NEOCON NATION

Neoconservatism, c. 1776

Robert Kagan

“T he Iraq War will always be linked with the term ‘neoconservative,’”

George Packer wrote in his book on the war, and he is probably right. The con-
ventional wisdom today, likely to be the approved version in the history books, is
that a small group of neoconservatives seized the occasion of the terrorist attacks
on September 11, 2001, to steer the nation into a war that would never have been
fought had not this group of ideologues managed somehow to gain control of
national policy.
This version of events implicitly rejects another and arguably simpler inter-
pretation: that after September 11, 2001, American fears were elevated, America’s
tolerance for potential threats lowered, and Saddam Hussein naturally became
a potential target, based on a long history of armed aggression, the production
and use of chemical weapons, proven efforts to produce nuclear and biological
weapons, and a murky relationship with terrorists. The United States had gone
to war with him twice before, in 1991 and then again at the end of 1998, and the
fate of Saddam Hussein had remained an unresolved question at the end of the
Clinton administration. It was not so unusual for the United States to go to war a
third time, therefore, and the Bush administration’s decision can be understood

Robert Kagan is senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
and Transatlantic Fellow at The German Marshall Fund. He is the author of Dangerous
Nation: America’s Place in the World from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the 20th Century and
Of Paradise and Power.

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without reference to a neoconservative doctrine. After September 11, the Bush

administration weighed the risks of leaving Saddam Hussein in power against
the risks of fighting a war to remove him and chose the latter, its calculus shaped
by the terrorist attacks and by widely shared suppositions about Iraq’s weapons
programs that ultimately proved mistaken.
If one chose to believe this simpler version, then the decision to invade Iraq
might have been correct or mistaken, but the lessons to be learned from the
war would concern matters of judgment, tactics, and execution—don’t go to
war based on faulty intelligence; don’t topple a foreign government without a
plan to bring order and peace to the country afterwards; don’t be so quick on
the trigger; exhaust all possibilities before going to war; be more prudent. But
they would not raise broader issues of foreign policy doctrine and grand strat-
egy. After all, prudence is not a foreign policy. It is possible to be prudent or
imprudent, capable or clumsy, wise or foolish, hurried or cautious in pursuit of
any doctrine. The intervention in Vietnam was the direct product of the Cold
War strategy of containment, but many people who think the Vietnam War was a
mistake nevertheless do not condemn containment. They believe the war was the
misapplication and poor execution of an otherwise sound strategy. One could
argue the same was true of Iraq.
One could, but very few critics of the war do. The heated debate in the United
States over the past few years has not been so much about bad intelligence, faulty
execution, or imprudence in Iraq. In his book The Assassins’ Gate, Packer claims
that he is unable to explain why the United States went to war without recourse
to the larger doctrine behind it. “The story of the Iraq war,” he writes, “is a story
of ideas about the role of the United States in the world.” And the ideas he has
in mind are “neoconservative” ideas. His premise, and that of most critics, is that
neoconservatism was uniquely responsible for the United States going to war in
Iraq and that, had it not been for the influence of neoconservative ideas, the war
never would have occurred.
To examine this premise requires first understanding what people mean
by “neoconservative,” for the term conjures very different images. For some,
it is synonymous with “hawk,” to others, it is an ethnic description, and to still
others, it is a term to describe anything evil—I once heard a Cornell professor
earnestly define neoconservatism as an ideological commitment to torture and
political oppression. But when employed fairly neutrally to describe a foreign
policy worldview, as Packer does, neoconservatism usually has a recognizable
meaning. It connotes a potent moralism and idealism in world affairs, a belief
in America’s exceptional role as a promoter of the principles of liberty and

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democracy, a belief in the preservation of American primacy and in the exer-

cise of power, including military power, as a tool for defending and advancing
moralistic and idealistic causes, as well as a suspicion of international institu-
tions and a tendency toward unilateralism. In the hands of more hostile critics,
the neocons are not merely idealistic but absurdly and dangerously hubristic
about the unlimited capacity of American power to effect positive change; not
merely expansive but imperialistic, seeking not only American pre-eminence
but ruthless global dominance; not merely willing to use force, but preferring it
to peaceful methods; and not merely tending toward unilateralism but actively
spurning alliances in favor of solitary action. Even these deliberately polemical
caricatures point to something recognizable, a foreign policy that combines an
idealist’s moralism, and even messianism, with a realist’s belief in the impor-
tance of power.
The first thing that could be said about this neoconservative worldview is
that there is nothing very conservative about it. But a more important question
is, how “neo” is it? A central contention of those who insist that neoconservatism
explains the Iraq War is that the doctrine is not only new but outside the for-
eign policy traditions that have guided the United States throughout its history.
Where, for instance, did the idea of promoting democracy come from? To find
an answer, Packer, along with many others, feels he must follow a winding intel-
lectual path back to Leo Strauss, or to Leon Trotsky, or to the Jewish experience
after the Holocaust. The point is that the “neoconservative” foreign policy of the
Bush years needs to be understood as an alien presence in the American body.
The further implication is that once this alien worldview is exorcised, the United
States can return to its traditional ways and avoid future Iraqs.
Is this right? Is it true that moralism, idealism, exceptionalism, militarism,
and global ambition—as well as imprudent excesses in the exercise of all of
these—are alien to American foreign policy traditions? The question must seem
absurd to anyone with even a passing knowledge of American history. But then,
perhaps, it is also very American to forget the past so willfully.

T o understand where the idea of promoting American principles by force

comes from, it is not really necessary to parse the writings of Jewish émigrés.
One could begin with less obscure writings, like the Republican Party’s campaign
platform of 1900. In that long-forgotten document, the party leaders, setting
the stage for what would be William McKinley’s crushing electoral victory over

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William Jennings Bryan, congratulated themselves and the country for their
recently concluded war with Spain. It was, they declared, a war fought for “high
purpose,” a “war for liberty and human rights” that had given “ten millions of
the human race” a “new birth of freedom” and the American people “a new and
noble responsibility . . . to confer the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all
the rescued peoples.”
Or one could go back further, for the Republican Party’s moralism was not
“neo” even in 1900. In the 1850s, William Henry Seward, the party’s founder,
New York’s governor, and, later, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, declared it
America’s duty “to renovate the condition of mankind” and lead the way “to the
universal restoration of power to the governed.” Seward himself was only expand-
ing on the beliefs of earlier American statesmen, such as Henry Clay, who had
spoken of America’s “duty to share with the rest of mankind this most precious
gift,” who pushed for war against Britain in 1812 to defend America’s republican
“honour,” who was willing to go to war with Europe over the fate of Latin Ameri-
can “republics,” and who sought to place the United States at the “centre of a
system which would constitute the rallying point of human freedom against all
the despotism of the Old World.”
Before Clay there was Alexander Hamilton, who, like George Washington
and others of the founding generation, believed their young republic was des-
tined for greatness and even primacy on the global stage. Hamilton believed
America would “erelong, assume an attitude correspondent with its great desti-
nies—majestic, efficient, and operative of great things. A noble career lies before
it.” With twenty years of peace, Washington predicted in his farewell address, the
United States would acquire the power to “enable us in a just cause, to bid defi-
ance to any power on earth.” Jefferson foresaw a vast “empire of liberty” spread-
ing west, north, and south across the continent. John Quincy Adams considered
the United States “destined by God and by nature to be the most populous and
powerful people ever combined under one social contract.” To all the founders,
the United States was a “Hercules in a cradle,” powerful in a traditional sense and
also in a special, moral sense, because its beliefs, which liberated human poten-
tial and made possible a transcendent greatness, would capture the imagination
and the following of all humanity. These beliefs, enshrined in the Declaration
of Independence, were neither exclusively Anglo-Saxon nor Burkean accretions
of the centuries but, in Hamilton’s words, were “written, as with a sunbeam, in
the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the divinity itself.” And these
ideals would revolutionize the world. Hamilton, even in the 1790s, looked for-
ward to the day when America would be powerful enough to assist peoples in

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the “gloomy regions of despotism” to rise up against the “tyrants” that oppressed
them. James Madison saw as the “great struggle of the Epoch” the battle between
“Liberty and Despotism,” and America’s role in that battle was inescapable.
The twentieth century, of course, rang with the rhetoric of greatness, moral-
ism, and mission. “Is America a weakling to shrink from the world work of the
great world-powers?” Theodore Roosevelt asked when he accepted the vice-
presidential nomination in 1900. And he roared the answer: “The young giant of
the West stands on a continent and clasps the crest of an ocean in either hand.
Our nation, glorious in youth and strength, looks in the future with eager eyes
and rejoices as a strong man to run a race.” This young, muscular America was
“the just man armed,” and when World War I came, Roosevelt and others of his
generation regarded it as America’s second great moral crusade. The Civil War
had been the first. “As our fathers fought with slavery and crushed it, in order
that it not seize and crush them,” Roosevelt declared, “so we are called on to
fight new forces.” Henry Cabot Lodge called World War I “the last great struggle
of democracy and freedom against autocracy and militarism.” Woodrow Wilson,
in his message to Congress in 1917, used language that would make George W.
Bush’s speechwriters blush: “The right is more precious than peace,” he pro-
claimed, “and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest
our hearts,” for “democracy” and against “selfish and autocratic power.” The
day had finally come when America was “privileged to spend her blood and her
might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness.”
The first decades of the twentieth century saw a steady stream of military
interventions in the affairs of Latin American and Caribbean peoples, often
launched with the professed aim of “teaching them to elect good men” (Wood-
row Wilson) or lifting them “up out of the discord and turmoil of continual
revolution into a general public sense of justice and determination to maintain
order” (Elihu Root). And yes, as critics then and later claimed, there were, as
always, other motives at work. But along with protecting American investments,
successive American presidents, from Taft to Wilson to Harding to Coolidge, also
undertook painstaking if often unsuccessful efforts to establish and support func-
tioning democratic systems. In Nicaragua, the Marines intervened in 1912 and
then remained for the better part of two decades, guarding not only American
financial interests but also a flawed but functioning electoral process with the
hope, as Henry Stimson put it, “that if a generally admitted fair election could
once be held, it might serve as a guide and pattern toward which the minds of the
Nicaragua people might turn in the future.” Having once “been shown by Ameri-
cans that such an election was possible,” Nicaraguans “would be encouraged in

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the future to adopt permanently a system of free elections with their own efforts.”
This seemed to Stimson “to be a goal worthy of every possible effort.”
Such aspirations, and others even more purely idealistic, drove American
policy in every decade of the twentieth century. Even in the “isolationist” 1930s,
there was the concern over Japan’s plundering of Manchuria and depredations
in China—all ignored as not worthy of serious comment by hard-headed Britain
and the European powers but in the United States producing the moral outrage,
the diplomatic protests, and the economic embargoes that ultimately convinced
the Japanese to launch their attack on Pearl Harbor. Then there was the great
moral crusade against Nazism and fascism—a battle for democratic civilization
and the “four freedoms.” And then, of course, there was the Cold War, which
began with Harry Truman declaring that the nations of the world must “choose
between alternative ways of life” and that it was the duty of the United States to
“support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation” and assist them
“to work out their own destinies in their own way.” In the middle there was John
F. Kennedy proclaiming America’s determination to “pay any price, bear any bur-
den, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure
the survival and the success of liberty.” And, at the end, there was Ronald Reagan
citing the words of Thomas Paine and promising to “begin the world anew” by
vanquishing an “evil empire” and leading the world into a new era of freedom.
It is hard to believe that Americans today have really forgotten this long his-
tory, if for no other reason than their history textbooks for the past three decades
at least have been devoted almost entirely to revealing this dominant tradition in
American foreign policy as imperialistic, chauvinistic, militaristic, and hypocriti-
cal. Can a generation raised on the teachings of William Appleman Williams and
Walter LaFeber believe that the alleged sins of neoconservatism—excessive ideal-
ism, blinding self-righteousness, utopianism, hubris, militarism, and overweening
ambition, and throw in if you want selfishness and greed—are somehow new sins?
Has the American academy so badly failed to get its message across? Or is it neces-
sary to whitewash the past in order to win a political argument in the present?

T he idea that today’s policies represent a decisive break from the past would
certainly come as a surprise to the many critics of American foreign policy across
the generations, for there has not been a single criticism leveled at neoconserva-
tism in recent years that was not leveled at American foreign policy hundreds of
times over the past two centuries.

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 Robert Kagan

The oldest, and in some ways most potent, critique has always been that of
genuine conservatism, a powerful counter-tradition that goes back at least as far
as the debates over the ratification of the Constitution in 1787. The supporters of
the new federal Constitution—George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benja-
min Franklin, and James Madison—insisted that the concentration of energy and
power in the federal government was essential if the United States was to become
a world power capable both of protecting itself and achieving its destined great-
ness on the world stage. “Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of Euro-
pean greatness!” Hamilton exhorted in the Federalist papers. But Patrick Henry,
a leader of the anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution, accused Hamilton
and his allies, not unfairly, of seeking to “convert this country into a powerful and
mighty empire.” This, Henry insisted, was a betrayal of the nation’s true purpose.
“When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was differ-
ent: liberty, sir, was then the primary object.”
That quotation is a favorite chestnut of Patrick Buchanan and that ancient
confrontation has recurred in almost every generation since the founding. At the
core of this conservative critique has always been the fear that “empire,” however
one might define it—in Henry’s day, it meant simply a wide expanse of land under
a single, strong central government—is antithetical to, and ultimately destructive
of, American democratic and republican virtues. A big, expansive foreign policy
requires a big, powerful central government to advance it, and such a government
imperils American liberties. It also imperils its democratic soul. As John Quincy
Adams memorably put it in 1821, America might become “the dictatress of the
world,” but she would “be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
In one way or another, all the major critiques of expansive, ambitious, ideal-
istic American foreign policy have been shaped by this concern about overween-
ing ambition and the temptations of power. It may not even be right to call this
inclination “conservative” but rather, as Bernard Bailyn long ago suggested, a
manifestation of American “republicanism”—a deep and abiding suspicion of
centralized power and its corrupting effects on the people who wield it. Such
fears have been expressed by conservatives, liberals, socialists, realists, and ideal-
ists alike over the past two centuries.
Today, most of those old battles are forgotten. No one recalls that John Ran-
dolph of Roanoke and John Taylor of South Carolina—more Jeffersonian than Jef-
ferson himself—railed against the War of 1812 as having no justification in terms
of American interests. It was merely, and appallingly, a “war for honour,” a “meta-
physical war” that, by requiring a strong federal government to wage it, would end
in “the destruction of the last experiment in . . . free government.” Few remember

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that when President James Monroe set forth his famous doctrine in 1823, he was
not staking out a restrictive isolationist worldview but, on the contrary, a progres-
sive, expansive view of America’s role in the world. His critics, led by Andrew
Jackson and Martin Van Buren, attacked him for gravely departing from what
they, too, insisted were American foreign policy traditions. The Mexican-Ameri-
can War is the one war Buchanan likes—he lovingly calls it “Jimmy Polk’s War.”
But most conservatives at the time did not, for although a struggle primarily to
open new territory for slavery, it was fought under the idealistic and expansive,
if hypocritical, banner of liberty and “Manifest Destiny.” Its opponents included
anti-slavery northerners and conservative Whigs like Daniel Webster, who had
long exhorted his expansionist countrymen to cease and desist: “You have your
Sparta. Embellish it!” In the early 1890s, the increasingly progressive Republican
Party stood for “the
future greatness and
“The first thing that could be said about destiny of the United
this neoconservative worldview is that States,” favored an
there is nothing very conservative about intrusive government
at home (by the stan-
it. But a more important question is, how dards of the day),
“neo” is it?” and shared James G.
Blaine’s ambition for
an active and intrusive role “in global affairs and in the improvement of the
world.” The guardians of the conservative tradition were the Democratic Party
of Grover Cleveland, and it was Cleveland’s forgotten secretary of state, Walter
Q. Gresham, who uttered another classic statement of the conservative critique
when he warned Americans against their “impulse to rush into difficulties that
do not concern” them. “To restrain the indulgence of such a propensity is not
only the part of wisdom, but a duty we owe to the world as an example of the
strength, the moderation, and the beneficence of popular government.” Ameri-
cans did not listen, however, and rushed into war with Spain for Cuba’s freedom,
and into the Philippines pursuing their “high purpose” of raising the natives up
to self-sustaining civilization.
The battles continued and intensified in the “Wilsonian” twentieth century.
Conservatives fought Wilson’s interventionist foreign policies partly because
they saw in them the extension of his progressive domestic policies, which they
regarded as bordering on despotic. The more radical progressives like Randolph
Bourne believed the war to make the world safe for democracy would undermine
democracy in the United States, and given the undemocratic excesses of the Wil-

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son years—which dwarf anything that has occurred since September 11—Bourne
was not entirely mistaken.
In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s it was Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman,
and Dean Acheson pitted against the followers of Robert A. Taft. The “Mr.
Republican” of his day has long been in bad odor for opposing the war against
Fascism. But his objections to America’s global involvement, including against
Nazi Germany, were not those of a bumpkin or redneck, which he certainly
was not, but of a highly sophisticated conservative critic of American ambition
and hubris. “We should be prepared to defend our own shores,” Taft warned,
“but we should not undertake to defend the ideals of democracy in foreign
countries.” Otherwise the United States would become a “meddlesome Mattie,
interfering in trouble throughout the world,” with “our fingers in every pie.” It
would “occupy all the strategic points in the world and try to maintain a force so
preponderant that none shall dare attack.” Like Patrick Henry, John Taylor, and
John Quincy Adams before him, he worried about the effect of so much power
on the health of his republic. “How long can nations restrain themselves from
using such force with just a little of the aggressiveness of Germany and Japan?”
he asked. “Potential power over other nations, however benevolent its purpose,
leads inevitably to imperialism.”
But Americans in the days of FDR, Truman, Acheson, and after them Eisen-
hower and Kennedy, sought precisely what Taft feared, a “preponderance of power”
and “situations of strength” at strategic points all across the globe. They pursued an
ideologically laden containment strategy that theoretically could lead America to
war anywhere on the planet, and which did lead it straight into Vietnam.
Old-fashioned conservatives were not alone in raising these concerns. Begin-
ning around the time of World War II, the “realist” school leveled similar criti-
cisms of American foreign policy. Again, it is not much recalled today, but the
original realists cut their teeth fighting against FDR, Truman, and Dean Acheson.
As Truman enunciated his famous doctrine and Acheson set about implement-
ing the strategy of containment, the great realists of the day howled in disgust.
Walter Lippmann denounced containment as a “strategic monstrosity” because it
seemed to promise endless confrontation everywhere. He warned it would either
bankrupt the nation or lead into an unnecessary and catastrophic war, and some
would argue it did both. The realists were joined by the left which, though from a
different angle, came to similar conclusions about the dangerous and destructive
tendencies of American foreign policy. The left attributed these tendencies to the
dominance of capitalists. The realists attributed them to the foolishness of the
American people and what George F. Kennan called their “moralistic-legalistic”

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sensibility. And the conservatives blamed it on progressive liberal utopianism.

But otherwise their collective criticisms had much in common.
None of those who criticized American foreign policy believed that what
they were fighting against was an aberrant, esoteric, or alien strain. For William
Appleman Williams and the left-revisionists, American imperialism was not some
deviation from tradition foisted on an unsuspecting nation by clever ideologues;
it was ingrained in the American capitalist soul. Whether in Southeast Asia in
the 1960s or the Philippines in 1898, it was empire not by accident nor empire
as conspiracy but “empire as a way of life.” For the realists, America suffered
from a long utopian tradition, which they traced back to Thomas Paine and, a
bit unfairly, to Thomas Jefferson, a tradition that ran through Wilson and to the
postwar American faith in the United Nations. More worrying still was America’s
“messianic” impulse, what Hans Morgenthau called America’s “nationalistic uni-
versalism,” which claimed “for one nation and one state the right to impose its
own valuations and standards of action upon all other nations.” He and other
realists warned in the late 1940s and 1950s—and Henry Kissinger repeated the
warning in the 1960s and 1970s—that Americans must give up their “dream of
remaking the world in their own image” and rein in their “limitless aspirations
for power,” lest in a nuclear age they bring the whole world to ruin. Critics of
neoconservatism these days look back longingly to the 1940s and 1950s as the
imagined heyday of some “democratic realism,” but true realists do not share in
the nostalgia.
Indeed, there was scarcely a moment in the Cold War when true realists were
not appalled by the direction the United States was taking. What could a realist
make of Kennedy’s promise to “pay any price, bear any burden,” or Jimmy Cart-
er’s human rights policies, or Ronald Reagan’s self-righteous moralizing about
the “evil empire”? The Cold War, contrary to today’s reconstructed mythology,
was not waged coolly and methodically by calibrating realists or sweetly and ide-
alistically by institution-builders, but aggressively and stubbornly by passionate,
fearful, and intensely ideological men absolutely convinced that American power
and principles alone were the world’s salvation—a self-righteous conviction
that drove both realist and left-leaning critics to distraction. Only the conserva-
tives suspended their criticism in what was for them first, last, and only a war
against Communism.
These criticisms did not end with the Cold War. On the contrary, Ameri-
can behavior after the Cold War seemed to fulfill some of the worst fears of
conservatives, realists, and left-revisionists. There were George H. W. Bush’s
interventions in Panama and the Persian Gulf, undertaken in pursuit of a “New

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World Order.” There were Bill Clinton’s “humanitarian” interventions in Haiti,

Bosnia, and Kosovo, as well as the eastward expansion of NATO, all in pursuit
of “democratic enlargement.” During the years of the first Bush administration,
the realist scholar Robert W. Tucker warned against triumphalism and “The
Imperial Temptation.” During the Clinton years, Ronald Steel, Lippmann’s biog-
rapher, warned against the “Temptations of a Superpower.” Buchanan accused
both the Bush and Clinton administrations of “reenacting every folly” that had
ever brought great powers to ruin, “from arrogance to hubris, to assertions of
global hegemony, to imperial overstretch, to trumpeting new ‘crusades.’” In the
1990s, Samuel P. Huntington complained bitterly about American “arrogance,”
“hubris,” and “unilateralism,” and warned that “at least two-thirds of the world’s
people” saw the United States as “intrusive, interventionist, exploitative, uni-
lateralist, hegemonic, hypocritical” and the “single greatest external threat to
their societies.” He chastised Clinton administration officials who “boast[ed] of
American power and American virtue” and who “lecture[d] other countries on
the universal validity of American principles, practices, and institutions,” who
professed America’s superior wisdom and foresight. He was appalled at Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright when she told the world, “If we have to use force, it
is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We
see further into the future.”
These days critics of neoconservatism repeat these same complaints, often
culling from these old critics to make their case. They have rediscovered Hans
Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr. They pore over the writings of Williams
and Charles Beard and summon their wisdom against the present neoconserva-
tive foreign policies. They read Noam Chomsky and nod in agreement when
he writes that “the United States has become the most aggressive power in the
world, the greatest threat to peace, to national self-determination, and to inter-
national cooperation.”
But Chomsky wrote that in 1968. And, of course, Beard, Williams, Niebuhr,
and Morgenthau did not wage their dissenting battles against neoconservatism
but against the policies of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Franklin
Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.

What does it tell us that decades-old critiques of American foreign policy

seem so strikingly apt and useful in critiquing today’s “neoconservative” foreign
policies? What it tells us, quite simply, is that what many consider the neocon-

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servative aberration may not be such a great aberration after all. The tendencies
associated these days with neoconservatism are more deeply rooted in American
traditions than the critics care to admit, which means they will not so easily be
uprooted, even by the coming epochal presidential election.
In fact, the problem for those who have sought to end this history of Ameri-
can expansiveness, both in decades past and today, is that this tendency toward
expansion, this belief in the possibility of global transformation, this “messianic”
impulse, far from being aberrant, is a dominant strain in the American char-
acter. It is certainly not the only tra-
dition. There are counter-traditions,
conservative, “republican,” pacifist,
socialist, and realist. But in every gen-
eration these forces have done battle,
and in almost every generation the
expansive, moralistic, hubristic Ameri-
can approach has rolled over its crit-
ics, sometimes into victory and suc-
cess, sometimes into disappointment
and calamity.
What are the sources of its endur-
ing power? One source is the American
commitment to universal principles
embedded in the nation’s founding
documents, and the belief that these
principles are not debatable but are,
as Hamilton suggested, written in the
stars by the hand of God. Americans Charles Beard to our rescue Bain/LOC
believe they know the truth, and they
do not admit alternate truths. Democracy is the only legitimate form of gov-
ernment, and America as the greatest democracy is the most legitimate of all.
American foreign policy’s most astute critics have always understood that it is
not conservatism but this liberal and progressive idealism that is the engine of
American expansionism and hegemonism.
The other source is Americans’ perfectly natural, if seldom acknowledged,
ambition for power and wealth, an ambition that has never ceased to drive
Americans outward for the better part of the past three centuries. In this respect,
America has behaved precisely as old-fashioned realist theory would predict. It
has consistently sought greater power and influence and the tangible and intan-

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 Robert Kagan

gible rewards they bring. It is a puzzling irony, as Fareed Zakaria once noted, that
so many realists dislike American policy precisely because it so nicely conforms
to their model. More like Puritan moralists than Machiavellian pragmatists, they
wish America would practice restraint as a virtue.
The expansive, moralistic, militaristic tradition in American foreign policy
is the hearty offspring of this marriage between Americans’ driving ambitions
and their overpowering sense of righteousness. These tendencies have been
checked at times by overseas debacles, or by foreign powers too big and strong
to be coerced into acceptance of the American truth. At those times, the coun-
ter-traditions have been able to assert themselves and take temporary control of
American policy, as in the 1930s or in the 1970s. But these victories have been
fleeting. The story of America’s first century is not one of virtuous restraint but of
an increasingly powerful nation systematically eliminating all competitors on the
North American continent. The story of its second century is not one of caution
and a recognition of limits but of a steady and determined rise to global domi-
nance. Patrick Henry failed to defeat the Constitution; John Randolph failed to
stop the rush to war and big government in 1812; conservatives did not steer the
nation away from Manifest Destiny or prevent war with Spain, or World War I,
or the many interventions of the twentieth century. Five years after the end of
the Vietnam War, which seemed to presage the rejection of the Achesonian prin-
ciples that led to the intervention, Americans elected Ronald Reagan, who took
up those principles again with a vengeance.
Today, many hope that the war in Iraq will quench once and for all Ameri-
cans’ messianic impulses and their belief in the virtues of power. But will it?
Are Americans, either Democrats or Republicans, prepared to forfeit either
their power or their belief in America’s exceptional role in the world? Back
in the 1960s, the historian Stanley Hoffmann posed a choice for Americans in
the title of his book: Primacy or World Order? He knew then, and it remains true
today, that for Americans this is not a choice. As the former French Foreign
Minister Hubert Vedrine observed (during the Clinton administration), most
“great American leaders and thinkers have never doubted for an instant that
the United States was chosen by providence as the ‘indispensable nation’ and
that it must remain dominant for the sake of humankind.” And as Robert W.
Tucker observed (during the first Bush administration), Americans may have
sought international order, but for them “international order implies [Ameri-
can] leadership.” That leadership imposes “special responsibilities others do
not have,” but in the American view it also “confers a degree of freedom oth-
ers do not enjoy.” As prominent liberal Democrat and former Clinton official

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Ivo Daalder has put it, “without American primacy—or something like it—it is
doubtful that the rule of law can be sustained.”

T oday we are allegedly consumed in a great debate over the nation’s foreign
policy. But what kind of debate is it really? At the level of politics and policy, the
sides are not as far apart as they would like everyone to believe. Even between the
so-called neoconservatives and the liberal internationalists, between the advisers
to Republican and Democratic candidates for the White House, the differences,
as David Rieff rightly notes, “are more in the nature of a family quarrel,” the
“interventionist family.” Today’s argument takes place within the narrow param-
eters of a common paradigm. Both sides share a belief in American primacy,
including military primacy. Both sides have no difficulty agreeing with the state-
ment of John Kerry during the last presidential campaign that “America must
always be the world’s paramount military power, but we can magnify our power
through alliances.” When Barack Obama talks about foreign policy, he evokes
not Chomsky but Kennedy and insists America must be the “leader of the free
world.” It must lead the way “in battling immediate evils and promoting the ulti-
mate good.” Its “larger purpose in the world is to promote the spread of freedom.”
He insists, in phrases that should appall any true realist, that the “security of the
American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people.” He wants to
increase the defense budget, to expand the size of American ground forces by
adding 65,000 soldiers to the Army and 27,000 to the Marines to ensure that the
United States has “the strongest, best-equipped military in the world.” He talks
about “rogue nations,” “hostile dictators,” “muscular alliances,” and maintaining
“a strong nuclear deterrent.” He talks about the “American moment” and how
we need to “seize” it. He says we must “begin the world anew,” echoing, as Ronald
Reagan did, Thomas Paine’s messianic call. Conservatives, realists, and those on
the left may cavil, but the compelling force of this tradition is hard to withstand
because it reflects deep convictions and long-standing ambitions. Even its most
sober-minded critics sometimes can’t help being swept up in it.
These days few people are more vigorous spokesmen for the conservative
critique than George F. Will. Over the past couple of years, he has been a steady
voice of disapproval against those who would presume to advance American prin-
ciples of democracy and liberalism by force or other impatient means. “On for-
eign policy,” he writes, “conservatism begins, and very nearly ends, by eschewing
abroad the fatal conceit that has been liberalism’s undoing domestically—hubris

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about controlling what cannot, and should not, be controlled.” And of course
exhibit “A” of this misguided hubris was the intervention in Iraq—a war fought
for the “delusory goal” of implanting a democracy there “that would inspire emu-
lation, transforming the region.” Conservatives ought not to have had to learn
“on the job” about “the limits of power to subdue an unruly world,” Will chides,
or succumbed to the “generous but preposterous assumption” that a people like
the Iraqis could “spontaneously” flourish under a democratic regime “without
long acculturation in the necessary habits and mores.”
Here is the classic conservative critique of America’s progressive and idealis-
tic approach to the world, and yet even Will has not always been able to resist suc-
cumbing to the illusions he identifies. In the waning years of the Cold War, when
the triumph of democracy around the world seemed inevitable, Will sounded
rather different themes. While celebrating the invasion of Panama by the first
President Bush at the end of 1989, he adumbrated the essence of what today is
known as “neoconservative” thought. “Because of American interventions in this
decade,” he wrote, “this hemisphere has two more democracies—Grenada and
Panama—than it would have if America husbanded its power differently.” The
invasion of Panama “punctuates a decade of recovery of national purposefulness
and a year of militant democracy.” It was the “story of American attempts to com-
prehend the rights and responsibilities that come with the possession of great
power and the enjoyment of democracy.” The invasion of Panama was about
democracy, Will insisted, not about interests. After all, Noriega never threatened
to close the Panama Canal but, on the contrary, promised to keep it open. Ameri-
can national interests, Will admitted, if “narrowly construed,” could not justify
the invasion. But this was not an argument against the intervention. It was an
argument “against the narrow construing of national interests.”
A “constant” of America’s “national character,” Will explained, and “a compo-
nent of American patriotism” had always been this “messianic impulse.” It derived
from the belief that America’s “national identity is bound up with acceptance of
a responsibility to further democracy.” And while there had always been “many
Americans who reject that premise” and who have insisted that America “has no
responsibility toward democracy abroad,” nevertheless a majority of Americans
have “always thought otherwise.” The “restoration of democracy” was part of “a tra-
dition with a distinguished pedigree. It holds that America’s fundamental national
interest is to be America, and the nation’s identity (its sense of its self, its peculiar
purposefulness) is inseparable from a commitment to the spread—not the aggres-
sive universalization, but the civilized advancement—of the proposition to which
we, unique among nations, are, as the greatest American said, dedicated.” Well.

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Guided perhaps by such impulses, Will, during the run-up to the Iraq War
in 2002 and 2003, was an enthusiastic supporter, penning column after column
about the need to remove Saddam from power, and occasionally sounding very
neocon indeed in explaining why. “If Iraq’s next government derives its powers
from the consent of the governed,” he wrote in the months before the war, “the
entire region may be changed.” At the time, he even chastised those who “too
pessimistically” believed that the Arab world was culturally and historically unfit
“to experience democratization.”
When the war went badly, Will, like many others, turned against not only the
war but also against those who had supported it on the same grounds that he had
supported it. He returned to assailing such “generous but preposterous assump-
tions” that, if not discarded, could lead Americans into “many Iraqs.” But who could
be counted on to resist those beguiling assumptions, and the messianic crusades
they were likely to produce, if even George Will could not resist them, if indeed
this “messianic impulse” was a “constant” in America’s “national character”?

Which brings us back to the question of whether “neoconservatives”

dragged the United States into war in 2003. As a purely practical matter, the sug-
gestion has always presented a puzzle. How did they do it? Few people consid-
ered George W. Bush a neoconservative before 2003, or Dick Cheney, or Donald
Rumsfeld, or Condoleezza Rice, who actually made a point in the 2000 campaign
of saying that she was a “realpolitiker.”
Then there was the matter of public opinion. The war was, as American wars
go, immensely popular, both before and immediately following its launch—more
popular than the wars in Kosovo and Bosnia, or the invasions of Panama and
Grenada, and about as popular as the Persian Gulf War of 1991. It remained popu-
lar even after weapons investigators discovered none of the suspected caches of
chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons materials or the programs that the intel-
ligence services of two American administrations and several European countries
believed were there. A Washington Post/ABC News poll in April 2003 found that,
nevertheless, more than 70 percent of Americans supported the war, and a CBS
poll revealed that 60 percent of Americans believed it had been worth the sacrifice
even if no weapons of mass destruction were ever found. A month later, a Gal-
lup poll found that 79 percent of Americans considered the war justified with or
without conclusive evidence that Saddam Hussein had possessed weapons of mass
destruction, and only 19 percent believed the discovery of such weapons was neces-

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 Robert Kagan

sary to justify the war. The war lost popular support only as it began to look as if the
U.S. military was bogged down in a seemingly endless and possibly losing effort.
The nation’s political leaders were similarly supportive up to that point. The
key vote in the Senate in the fall of 2002 passed 77-23, with 29 of 50 Democrats
voting to authorize the war. Many will argue, correctly, that members of the Sen-
ate were under pressure, that it is always difficult to vote against a president’s
request for authority to wage war. But it is not impossible, as a majority of Demo-
crats proved when they opposed the resolution authorizing the first Persian
Gulf War in 1991. And if Democrats were cowed into voting to approve war in
October 2002, this only reflected their fear of a popular backlash against them
if they opposed it. No doubt some members of Congress who approved the war
resolution in 1917 felt similar apprehensions.
Still, the breadth of support was remarkable. In 2002, those voting to approve
the war included everyone with even vague plans of running for president in either
2004 or 2008—not only John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Joseph
Biden, but also Thomas Daschle, Tom Harkin, and Chris Dodd—as well as other
Democrats who had no such plans such as Harry Reid, Byron Dorgan, Jay Rock-
efeller, and Charles Schumer, along with Republican moderates such as Chuck
Hagel, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter. One can only speculate abut whether
Barack Obama might have voted against the war had he been in the Senate in the
fall of 2002. If Dodd and Harkin voted for it, either out of conviction or out of some
distant thought of future presidential plans, would Obama alone have made a dif-
ferent calculation?
So were all these people neoconservatives—Cheney and Rumsfeld, Kerry
and Clinton, Harkin and Hagel? In a way, yes. They all belonged, in one way or
another, to the same expansive tradition in American foreign policy that these
days curiously goes by that name. They all believed in American power and the
ability of the United States to use that power to beneficial ends in the world. Most
had at one point in the previous decade supported the use of force, whether in
Iraq or Panama, or in Bosnia or Kosovo, with or without allied support, with or
without UN Security Council authorization, and sometimes in pursuit of Ameri-
can interests that were more ideological than tangible. They may not have all
agreed that it was the right thing to send ground troops to Iraq in the spring of
2003, even though they voted to approve war. But did any of them stand for a
foreign policy doctrine that opposed such action as a matter of principle?
The Bush administration had not brought a new doctrine to bear in consid-
ering the Iraq question. The specific rationale for the war it inherited from the
Clinton administration. The fear of Saddam’s weapons programs, the concern

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that his weapons might someday end up in the hands of terrorists, the belief that
containment was failing, that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant and a serial aggres-
sor—all these arguments had been made in public and in detail in the years
when the Clinton administration grappled with the problem of Iraq. These were
the arguments used to justify the use of force when President Clinton ordered
four days of bombing and missile attacks against suspected Iraqi weapons pro-
duction facilities. Neither George W. Bush nor all his clever speechwriters ever
managed to come up with a rationale for removing Saddam that had not already
been laid out by President Clinton and his top advisers in the late 1990s.
Even Bush’s call for democracy in Iraq was unoriginal. In 2003, in a speech
at the American Enterprise Institute, Bush declared that “a new regime in Iraq
would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in
the region. Success in Iraq,” he added, “could also begin a new stage for Middle
Eastern peace, and set in motion progress towards a truly democratic Palestinian
state.” This statement has been singled out by critics of Bush and neoconserva-
tism as proof of idealistic hubris. But if so, the statement only repeated senti-
ments expressed by Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, who argued
in 2000 that “the best way to address the challenge Iraq poses is through a gov-
ernment in Baghdad—a new government—that is committed to represent and
respect its people, not repress them; that is committed to peace in the region. . . .
The future of Iraq will affect the way in which the Middle East and the Arab
world in particular evolve in the next decade and beyond.”
If the Bush administration inherited the specific rationale for war from the
Clinton administration, the larger worldview in which that rationale made sense
it inherited from the entire sweep of American history. The effort to explain
the war as the product of manipulation by a handful of “neoconservatives” is
an effort to escape what for many may be a more troubling reality: that there is
something in the American character which leads it in this direction. Americans
have an image of themselves as a peace-loving people who generally mind their
own business unless blatantly provoked. This self-image is profoundly at odds
with reality. So many Americans must find a way to explain American behavior
that seems out of character.

The search for an extraneous explanation is an old tradition. The Spanish-

American War was probably the most popular war in American history, uniting
left and right, southerners with northerners, Theodore Roosevelt with William

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 Robert Kagan

Jennings Bryan. But when the aftermath of the war left a sour taste in the mouths
of many, a new account of the war emerged, according to which a very small
number of people had managed to manipulate the levers of power and the emo-
tions of millions in order to pursue their imperialistic conspiracy. This account
became the accepted version of events, so much so that to read many history
textbooks today, you would imagine that the war was foisted upon an unsuspect-
ing nation by a handful of cagey “imperialists”—Roosevelt, William Randolph
Hearst, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Alfred Thayer Mahan—rather than having
been launched enthusiastically by a bipartisan majority in Congress that all but
trampled McKinley in its rush to war. When Americans came to regret their
equally enthusiastic rush into World War I, many chose to blame the nefarious
manipulations of bankers and munitions makers. Opponents of American entry
into World War II, from Charles Beard to Robert A. Taft, insisted that Franklin
Roosevelt “tricked” or “lied” the nation into war. Today it is the Iraq War, once
approved by an overwhelming bipartisan vote in the Senate and by large majori-
ties of Americans, that is now inexplicable except by reference to a neoconserva-
tive conspiracy. There may be an echo here of what Richard Hofstadter called the
“paranoid style in American politics,” except that this time it is not the populist
yahoos but the Hofstadters themselves looking around for secret conspiracies.
And of course it is not just the conspirators who need to be revealed, but also
their willing dupes. Maureen Dowd, in her New York Times column earlier this year,
chastised Hillary Clinton for her vote to authorize the Iraq War in 2002. Dowd
accused Clinton of voting for the war only to prove that she was man enough to
lead the nation, and the columnist reflected on past instances of such behavior:
“Why didn’t JFK simply toss out the CIA plan developed under Eisenhower to send
1,200 exiles to overthrow a popular Cuban leader with a force of 200,000? He felt
the need to prove himself. Why did LBJ ignore his own solid political instincts to
listen to Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk about Vietnam—falling under their
stupid sway because they had been JFK’s advisers? . . . Why did W. let Cheney and
Rummy lead him into hubristic disaster? He, too, needed to prove himself—and
outdo Daddy.” Or as Bill Gorton put it in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, “That was
what the Civil War was all about. Abraham Lincoln was a faggot. He was in love with
General Grant. So was Jefferson Davis. Lincoln just freed the slaves on a bet.”
The idea that momentous decisions of war and peace can be explained
by human insecurities and personality quirks obviously has a certain useful
appeal. The American diplomatic history syllabus these days features a book,
Fighting for American Manhood, which explains how “gender politics provoked
the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars.” But whatever truth

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there may be in such explanations, they also serve to obscure what to their
authors may be a more troubling reality: that American leaders did what they
did because it was in keeping with their worldview and with the essential char-
acter of the nation they led.
After all, as Dowd presumably knows, Johnson’s decision to continue and esca-
late American involvement in Vietnam in 1964 and 1965 reflected the judgment of
many Americans, not just McNamara and Rusk. Not only was the editorial board of
Dowd’s own newspaper in favor of it at that time, but so too was the Times’ most her-
alded and astute observer of the situation in Vietnam, David Halberstam. In 1965
Halberstam wrote that he could not “stomach” the idea of withdrawal; Vietnam
was “vital to our national interest;” withdrawal would damage America’s “prestige
throughout the world;” and the “pressure of Communism on the rest of Southeast
Asia” would grow unacceptably. Johnson may have agreed with this assessment, and
perhaps he ignored his sound political instincts not because he lacked the guts to
overrule Dean Rusk but because he thought it was the right thing to do.
Is it possible that Hillary Clinton also thought she was doing the right thing
in 2002? When Clinton rose on the Senate floor to cast her vote in favor of the
resolution “to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq,”
the arguments she used were neither novel nor obviously disingenuous. They
were the old Clinton administration arguments with which she was very familiar
from her own experience in the White House. Thus Saddam Hussein, she noted,
was “a tyrant who has tortured and killed his own people, even his own family
members, to maintain his iron grip on power.” He had used “chemical weapons
on Iraqi Kurds and on Iranians, killing over 20 thousand people.” He had “given
aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.” He had
“invaded and occupied Kuwait,” and when the United States withdrew its forces
after driving him out, he had taken his revenge against Kurds and the Shiites
“who had risen against Saddam Hussein at our urging.”
Clinton also noted in 2002 what has since been quietly and conveniently for-
gotten—that in 1998 the Clinton administration had changed its policy toward
Iraq “from containment to regime change” and had begun “to examine options
to effect such a change.” She, like Berger and other Clinton officials, worried
that containment was collapsing. If “left unchecked,” Hussein would “continue
to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep
trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could
alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all
too well affects American security.” This much, she said, was “undisputed.” The
question was, what to do about it?

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 Robert Kagan

Clinton’s answer expressed the views of what might be called the liberal side
of Rieff’s “interventionist family.” She opposed a “unilateral attack,” for if the
United States went to war “alone or with a few allies,” such action would “come
back to haunt us.” International support and legitimacy were “crucial” because,
“while the military outcome” was “not in doubt,” “after shots are fired and bombs
are dropped, not all consequences are predictable.” This was a prescient observa-
tion, though the unpredictable consequences Clinton feared at the time were that
Saddam Hussein would use his chemical and biological weapons or would provide
them to “terrorists” who could “torment us with them long after he is gone.”
While preferring to win international support for military action, however,
Clinton disagreed with those who insisted the United States “should only resort
to force if and when the United Nations Security Council approves it.” The
UN remained an imperfect organization. Security council members sometimes
vetoed action “for reasons of narrow-minded interests,” and she pointed to the
example of Kosovo, when the Clinton administration had been forced to go to
war without the Security Council’s approval because Russia had refused to agree.
Once again, “in the case of Iraq, recent comments indicate that one or two
Security Council members might never approve force against Saddam Hussein
until he has actually used chemical, biological, or God forbid, nuclear weapons.”
Clinton believed it was still worth trying, if only to put those who opposed action
in an “indefensible position.” But she made clear that the United States could go
to war with or without a UN authorization.
Casting a vote to authorize war, Clinton declared, was “the hardest decision
I have ever had to make,” but “I cast it with conviction . . . Perhaps my decision
is influenced by my eight years of experience on the other end of Pennsylvania
Avenue in the White House watching my husband deal with serious challenges
to our nation.” Perhaps it was also influenced, she said, by the fact that she was
a “Senator from New York who has seen all too closely the consequences of last
year’s terrible attacks on our nation. In balancing the risks of action versus inac-
tion, I think New Yorkers who have gone through the fires of hell may be more
attuned to the risk of not acting. I know that I am.”
No doubt there are things Hillary Clinton would have done differently had
she been sitting in the White House in the spring of 2003. It is possible she
would not, in the end, have gone to war. But there was certainly nothing in
Hillary Clinton’s own foreign policy doctrine that precluded her from going to
war. The Clinton administration had itself used force on several occasions, in
Somalia, Sudan, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and, of course, against Iraq. It had used
force without UN authorization. It had bombed and fired missiles into Iraq over

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the heated objections of France and other allies, and it had done so based on
the same evidence of Saddam’s weapons programs that the Bush administration
used to justify its war. Certainly there was nothing in the worldview of the Clinton
administration to stop it from going to war against Iraq in 2003, and much to
support it—which is why nearly every former Clinton official and many Demo-
crats in and out of Congress did. Only when the war went badly did it turn out
that, as in 1898, 1917, 1941, and 1965, Americans had once again been lied and
tricked into war.

History will judge whether the decision to invade Iraq was a mistake or not.
But if it was, what kind of mistake was it? Was it an error of judgment and calcu-
lation or an error of doctrine, and if the latter, which doctrine? We could have
such a debate, but we are only pretending to have it now.
Critics of the Iraq War often compare it to Vietnam. But there was something
more fundamental, and perhaps also more honest, about the debate over Vietnam
in the 1960s and 1970s. When David Halberstam and others of his generation
turned against the war, their objection went beyond personalities, tricks, and lies.
The problem was not McNamara or Rusk or the misguided American military or
the dishonest politicians. The “real problem,” Halberstam wrote, was more basic.
It was “the failure to examine the assumptions of the era”—the widely shared
assumptions about the nature of the Communist threat, about American interests
in a place as far off as Vietnam, and above all, about the role of America in the
world. It was the whole idea, which lay behind containment and the Truman Doc-
trine, of a “manifest U.S. destiny in the world,” the whole notion that the United
States was the possessor of transcendent truth and was its best and only defender.
Acheson and Truman and the whole postwar establishment saw the world in terms
of good and evil, that “the great threat to the world was Communist” and that it was
the role of the United States to resist. Halberstam himself had once believed this,
but when he turned against the war he also professed to abandon the worldview
that had produced it. Now the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to
him as “just two new great powers struggling to find their balance,” each with an
equal and equally absurd messianic vision.
Today, a true debate about foreign policy doctrine would examine not some
fictitious neoconservatism but what remains the dominant worldview that Hal-
berstam and his generation came to criticize. That worldview has its critics in
the intellectual world, today as in the past—from Chomsky to Buchanan to John

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 Robert Kagan

Mearsheimer—but in the political world those who even remotely stand in criti-
cism of this dominant approach—Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, or Dennis Kucinich,
for instance—can barely fight their way onto the ballot. In 2008, as in almost
every election of the past century, American voters will choose between two varia-
tions of the same worldview.
There is much to question in that philosophy. And there is also much to
praise. People understandably want a foreign policy doctrine that produces only
the results they desire and avoids all errors. Unfortunately, no such doctrine
exists. A doctrine that precluded war with Iraq would also likely preclude going
to war over Kosovo, just as a strategy that guaranteed America would never go
to war in Vietnam might not have been successful in the Cold War. Realists and
left-revisionists and genuine conservatives may continue to claim that they have
the formula for success, but on the rare occasions when their formula has been
tried, it, too, has ended in failure or been rejected by the American people.
Today, some self-professed realists, such as Michael Lind, celebrate the great
virtues of Dwight D. Eisenhower, chiefly because he did not send combat troops
to Vietnam. But these virtues mostly eluded Ike’s contemporaries, who won-
dered whether a foreign policy based as heavily on threatening nuclear war (as
Eisenhower did on more than one occasion) and on CIA-engineered coups (as
in Iran and Guatemala) was really so brilliant. Of course, the deeply confused
Lind himself once wrote a book insisting that Vietnam, even though a disaster,
was “The Necessary War.”
In fact, the expansive, idealistic, and at times militaristic American approach
to foreign policy has produced some accomplishments of world historical
importance—the defeat of Nazism, Japanese imperialism, and Soviet Commu-
nism—as well as some notable failures and disappointments. But it was not as if
the successes were the product of a good America and the failures the product
of a bad America. They were all the product of the same America. The achieve-
ments, as well as the failures, derived not from innocence or purity of motive,
and not because Americans abided by an imagined ideal of conduct in the
world, but from the very qualities that often make Americans queasy: their will-
ingness to accumulate and use power, their ambition and sense of honor, their
spiritedness in defense of both interests and principles, their dissatisfaction with
the status quo and belief in the possibility of change. Are we really interested in
abandoning this course?

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