Foreign Policy In Focus | Special Report | The Men Who Stole the Show

Special Report
October 2002
The Men Who Stole the Show
By Tom Barry and Jim Lobe

Focusing on the “New American Century”

Bringing It All Together

Box 1: Security Strategy Foretold

Box 2: Glossary of the Right-Wing Sectors in U.S. Foreign Policy

Endnotes

Endnotes
1 Barton Gellman, “Keeping the U.S. First; Pentagon Would Preclude a Rival Superpower,” The Washington Post, 11 March 1992, p. 1.
2 Todd S. Purdum, “Embattled, Scrutinized, Powell Soldiers On,” The New York Times, July 25, 2002.
3 Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 70, no. 1 (Winter 1990-91).
4 Key parts of the right-wing anti-communist coalition—particularly the libertarians and “paleoconservatives” such as Pat Buchanan—strongly opposed the imperial vision of the kind that Krauthammer and fellow-neo-conservatives were proposing.
5 Tom Barry and Jim Lobe, “Foreign Policy: Right Face, Forward March,” Foreign Policy In Focus, April 2002.
6 Statement of Principles, Project for the New American Century, June 3, 1997, <http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm>.
7 PNAC boosters have not shied away from the notion of an imperium. See, for example, Dan Balz, “In War Reversal, Criticism is Mostly From Right,” The Washington Post, Nov. 26, 2001, quoting William Kristol.
8 In addition to Robert Kagan and William Kristol, other neo-conservatives that have associated themselves with PNAC include Elliott Abrams, Eliot Cohen, Midge Decter, Francis Fukuyama, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podheretz, and George Weigel. Prominent social conservatives associated with PNAC include Gary Bauer, William Bennett, Steve Forbes, Dan Quayle, and Vin Weber. Hawks or national security militarists include Richard Cheney, Frank Gafney, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby, Richard Perle, Peter Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and R. James Woolsey.
9 Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), pp. 178-202.
10 See Diamond, Roads to Dominion, for excellent treatment of fusionist trends in the right until the mid-1990s. According to Diamond, the New Right of the 1970s and 1980s “represented a reassertion of the old fusionist blend of anticommunism, traditionalism, and libertarianism” but with more emphasis on moral traditionalism than given by the fusionists of the 1950s.
11 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 36: “They wished for a military posture approaching mobilization; they would create or invent whatever crises were required to bring this about.”
12 For the influence of the Center for National Security and arms manufacturers, see William Hartung, Military Industrial Complex Revisited, Foreign Policy In Focus Special Report, June 1999. See also Jason Vest, “ The Men from JINSA and CSP,” The Nation, September 2/9, 2002.
13 Ethics and Public Policy Center, “About EPPC,” <http://www.eppc.org/about/xq/ASP/qx/about.htm>.
14 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
15 Also see William Bennett, Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism (New York: Doubleday, 2002).
16 The New York Times, March 10, 2002.
17 Nicholas Kristof, “The New Internationalists,” New York Times, May 21, 2002.
18 For a helpful examination of the links between the Christian Right and the largely Jewish neo-conservatives, see Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guilford Press, 2000). The founders of neo-conservative thought, Irving Kristol, Midge Decter, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, defend the Christian Right, declaring that on “the survival of Israel, the Jews have no more stalwart friends than evangelical Christians,” if for no other reason than the millennialist and dispensationalist beliefs of the Christian Right revolve around an apocalyptic showdown in Jerusalem (Berlet and Lyons, p. 263). Also see Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion, op. cit.
19 The three principals of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, founded in the wake of 9/11, are Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Steve Forbes.
20 For more on the connections between AEI and the Bush administration, see Jim Lobe, “The Axis of Incitement,” Inter Press Service, March 6, 2002.
21 Working with Perle at AEI, in addition to Lynne Cheney, are several other neo-conservatives who have played important roles in expanding the list of potential targets for the administration’s war on terrorism, including Michael Ledeen, who co-founded JINSA with Gaffney; former CIA officer Reuel Marc Gerecht, who also heads PNAC’s Mideast project; and Michael Rubin, who was hired by the Pentagon to help prepare the groundwork for a post-Hussein Iraq. Ledeen, who gained notoriety as an intermediary between Oliver North and the Iranians in the Iran-Contra affairs, and Gerecht have both been especially outspoken about promoting a pro-U.S. uprising in Iran.
22 Jim Lobe & Tom Barry, “U.S. Middle East Policy: ‘Enough is Enough,’” Foreign Policy In Focus, April 2002.
23 This pragmatic application of free trade philosophy to U.S. foreign economic policy is the prevailing approach of conservatives (and most liberal policymakers, as well) in pursuing economic supremacy. However, within this general framework, there are bitter divisions. The nationalist and reactionary populist right wing, as epitomized by Pat Buchanan, contends that Washington increasingly measures U.S. economic interests by what is good for footloose U.S. corporations rather than the American people and domestic production. The populist Right is more apt to support protectionist measures than the dominant internationalists of the Republican Party, who respond primarily to the interests of corporate donors. A similar split within the right regarding international economic policy revolves around U.S. sanctions. Unilateral economic sanctions are generally opposed by the right’s Wall Street donors but are heartily supported by right-wing populists and neo-conservatives. A powerful coalition of business interests complains that the imposition of economic sanctions in response to violations of human rights and other international norms has the effect of handicapping U.S. corporations and undermining the drive for U.S. economic supremacy. This business-first approach infuriates the moral, political, and military ideologues of the right, who believe that the U.S. should severely restrict or condition its business dealings with respect to such considerations as national security, anticommunism, and the repression of religious minorities, principally Christians. For more on the divisions within the Right on economic supremacy concerns, see Tom Barry and Jim Lobe, “U.S. Foreign Policy—Attention, Right Face, Forward March,” op. cit.