By the 1990’s, therefore, the neoconservatives’ analysis seemed vindicated. But, by the same token, the cause that had drawn them together and defined them—the cold war—was concluded.
In the relatively quiet 1990’s, most of the nation’s attention was concentrated on taxes and budgets and other domestic concerns.
By 1996, Podhoretz himself proclaimed that neoconservatism was “dead,” and that “what killed it was not defeat but victory; it died not of failure but of success.” As a consequence, he wrote, “in foreign policy it has become impossible to define a neoconservative position.”
This, in my judgment, underestimated the signs that a distinctive neoconservative approach to post-cold-war foreign policy had already been taking form. In 1990-91, cold-war neoconservatives lined up with traditional conservatives serving in the first Bush administration in support of military action to force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait.
At the time, most liberals opposed the use of force, and so did some so-called paleoconservatives like Patrick J. Buchanan and Robert Novak, as well as various libertarians.
No less revealing than the debates between the war’s opponents and supporters was a division that opened within the ranks of the supporters themselves once the fighting ended.
In an act of quintessential “realism,” President Bush declined to order American forces to capture Baghdad and oust Saddam Hussein or even to obstruct Saddam’s campaign to suppress Iraqis who had risen in rebellion against him. Most neoconservatives disagreed with at least the latter of these decisions.
In 1992, the Bush administration’s realism got the better of it once again when war broke out in Bosnia. The President dismissed the violence there as a “hiccup,” and James Baker, his Secretary of State, famously declared that “we have no dog in that fight.”
When the new Clinton administration proved equally inert, and with the death toll mounting, a lobby developed for some form of American intervention.
Most active members of that lobby were neoconservatives, and other neoconservatives, with notable exceptions like Charles Krauthammer, embraced its position.
By contrast, most traditional conservatives believed that America’s own interests were not sufficiently engaged to justify intervention. Many liberals, for their part, while sharing a sense of urgency about Bosnia, were characteristically chary of using force or acting outside the aegis of the United Nations (whose actions, as it happened, had been constraining the victims of aggression more than the aggressors).
After Bosnia, the top foreign-policy issue in the latter half of the 1990’s was the enlargement of NATO. Liberals and conservatives were arrayed on all sides.
But most of those associated with the neoconservative camp, with the prominent exception of the historian Richard Pipes, were united in favor of it. I worked with Jeane Kirkpatrick and Paul Wolfowitz (and two moderate Democrats, Anthony Lake and Richard Holbrooke) to organize a statement, signed by most of America’s former top foreign-affairs officials, that helped to seal the debate.
