (New York: Basic Books, 1978).

40 Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

41 Irving Kristol, “Pornography, Obscenity, and the Case for Censorship,” New York Times Magazine (March 28, 1971).

42 Irving Kristol, “The New Populism: Not to Worry” [1985], in Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Free Press, 1995), pp. 359–63.

43 Irving Kristol, “Room for Darwin and the Bible,” New York Times (September 30, 1986).

44 Irving Kristol, “The Future of American Jewry,” Commentary (August 1991), pp. 21–6; Kristol, “The Coming ‘Conservative Century’ ” [1993], in Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, pp. 364–8.

45 Irving Kristol, “America’s ‘Exceptional’ Conservatism,” in Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, p. 380.

46 Irving Kristol, “The Political Dilemma of American Jews,” Commentary (July 1984), pp. 23–9.

47 Nathan Abrams, Norman Podhoretz and Commentary Magazine: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons (New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 205–7, 244, 264–8; Norman Podhoretz, “Should Jews Fear the Christian Right?” New York Times (July 23, 1994); Podhoretz, “In the Matter of Pat Robertson,” Commentary (August 1995), pp. 27–32; Midge Decter, “The ADL vs. the Religious Right,” Commentary (September 1994), pp. 45–7.

48 Steven M. Tipton, Public Pulpits: Methodists and Mainline Churches in the Moral Argument of Public Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 146–228; William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

49 Peter Steinfels, “Christianity and Democracy: Baptizing Reaganism,” Christianity and Crisis (March 29, 1983), pp. 80–5.

50 http://bridgeproject.com/?transparency? as of October 2012.

51 See note 48 for Tipton.

52 Damon Linker, The Theocons: Secular America under Siege (New York: Doubleday, 2006).

53 See note 38 for Novak.

54 Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984).

55 Linker, The Theocons, pp. 53–86.

56 http://bridgeproject.com/?transparency? as of October 2012.

57 Norman Podhoretz, The Present Danger: “Do We Have the Will to Reverse the Decline of American Power? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), p. 91.

58 Norman Podhoretz, “Making the World Safe for Communism,” Commentary (April 1976), pp. 31–42; Podhoretz, “The Abandonment of Israel,” Commentary (July 1976), pp. 23–31; Podhoretz, “The Culture of Appeasement,” Harper’s (October 1977), pp. 25–32.

59 Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were in Vietnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).

60 Podhoretz, The Present Danger, p. 49.

61 Ibid., pp. 57, 12.

62 In defending the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970, Nixon said, “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.” President Richard M. Nixon, “Address to the Nation on the Situation in Southeast Asia” (April 30, 1970), at http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/nixon430.htm as of October 2012.

63 Irving Kristol, “Does NATO Exist?” [1979], in Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. 241, 242.

64 Kristol, “Our Incoherent Foreign Policy” [1980], in Reflections of a Neoconservative, p. 235.

65 Key figures associated with the Coalition for a Democratic Majority were Senators Henry Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, along with Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Penn Kemble (executive director of the group), Max Kampelman (a former chief of staff for Senator Hubert Humphrey), and Ben Wattenberg (a former aide to President Lyndon Johnson). According to Benjamin Balint, the coalition’s manifesto was drafted by Podhoretz and Decter. Benjamin Balint, Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010), p. 119.

66 Charles Tyroler, II, ed., Alerting America: The Papers of the Committee on the Present Danger (Washington: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1984); Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 48–50.

67 Albert Wohlstetter, “Is There a Strategic Arms Race?” Foreign Policy, Vol. 15 (Summer 1974), pp. 3–20. The bomber and missile gaps of the late 1950s were based on extraordinarily spotty data, wild presumptions of Soviet weapons factory production, miscounting, and gross conjecture about Soviet military policy, at the root of which were the parochial turf interests of the Air Force and its allies in the Pentagon. Similarly, the military sometimes assumed, on scant evidence, very high damage expectations in the wake of a Soviet attack in order to justify massive new weapons systems. All military plans and numbers were part of the inter-service rivalries during the post-war era and the strategic exploitation of these rivalries by select politicians. A key element of John F. Kennedy’s bid for the presidency in 1960, for instance, was the missile gap, which he pinned on the Eisenhower administration. But there was no missile gap. Indeed, Soviet nuclear capabilities at that time were far retarded in comparison with those of the United States. Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983).

68 Team B, “Soviet Strategic Objections, An Alternative View: Intelligence Community Experiment in Competitive Analysis,” CIA Classified Document (December 1976); unclassified, National Archives and Records Administration (1992).

69 Dorrien, Imperial Designs, pp. 51–2.

70 The pattern of overestimates of Soviet military strength and American weakness, along with fanciful conjecture about Soviet military policy, characterizes each of the three key reports – the NSC-68 report of 1950, the 1957 Gaither Report, and the Team B report – which established the hawk position and largely determined U.S. military strategy since 1950. NSC-68, classified for more than two decades, contemplated rollback, militarizing the containment of the Soviet Union through the threat of nuclear reprisal. At http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68.htm as of October 2012. This key early document has been described as more like a sermon in parts than a policy blueprint, a “synthesis of righteousness, pride in patria, and sense of the evil in other polities, as well as the belief in the spiritual potency of American ideas.” Bruce Kuklick, “Commentary,” in Ernest R. May, ed., American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (Boston: Bedford Books, 1993), p. 158. The reports created an environment of political fear difficult to resist and resulted in large military expenditures. The influential defense hawk Paul Nitze was central to all three reports. Fred Kaplan, “Paul Nitze: The Man Who Brought Us the Cold War,” Slate (October 21, 2004), at http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/obit/2004/10/paul_nitze.html as of October 2012.

71 Julian E. Zelizer, “Conservatives, Carter, and the Politics of National Security,” in Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 265–87; James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking Penguin, 2004).

72 Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships and Double Standards” [1979], in Gerson, ed. The Essential Neoconservative Reader, pp. 163–89.

73 Ibid., p. 186.

74 Irving Kristol, “The ‘Human Rights’ Muddle,” Wall Street Journal (March 20, 1978).

75 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 331–4.

76 Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, William Bennett, Linda Chavez, Chester Finn, Fred Ikle, Robert Kagan, Max Kampelman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Richard Pipes, and Paul Wolfowitz worked in the Reagan administration. Dorrien, Imperial Designs, p. 10; Jerry W. Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston: South End Press, 1983), p. 8.

77 Ronald Reagan, at http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1983/30883b.htm as of October 2012.

78 John Patrick Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007); Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

79 Norman Podhoretz, “The Neo-Conservative Anguish over Reagan’s Foreign Policy,” New York Times Magazine (May 2, 1982); Podhoretz, “The First Term: The Reagan Road to Détente,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 63, No. 3 (1984), pp. 447–64. With respect to Israel, neoconservatives had already begun to back the Israeli right-wing Likud Party, which advocated West Bank settlements as necessary for Israel’s security, and fingered Arab intransigence as the central obstacle to any possible peace agreement. And because Israel represented a bulwark against Soviet expansion in the Middle East, any weakening of Israel was considered a blow to U.S. policy with regard to the USSR and thus a threat to American national security. Douglas Feith, “The Settlements and Peace: Playing the Links with Begin, Carter and Sadat,” Policy Review, Vol. 8 (Spring 1979), pp. 25–40.

80 Norman Podhoretz, “How Reagan Succeeds as a Carter Clone,” New York Post (October 7, 1986); Podhoretz, “The Fantasy of Communist Collapse,” Washington Post (December 31, 1986).

81 For example, Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 4 (July/August 1996), pp. 18–32.

82 Jeane Kirkpatrick, “A Normal Country in a Normal Time,” National Interest (Fall 1990), pp. 40–3. After 9/11, Kirkpatrick modified this stance.

83 Nathan Glazer, “A Time for Modesty,” in Owen Harries, ed., America’s Purpose: New Visions of U.S. Foreign Policy (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1991), pp. 133–41.

84 Irving Kristol, “Defining Our National Interest,” National Interest (Fall 1990), pp. 16–25.

85 Michael Mandelbaum, “Foreign Policy as Social Work,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 1 (January/February 1996), pp. 16–32.

86 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest (Summer 1989), pp. 3–18.

87 Ben Wattenberg, “Neo-Manifest Destinarianism,” National Interest (Fall 1990), pp. 51–4; Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs (Winter 1990/1), pp. 23–33; Joshua Muravchik, Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America’s Destiny (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1991).

88 Project for a New American Century, “Statement of Principles” (1997), at http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm as of October 2012. PNAC was co-founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The signatories to the “Statement of Principles” were a combination of neoconservatives and hawkish unilateralist Republicans out of power: Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky, Steve Forbes, Aaron Friedberg, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S. Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, George Weigel, and Paul Wolfowitz.

89 Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “Introduction: National Interest and Global Responsibility,” in Kagan and Kristol, eds., Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), p. 12.

90 Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop,” New York Times (March 8, 1992); PBS, “Frontline: The War Behind Closed Doors: Excerpts from 1992 Draft ‘Defense Planning Guidance,’ ” at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/wolf.html as of October 2012.

91 Richard Perle, “Iraq: Saddam Unbound,” in Kagan and Kristol, eds., Present Dangers, pp. 107–8. Also David Wurmser, Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1999); Donald Kagan and Frederick W. Kagan, While America Sleeps: Self-delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).

92 Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “Introduction: National Interest and Global Responsibility,” in Kagan and Kristol, eds., Present Dangers, pp. 5–6; David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2003).

93 “U.S. Policy on Iraq Draws Fire in Ohio,” CNN Interactive (February 18, 1998), at http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9802/18/town.meeting.folo/ as of October 2012.

94 Paul Wolfowitz, “Clinton’s First Year,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 1 (January/February 1994), pp. 28–43.

95 Halper and Clarke, America Alone, pp. 84–95.

96 Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 31–6; Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right, p. 106.

97 Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Knopf, 2003). It was with this analysis in the background that, in the face of European opposition to the Iraq War, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld contemptuously denounced “old Europe” as barely worth dealing with.

98 Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol, The War over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), p. 56.

99 Harvey C. Mansfield, the Straussian political philosopher with whom some second-generation neoconservatives studied at Harvard, rearticulated the view in his study Manliness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

100 John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London: Allen Lane, 2007).

101 Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace (De Jure Belli Ac Pacis, Libri Tres.), Francis W. Kelsey, with Arthur E.R. Boak, trans. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925); Michael Walzer, Arguing about War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

102 Kaplan and Kristol, The War over Iraq, p. 64.

103 Ibid., p. 119.

104 Max Boot, “The Case for American Empire,” Weekly Standard, Vol. 7, No. 5 (October 15, 2001); Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004).

105 George W. Bush, “A Distinctly American Internationalism,” Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California (November 19, 1999), at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bush/wspeech.htm as of October 2012.

106 Project for the New American Century, Letter to President George W. Bush on the War on Terrorism (September 20, 2001), at http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm as of October 2012.

107 Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 32.

108 The White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (September 17, 2002), at http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/nss/2002/ as of October 2012.

109 Neta C. Crawford, “The Justice of Pre-emption and Preventive War Doctrines,” in Mark Evans, ed., Just War Theory: A Reappraisal (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 25–49.

110 George W. Bush, Second Inaugural Address (January 20, 2005), at http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres67.html as of October 2012.

111 Identifiable neoconservatives and fellow travelers in the Bush administration included Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, John Bolton, Stephen Cambone, Paula Dobriansky, Stephen Hadley, Douglas Feith, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby, William Luti, Richard Perle, Peter Rodman, and David Wurmser. Dorrien, Imperial Designs, p. 2. (Wolfowitz and Perle always rejected the neoconservative designation.) Note the large overlap with those who signed the Project for a New American Century’s “Statement of Principles.” But while Vice-President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld shared the inclination of interventionist unipolarism, they were more of a realist bent, albeit characterized by assertive nationalism: that is, willing to use military power to defeat threats to the United States but reluctant as a general rule to use American primacy to remake the world in its image. On this point see Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), p. 16. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was identified with her realist mentor, Brent Scowcroft; Secretary of State Colin Powell flitted between realism and liberal internationalism, guided by the lessons of Vietnam, not Munich.

112 Kagan and Kristol, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” pp. 22–3.

113 Leon Kass, Chairman’s opening remarks at the first meeting of the president’s Council on Bioethics (January 17, 2002), at http://bioethics.georgetown.edu/pcbe/transcripts/jan02/opening01.html as of October 2012. Similar sentiments were articulated by many neoconservatives, among them William J. Bennett, Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism (New York: Doubleday, 2002).

114 Richard John Neuhaus, “September 11 – Before and After,” First Things (November 2001), p. 65.

115 The portentous phrase “clash of civilizations” came from Samuel P. Huntington’s influential book of the same name, in which he argued that in the post-Cold War world the basis of conflict would come from culture and religious identities. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). The term, and a source of Huntington’s ideas on Islam, derived from the work of the Princeton historian of the Islamic world and neoconservative fellow traveler Bernard Lewis. Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Atlantic Monthly (September 1990). The centrality of the concept of the clash of civilizations is key to Richard Bonney’s fine treatment of the war on terror, False Prophets: The “Clash of Civilizations” and the Global War on Terror (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008). As for the term “evil,” its use invariably transforms moral and political questions into religious ones. See Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11 (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005).

116 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Scribner, 1952); Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955); Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: Norton, 1996).

117 Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1997); Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Hugh Heclo, Christianity and American Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Ted Widmer, Ark of the Liberties: America and the World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008); Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960; William Pfaff, The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy (New York: Walker, 2010).

118 Robert P. Jones and Daniel Cox, “Old Alignments, Emerging Fault Lines: Religion in the 2010 Election and Beyond” (Washington, DC: Public Religion Research Institute, November 2010).

119 Maureen Dowd, Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (New York: GP Putnam’s Sons, 2004); Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy (New York: Random House, 2008).

120 John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (London: Allen Lane, 2007); Bonney, False Prophets.

121 Michael T. Klare, “The Coming War with Iraq: Deciphering the Bush Administration’s Motives,” Foreign Policy in Focus (January 16, 2003), at http://www.fpif.org/articles/the_coming_war_with_iraq_deciphering_the_bush_administrations_motives as of October 2012.

122 Daniel Yergin, “A Crude View of the Crisis in Iraq,” Washington Post (December 8, 2002).

123 This subsection draws heavily on Michael MacDonald, We Are the World: Regime Change in Iraq (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).

124 Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York: Sentinel, 2011).

125 “The Secret Downing Street Memo,” Sunday Times (May 1, 2005), at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8709.htm as of August 2012.

126 Sarah Lyall, “Ex-official Says Afghan and Iraq Wars Increased Threats to Britain,” New York Times (July 21, 2010).

127 Cited in Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 281.

128 Bob Drogin, Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War (New York: Random House, 2007).

129 Therein lies the importance of the “liberal hawks,” the liberal internationalists and even some leftists who were convinced by the WMD claims and who supported the invasion of Iraq because of their commitment to international humanitarianism. After 9/11, they found in “Islamic totalitarianism” or “Islamofascism” an existential threat to the United States and western liberalism, seeing in militant Islam’s animosity toward the West a “clash of civilizations” and September 11, 2001 as comparable to the Nazi assault of 1939. These included former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey, former National Security Council staffer Kenneth Pollack, and the writers Philip Bobbitt, Will Marshall, Paul Berman, George Packer, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, and many at the staff of the New Republic who supported Bush administration Iraq policy, and whom the incisive, biting political historian Tony Judt called “useful idiots.” Judt, “Bush’s Useful Idiots,” London Review of Books (September 21, 2006), pp. 3–5.

130 One more look at the money. Between 1995 and 2001, the American Enterprise Institute took in $14.5 million from the Bradley Foundation alone, and topped $17 million by 2008. William Kristol’s Project for a New American Century, so connected to the AEI that it rented office space from it, also benefited from the Bradley Foundation’s largesse, to the tune of $1.8 million. Dorrien, Imperial Designs, p. 130. Other large conservative foundation grants to the AEI included the Smith-Richardson Foundation ($8 million), the Olin Foundation ($7.6 million), and the Sarah Scaife Foundation ($6.4 million). The Heritage Foundation received $21.2 million from Scaife, $14.2 from Bradley, $8 million from Olin, and $13 million from the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation. The Hoover Institution received almost $10 million from Scaife, $5 million from Olin, and $4 million from the Walton Family Foundation. And the Cato Institute, to round out this financial look at the most important conservative think tanks, received $9.3 million from the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, $4 million from the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, and almost $2 million from Scaife. These numbers reflect total cumulative donations, as of 2008. At http://bridgeproject.com/?transparency? as of October 2012.

131 Dorrien, Imperial Designs, p. 17.

132 Mann, Rise of the Vulcans. Of course, Cheney and especially Rumsfeld were far less interested in democracy promotion than in the unilateral assertion of American power. It’s not clear whether it is accurate to label Cheney and Rumsfeld foreign policy realists. It seems more that they were so keen to restore power and war-making prerogative to the executive branch that they were simply interventionists. Since the time of Watergate, Cheney had endeavored to restore authority to the executive branch, especially via the president’s commander-in-chief powers. The Iraq War was an excellent means of doing so, and Cheney’s office was a hive of activity for neoconservatives and those keen to expand and exercise executive power. Jane Mayer, Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008). Rumsfeld had so little interest in Iraq apart from its conquest that, in his emblematical combat over turf, he sabotaged the State Department’s post-Iraq planning and had no Defense Department plan for the war’s aftermath at all. PBS Frontline, “Bush’s War” (2008), at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/ as of October 2012. This was likely a function of the naïve expectation on the part of Rumsfeld and other high-ranking administration officials that the “decapitation” of Saddam as Iraq’s leader would be accompanied by Iraqis dancing in the streets, welcoming American soldiers as liberators.

133 Cited in Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right, p. 236.

134 Cited in Abrams, Norman Podhoretz and Commentary Magazine, p. 242.

135 Gray, Black Mass.

136 George W. Bush, State of the Union address (January 29, 2002), at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/sou012902.htm as of October 2012.

137 Frum and Perle, An End to Evil, p. 114; Norman Podhoretz, “In Praise of the Bush Doctrine,” Commentary (September 2002), pp. 19–28.

138 Ken Jowitt, “Rage, Hubris and Regime Change: The Urge to Speed History Along,” Policy Review, Vol. 118 (April/May 2003), pp. 33–42.

139 Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, p. 116.

140 “Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg: Interview with Richard Perle,” Public Broadcasting System (November 14, 2002), at http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript1017.html as of October 2012. And notice the language. The reverberation between Bush’s foreign policy speeches and neoconservative public comments is palpable.

141 Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage”; Lewis, “The Revolt of Islam: When Did the Conflict With the West Begin, and How Could It End?” New Yorker (November 19, 2001); Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Michael Hirsh, “Bernard Lewis Revisited,” Washington Monthly (November 2004), at http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0411.hirsh.html as of October 2012.

142 Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 131, 109.

143 Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transitions From Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

144 Chalabi, it should be noted, had been, along with Wolfowitz, Perle, and Khalilzad, a protégé of sorts of Albert Wohlstetter and a favorite of Bernard Lewis. His connections to Rumsfeld and the high-ups in the Defense Department and to the closed circle of analysts convinced of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction are described in Hersh, “Selective Intelligence.”

145 Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” p. 169.