Jonathan Clarke: The end of the neocons?

[Jonathan Clarke, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs looks back at the rise and fall of the neocons, who encouraged George Bush to invade Iraq.]

With the Bush Administration about to recede into history, a widely asked question is whether the neoconservative philosophy that underpinned its major foreign policy decisions will likewise vanish from the scene.

The answer seems likely to be Yes.

But the epitaph of neoconservatism has been written before - prematurely, as it turned out, in the 1980s.

Having been apparently headed for extinction at the end of the Reagan Administration a second generation emerged in the mid-1990s.

This was period of post-Cold War overwhelming US military dominance which the neocons anointed as the"unipolar moment". It acted as the incubator for the ideas of modern neoconservatism.

Bold ambition

The main characteristics of neoconservatism are:

a tendency to see the world in binary good/evil terms
low tolerance for diplomacy
readiness to use military force
emphasis on US unilateral action
disdain for multilateral organisations
focus on the Middle East

Prominent neocons destined to play a major role in the Bush Administration included Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, David Addington and Richard Perle.

Neocon advocates in the media included Bill Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, while in academia, Bernard Lewis and Victor Davis Hanson were among those who provided intellectual heft.

Many neocons are Jews, but it is wrong to suggest that neoconservatism is an exclusively Jewish phenomenon.

In Washington DC, the favourite neocon think tank was the American Enterprise Institute....