New American Century" Lives On -- Tom Barry

Overview

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was established in spring 1997. The nonprofit organization declared that its goal was “to promote American global leadership.” PNAC, which has been inactive since late 2005, was an initiative of the New Citizenship Project, whose chairman is William Kristol. PNAC described itself as a “nonprofit educational organization supporting American military, diplomatic, and moral leadership.”

PNAC's board of directors had the following members, as listed on its website as of May 26, 2006: William Kristol (chairman), Robert Kagan, Bruce Jackson, Mark Gerson, and Randy Scheunemann. Staff members: Ellen Bork (acting executive director), Gary Schmitt (senior fellow), Thomas Donnelly (senior fellow), Reuel Gerecht (director of the Middle East Initiative), Timothy Lehmann, (assistant director), and Michael Goldfarb (research associate). 1

PNAC's 1997 “Statement of Principles” set forth a new agenda for foreign and military policy that William Kristol and Robert Kagan described as “neo-Reaganite.” Signatories of this charter document said that they aimed “to make the case and rally support for American global leadership.” 2 Excerpts from the statement follow:

“We seem to have forgotten the essential elements of the Reagan administration's success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the U.S. global responsibilities.

“Of course, the United States must be prudent in how it exercises its power. But we cannot safely avoid the responsibilities of global leadership or the costs that are associated with its exercise. America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests. The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire. The history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership.

“Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.”

History and Impact

From an office in the same building that houses the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in downtown Washington and with funding from the Bradley Foundation, in 1993 William Kristol established the Project for the Republican Future in anticipation of the 1994 congressional elections. Following the resounding victory of right-wing Republicans, in 1995 he founded the Weekly Standard in the vacated offices of his Project for the Republican Future. In 1996, Kristol and Robert Kagan established PNAC, whose offices are also located in the AEI building and which is also generously supported by the Bradley Foundation. 3

By the time Kristol and Kagan organized PNAC, the widespread conservative frustration at having to endure another four years of Clinton liberals had largely papered over the conservative rift of the late 1980s. Newt Gingrich's “Contract with America” played a key role in unifying conservatives around an almost exclusively domestic agenda of big-government bashing, glorifying traditional family values, and attacking secular humanism. The domestic side of a reinvigorated right wing was coming together nicely in the 1990s, as seen in the winning role played by the Contract with America in ushering in a Republican majority in both houses of Congress under the Clinton presidency.

The right, however, had not recovered from the loss of its chief mobilizing principle: militant anticommunism. Central to the right's role in winning the White House for Ronald Reagan in 1980 was the fusion of three core conservative constituencies: social conservatives, economic libertarians, and national security militarists. In the late 1970s, neoconservatives played a strategic role in engineering this right-wing fusion, providing many of the key intellectual and ideological frameworks for the right wing's expanding counter-establishment and for the right-wing populists.

If they were to reprise this same unifying role in the late 1990s, the neocons knew that the old political messages daring the Democrats to associate themselves with the “L” word of liberalism would no longer suffice. Positioning themselves as New Democrats, Bill Clinton and Al Gore had stolen the neoconservative thunder on free market and big government issues.

To resurrect a right-wing populist movement, the challenge became creating a “neo-Reaganite” agenda—one that would appeal to the same “moral majority” citizens who were still fighting the backlash cultural wars against multiculturalism and the counterculture of the 1960s, citizens who responded to messages about moral clarity and America's mission, and whose sense of patriotism and nationalism could again be rallied to support increased military spending and interventionism abroad. Collectively, the neoconservatives, the Republican Party's hawks, and the social conservatives aimed to awaken America from its slumber to wage the good fight against the forces of evil that were gathering round the world. PNAC's founding statement in 1997 crystallized this new sense of American power and moral mission.

Liberals and progressives might regard PNAC's success at setting a new foreign policy agenda as an example of how the right's unity, messaging skills, networking, and focused political agenda of its small circle of foundations have enabled it to affect radical political change. Recalling the group's origins, PNAC Executive Director Gary Schmitt told a different story: “It is actually just the opposite. We started up precisely because the right was so divided—between the realists and the neo-isolationists.” According to Schmitt, “What we thought was that a tradition that was both more American and more particularly Reaganite had been dropped from the agenda.” 4

That agenda—one of U.S. moral clarity and the exercise of American power against evil—was articulated in 1996 by Kristol and Kagan in their Foreign Affairs essay on creating a neo-Reaganite foreign policy agenda. 5 PNAC, said Schmitt, was the result of Kristol and Kagan's decision to institutionalize their vision.

PNAC struck a discordant note in the dominant political discourse. At a time when most pundits and politicians were caught up in national debates about the price of prescription drugs, the future of social security, and the impact of globalization, PNAC warned of “present dangers” to U.S. national security.

On the whole, however, PNAC's associates, many of whom joined the George W. Bush administration, were hopeful. If conservatives continued to resist “isolationist impulses from within their own ranks” and if a new government adopted the history-tested principle of “peace through strength,” the “greatness” of the United States would be ensured in the next century. If the American people were to again embrace “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity,” they could look forward to a New American Century. 6

The rhetoric, political tactics, and assumptions about America's moral mission articulated by PNAC all had deep historical resonance. The three signature features of PNAC—the coalition-building to confront the “present danger,” the vision of a planetary Pax Americana, and the laying of nationalist claim to an entire century—were echoes of former visionaries, statesmen, and political leaders.

In raising the alarm about the present danger, PNAC sounded a traditional refrain of post-World War II militarists and internationalists. Since the late 1940s, factions of the U.S. foreign policy elite have stoked the patriotism and paranoia of Americans with warnings about the “present danger” the United States faces if lulled to sleep by dovish political and economic elites. For hawks and ideologues, the term “present danger,” along with the phrase “peace through strength,” has been the recurring rallying cry of those who argue for a more aggressive national security strategy.

In the advent of the 2000 presidential election, PNAC founders Kristol and Kagan, in their edited volume Present Dangers, invoked the words of the Henry Robinson Luce, who before the United States entered World War II predicted that the 20th century could be the “American Century,” if it created “an international moral order.” 7 The combination of military strength, “a vital international economic order” established by the United States, and foreign policy guided by America's God-ordained moral mission would, according to Luce, ensure American supremacy and international peace. 8

PNAC Letters and Statements (1998-2003)

Following its Statement of Principles, PNAC organized several reports and sign-on letters critical of the Clinton administration's foreign and military policy. These letters paralleled initiatives by the Republican majority in Congress to pressure Clinton to increase the military budget, implement a missile defense system, and switch to a more confrontational foreign policy that targeted rogue states. A January 1998 letter to Clinton contended that the only “acceptable policy” vis-à-vis Iraq was “one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.” 9

During Clinton's presidency, PNAC organized two sign-on letters to the president (the second one on Milosevic) and one letter to congressional leaders (on Iraq), and it published one statement (on the “Defense of Taiwan”). 10 In 2000, PNAC also published a book and a report, both of which were designed as blueprints for a new U.S. foreign and military policy. Present Dangers included work from many PNAC associates and other neoconservatives. “Rebuilding America's Defenses,” written largely by PNAC's Thomas Donnelly, offered an agenda for military transformation based on Defense Policy Guidance of 1992, the national security strategy written by Paul Wolfowitz, I. Lewis Libby, and Zalmay Khalilzad under the supervision of then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

The 2000 election of George W. Bush enabled PNAC to advance its agenda for the “New American Century.” Many PNAC principals moved into the Pentagon, vice president's office, and State Department. It was not, however, until after September 11, 2001, that the PNAC agenda was fast-forwarded.

On September 20, 2001, PNAC sent an open letter to Bush that commended his newly declared war on terrorism and urged him not only to target Osama bin Laden but also other “perpetrators,” including Saddam Hussein and Hezbollah. The letter made one of the first arguments for regime change in Iraq as part of the war on terror. According to the PNAC letter, “It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”

The letter also pointed out that to undertake this new war, it would be necessary to inject more money into the U.S. defense budget: “A serious and victorious war on terrorism will require a large increase in defense spending. Fighting this war may well require the United States to engage a well-armed foe, and will also require that we remain capable of defending our interests elsewhere in the world. We urge that there be no hesitation in requesting whatever funds for defense are needed to allow us to win this war.”

Including the first PNAC letter on the war on terrorism, PNAC published four letters to Bush from 2001 to 2003. In April 2002, PNAC sent Bush a letter regarding “Israel and the War on Terrorism,” followed on November 25, 2002, by a letter about Hong Kong, and a January 23, 2003 letter on increasing the military budget. In March 2003, PNAC published two statements on “Post-War Iraq.” 11

Latest from PNAC

The most recent PNAC statement was a January 28, 2005 letter addressed to congressional leaders requesting that they “take the steps necessary to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps.” It was the judgment of the signatories that an increase of 25,000 troops a year would be necessary to meet what Condoleezza Rice described as the country's “generational commitment” to fighting terrorism in the greater Middle East.

According to the letter, “The administration has been reluctant to adapt to this new reality.” But the signatories then countered: “We understand the dangers of continued federal deficits and the fiscal difficulty of increasing the number of troops. But the defense of the United States is the first priority of the government.”

The signatories of the January 2005 letter were: Peter Beinart, Jeffrey Bergner, Daniel Blumenthal, Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, Ivo Daalder, Thomas Donnelly, Michele Flournoy, Frank Gaffney, Reuel Gerecht, Lt. Gen. Buster Glosson (ret.), Bruce Jackson, Frederick Kagan, Robert Kagan, Craig Kennedy, Paul Kennedy, Col. Robert Killebrew (ret.), William Kristol, Will Marshall, Clifford May, Gen. Barry McCaffrey (ret.), Daniel McKivergan, Joshua Muravchik, Steven Nider, Michael O'Hanlon, Mackubin Thomas Owens, Ralph Peters, Danielle Pletka, Stephen Rosen, Maj. Gen. Robert Scales (ret.), Randy Scheunemann, Gary Schmitt, Walter Slocombe, James Steinberg, and James Woolsey.

Although many of the signatories belong to the usual circle of neocons—such as Boot, Cohen, Donnelly, Gaffney, Gerecht, the Kagans, May, Muravchik, Schmitt, and Woolsey—other signatories were such liberal hawks and liberal internationalists as Beinart, Paul Kennedy, Marshall, O'Hanlon, and James Steinberg. 12

Several months earlier, in September 2004, PNAC published an “Open Letter to the Heads of State and Government of the European Union and NATO,” which expressed concern about the domestic and foreign policies of Vladimir Putin's government in Russia. The letter stated: “President Putin's foreign policy is increasingly marked by a threatening attitude toward Russia's neighbors and Europe's energy security, the return of rhetoric of militarism and empire, and by a refusal to comply with Russia's international treaty obligations. In all aspects of Russian political life, the instruments of state power appear to be being rebuilt and the dominance of the security services to grow. We believe that this conduct cannot be accepted as the foundation of a true partnership between Russia and the democracies of NATO and the European Union.” 13

Among the 100 signatories were many prominent neoconservatives, including Boot, Ellen Bork, Donnelly, Carl Gershman, Bruce Jackson, Robert Kagan, Penn Kemble, May, Muravchik, Kristol, Schmitt, Pletka, and Woolsey. Prominent Democrats who signed the letter included Marshall, Steinberg, Joseph Biden, Richard Holbrooke, and Madeleine Albright.

The most recent PNAC report, Iraq: Setting the Record Straight, is an apologia for the disastrous invasion and war. It concludes that Bush's decision to act “derived from a perception of Saddam's intentions and capabilities, both existing and potential, and was grounded in the reality of Saddam's prior behavior.” The authors blame the reporting of the UN inspection teams and U.S. government statements, which they say “left wide gaps in the public understanding of what the president faced on March 18, 2003, and what we have learned since.” PNAC also charges that administration critics “selectively used material in the historical record to reinforce their case against the president's policy.” In other words, PNAC makes no apology for its own role in urging the administration to invade Iraq but rather defends the Bush administration as acting on the best intelligence available. 14

PNAC Loses Traction

PNAC's activities dwindled in 2005, and there have been no postings to its website in 2006. The most recent material under the “What's New” section of its website is from 2005: articles written by PNAC associates Gary Schmitt, Ellen Bork, and Daniel McKivergan, many of which were published in the Weekly Standard. 15

The war on terrorism that followed the 9/11 attacks spawned an array of other neoconservative organizations and front groups that share PNAC's views about U.S. global dominance and whose key figures have been associated with PNAC. Several of these entities—such as the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, the U.S. Committee on NATO, and the Coalition for Democracy in Iran—were formed as ad hoc pressure groups closely associated with PNAC and have now folded or become dormant. Other groups, notably the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), have emerged as major institutions with a staff and budget far larger than PNAC's.

PNAC founders William Kristol and Robert Kagan established PNAC as a political project to set a new agenda for U.S. foreign and military policy. Unlike many of the new neocon-led foreign policy groups, such as the FDD and the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD III), PNAC never had the pretension of being a bipartisan organization. All of PNAC's key figures have been Republicans.

In an administration with a foreign policy team mainly composed of PNAC associates, PNAC's role in setting the foreign policy agenda for the 21st century was largely successful. For the neoconservatives, the new challenge was to forge bipartisan support for this agenda of U.S. supremacy, preventive war, and regime change—focused first and foremost on the Middle East. FDD and the CPD aim to meet this challenge, although both groups are primarily Republican.

Since Bush became president in 2000, and especially after 9/11, the neoconservatives working outside the administration have attempted to set the broad ideological and specific policy directions of the administration's foreign policy. The AEI has functioned as the neoconservatives' main think tank, and Kristol's Weekly Standard is the neocons' main policy magazine. Both AEI and the Weekly Standard have been closely linked to PNAC since its founding, and all three are located in the same office building in Washington, DC.

In the course of the Bush presidency, differences have emerged in the circle of hawks and social conservatives that PNAC brought together in 1997. Some, like Francis Fukuyama, have backed away from the imperialism of PNAC and the neocon camp, and while generally supportive of the Bush administration's stance on the “global war on terror,” many neocons, militarists, and social conservatives have grown increasingly critical of its foreign, military, and domestic policies—creating splits between PNAC associates inside and outside government.

Some of the problems identified in PNAC's 1997 Statement of Principles have come back to undermine conservative unity around foreign policy. The first paragraph of PNAC's statement began with these observations: “ American foreign and defense policy is adrift …” In addition to criticizing “the incoherent policies of the Clinton administration,” conservatives “have also resisted isolationist impulses from within their own ranks. But conservatives have not confidently advanced a strategic vision of America's role in the world. They have not set forth guiding principles for American foreign policy. They have allowed differences over tactics to obscure potential agreement on strategic objectives. And they have not fought for a defense budget that would maintain American security and advance American interests in the new century.”

Main areas of current conservative dispute include immigration policy, stem cell research, levels of troop commitments in Iraq, democratization policy, Israel, and U.S. relations with China, North Korea, and Iran. Although the neocon camp and its allies, including the Rumsfeld-Cheney foreign policy team, are all hardliners with respect to Iran, there are public differences about which groups should receive U.S. assistance. While the leading neocon figures on Iran policy, such as Michael Rubin and Kenneth Timmerman, oppose funding the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian cult-like group with militants in Iraq, other players in the Iran policy debate, such as Raymond Tanter and the Iran Policy Committee, are MEK boosters.

Splits have also emerged on Israel, with groups such the Center for Security Policy (CSP) adamantly opposing any return of seized land, while other individuals such as Elliott Abrams cautiously support the policies of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Another widening divide among neocons surfaced in the immigration debate, with an increasing number of neoconservatives—including Richard Perle, David Frum, and Frank Gaffney—distancing themselves from the neocon historical support for a liberal immigration policy, while others, notably William Kristol, have been sharply critical of social conservatives for their restrictionist positions. Two neoconservative centers—FDD and especially the CSP—have positioned themselves in the restrictionist camp.

These and other splits have eroded the original PNAC coalition of neoconservatives, militarists, and social conservatives, although the CSP, FDD, CPD, and other new groups have established similar coalitions with different memberships. Despite saying that PNAC was modeled after the second incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger, neither Kristol nor Kagan are members of the newly organized CPD. 16

Funding

From 2000 to 2003, PNAC received $170,000 in grants from several conservative foundations, including the Earhart, Olin, and William J. Donner foundations. 17 From 1994 to 2004, the New Citizenship Project that sponsored PNAC and whose chairman is Kristol, received $3.3 million in grants, largely from the largest right-wing foundations: Bradley, Olin, and the Scaife Foundations. The Bradley Foundation has been PNAC's largest source of foundation support, granting PNAC $700,000 from 1997 to 2004. In its first year of operations, PNAC received grants from Bradley, Sarah Scaife, and Olin foundations. 18