The Men Who Stole the Show

By Jim Lobe and Tom Barry, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted November 4, 2002.

When he first saw the excerpts leaked to The New York Times in spring 1992, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) was horrified and denounced the document as a prescription for "literally a Pax Americana." The leak, a draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) on U.S. grand strategy through the 1990s, was stunning in the clarity and ambition of its vision for a new U.S. foreign and military policy. Written in the aftermath of the Gulf War by two relatively obscure political appointees in the Pentagon's policy department of the Bush Sr. administration, the draft DPG called for U.S. military preeminence over Eurasia by preventing the rise of any potentially hostile power and a policy of preemption against states suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction. It foretold a world in which U.S. military intervention overseas would become "a constant feature" and failed to even mention the United Nations.

Although softened in its final form at the insistence of then National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of State James Baker, the draft DPG occupied a central place in the hearts and minds of its two authors, Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and their boss, then Pentagon chief Dick Cheney. A decade later, theory was transformed into practice following the devastating terrorist attack on Sept. 11. By then, Dick Cheney had already become the most powerful vice president in U.S. history, and the draft DPG's two authors, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser, Lewis Libby, had moved to the center of foreign policy-making in the Bush administration. They, along with Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, have led a coalition of forces that has successfully engineered what former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke recently described as a "radical break with 55 years of bipartisan tradition" in U.S. foreign policy.

That break came as a great shock to most analysts. Candidate George W. Bush's talk of pursuing a "humble" foreign policy, as well as the narrowness of his electoral victory, suggested that Bush would likely take his cue from his father's administration. Although the younger Bush's stress on U.S. "national interests" and his skepticism about nation-building and peacekeeping suggested a likely pullback from the Clinton-Gore team's more globalist and multilateral aspirations, most pundits saw a likely return to the cautious, balance-of-power realism that characterized his father's tenure. That assessment seemed even more assured after Bush selected retired General Colin Powell as his secretary of state and Condoleezza Rice as national security adviser. Both were protégés of Brent Scowcroft, in many ways the dean of the realist establishment going back all the way to Gerald Ford for whom he also served as national security adviser. Those assumptions proved dead wrong, however, particularly in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

In engineering the radical break in U.S. foreign policy, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney relied on a handful of think tanks and front groups that have closely interlocking directorates and shared origins in the right-wing and neo-conservative organizations of the 1970s. Organizations such as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), the Center for Security Policy (CSP) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have supplied the administration with a steady stream of policy advice and also with the men-and they are virtually all men-to steer the ship of state on its radical new course. These men are by no means new recruits to the foreign policy elite. They cut their teeth on some of the most fateful foreign policy debates of the last thirty years. Their motto was "peace through strength," and they took great pride in their credentials as militant anti-communists and champions of U.S. military power. Until now, their greatest moments came during Reagan's first term in which most of them held high office. But now, in a world without the Soviet Union, their ambitions are much greater.

As reflected in the draft DPG, these forces first saw their opportunity in the "unipolar moment" that followed the Gulf War. But they were stymied by the "conservative crack-up" after the Soviet collapse, not to mention the cautious realism of the Bush Sr. administration itself. As a result, much of the 1990s marked a period of great frustration for these men who had nothing but contempt for Clinton's fashionable talk of transnational issues such as climate change, HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases, humanitarian intervention, peacekeeping, conflict prevention, social and environmental standards for the global economy and the creation of new multilateral mechanisms like the International Criminal Court (ICC). They regarded these transnational challenges and multilateral responses as nothing less than new constraints on Washington's freedom of action and diversions from the real task of identifying and confronting potential military rivals for its primacy. To them, American foreign policy under Clinton, which they sometimes called "globaloney," was dangerously unfocused.

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