The journalist Irving Kristol once remarked that a neoconservative is "a liberal who was mugged by reality." Like many early neocons, Kristol was a Marxist who became disillusioned with both the anti-democratic nature of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and the unanticipated consequences of liberal social policies in the United States. The writers and academics who abandoned Marxism to found the neoconservative movement were deeply concerned with political freedom and the moral decline of American society. While strongly supporting the separation of church and state, they saw religion as the social cement holding families, communities, and nations together. We owe these early neocons a great deal for they played an important role in checking the excesses of 1960s counterculture.
Yet it is in foreign policy that the neocons have left their most lasting mark. Many prominent neocons began life as Democrats who supported the war in Vietnam. They rejected their party's anti-war position and felt sidelined when the Democratic party nominated peace candidate George McGovern for president in 1972. Some, like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, who had supported the candidacy of Cold War hawk Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson left the Democratic Party. They eventually joined Republican administrations and took their interventionist attitudes with them.
Like their Marxist forefathers, the neocons firmly accepted the existence of a predicable, long- term process of social evolution. This so-called "arc of history" would, or so they believed, ultimately lead to "the end of history." That end for the Marxist was communism; for the neocons, it was liberal democracy. Both believed their system was unquestionably the best outcome for all nations. Both accepted a moral duty to spread their ideology, and both believed the inevitable "end of history" could be accelerated by the use of military force.
While the neocons never fully embraced free-market economics, they worked diligently to dump the centrally-planned Soviet Union onto the ash heap of history. Having helped win the Cold War, the neocons should have declared victory and retired. Unfortunately for the rest of us, they did not. When the collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States as the world's sole superpower, triumphant, dominant, and invulnerable, the neocons saw a rare opportunity to promote their vision of the future—and they seized it.
Their focus on America's unrivaled military might was enshrined in a 1992 Defense Department planning document informally known as the Wolfowitz doctrine. It called for unilateral, preemptive military action to suppress all threats to an American-dominated world order. In adopting this approach, the neocons consciously rejected the cautious realism that had won the Cold War as well as the non-interventionist lessons of Vietnam. Instead, they chose to emphasize what they saw as the lessons of Munich, where in 1938 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's capitulated to Adolf Hitler. They criticized the State Department's conventional diplomacy, condemned negotiated compromise as "appeasement" and regarded any suggestion that our capabilities were limited as "isolationism."
While the neocons always emphasized that relations between nations are fundamentally determined by military power, they also believed that spreading American social values and political institutions would help undermine threats to American hegemony. Rather cynically, they cloaked this agenda for global dominance in utopian verbiage about democracy, human rights, and nation building. In doing so they frequently rejected the advice of country-specific experts who pointed out that not all nations were ready for American political institutions or interested in American cultural values.
Over time, neocon thinking came to dominate the foreign policy establishments of both political parties. While Democrats often called themselves "liberal interventionists" rather than neocons, there was surprising little difference between the foreign policy views of a Republican like Sen. John McCain and a Democrat like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Both were convinced of their own moral and intellectual superiority. Both saw foreign policy as a morality play pitting good against evil. Both were prepared to replace realism with ideology and diplomacy with military force. In their efforts to check any challenge to America's global dominance, this foreign policy establishment led us into a series of "forever" wars and foreign policy failures.
It should be clearly understood that the neocons used the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as a springboard for achieving their long-held ambitions. Many neocons considered President George H.W. Bush's 1991 decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power after Operation Desert Storm to have been a mistake. In 1994, the neocon think tank Project for the New American Century urged decisive action to remove Saddam but conceded that this would be difficult "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor." The destruction of New York's World Trade Center provided that event and the neocons were quick to capitalize on it.
For the next 20 years the United States waged wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost trillions of dollars and more than 6,000 American lives. Both attempts to spread democracy from the barrel of a gun failed miserably. Today the Taliban again rule in Kabul, while in Bagdad it is Iran, not the United States, that has become the dominant foreign power. The blame for these debacles falls squarely on the neocons.
From their beginning, the neocons harbored a deep, visceral, almost irrational animosity toward Russia. This made very little sense after the Russian people, hoping for a more democratic future, toppled the Soviet dictatorship. As the author of America's containment policy Ambassador George Kennan noted, "I am particularly bothered by references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime."
Kennan's advice went unheeded. Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who in 1991 mounted a tank to defend Russia's nascent democracy against a Communist Party coup, was dismissed as a drunk and a fool. His request to join NATO went unanswered. Instead, the Clinton administration soon began to debate NATO expansion with Madelene Albright arguing for expansion and Defense Secretary William Perry strongly opposed. Albright prevailed. Over the next 25 years, NATO added 16 new members and moved 1,000 miles closer to Moscow.
Neocons in the Obama and Biden administrations have continued to argue for Ukraine's membership in NATO using two fundamental neocon principles. First, they argue that democracy is a universal right, and we have an obligation to help everyone obtain it. Second, because we are the benevolent and all-powerful global hegemon, a feeble, authoritarian Russian state should not—and ultimately cannot—oppose us.
Unsurprisingly, that is not how the Russians see things. For them, Ukrainian membership in NATO is an unacceptable security threat. It would mean the U.S. Navy in Sevastopol and American missiles 300 miles from Moscow. To claim that this is not provocative is to ignore America's own reaction to Russian missiles in Cuba. Very clearly, it was the neocon policy of NATO expansion that led Russia to invade Ukraine. This very avoidable conflict has now cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars while at the same time pushing us ever closer toward direct confrontation with a nuclear-armed power.
The neocons rose to prominence in the wake of two unique events. First, the collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States without a serious military rival and thus temporarily free to base its foreign policy on ideology rather than core interests. Second, the attacks of 9/11 provided the moral outrage needed to put the neocons' interventionist ideas into action. Both events are now far behind us. China, not Russia, is now our principal rival. Is it not time to reevaluate our priorities and policies?
The unipolar moment of unrivaled American military power is over. We are not the world's policeman. We have no messianic duty to export democracy. We cannot afford endless, inconclusive, resource-draining wars. While we are no longer invulnerable, our future security does not depend on full-spectrum global dominance. Intelligent diplomacy and well-chosen allies, not military action, should be our first line of defense in a multipolar world.
For a quarter century we have been misled by a chorus of neocon war hawks, defense industry profiteers, think tank courtiers and media opportunists. It is long past time to put the neocons and their outdated philosophy behind us. As a new administration arrives in Washington, let us hope that it offers the neocons the same advice Oliver Cromwell gave to the Rump Parliament in 1653. "You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart I say and let us have done with you."
David H. Rundell is a former chief of mission at the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia and the author of Vision or Mirage, Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads. Ambassador Michael Gfoeller is a former political advisor to the U.S. Central Command and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.