![]() In recent years, many of the former neoconservatives – or those aligned with them – have coalesced in opposition to former President Donald Trump. Twenty years after the attacks on 9/11, an event that arguably set in motion the fulfilment of neoconservative foreign policy dreams, what has become of the neoconservatives? It was an empire for the sake of promoting liberal democracy as they understood it.” They got to make an attempt at creating an American empire. “They got the chance to implement their most strongly desired objective. “They were the dog that caught the car,“ said Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age, a conservative quarterly critical of neoconservatives. Through policy advocacy in Washington, think-tank papers and articles in conservative journals of opinion, this loosely aligned bunch included some of the loudest supporters of the war in Iraq and other forms of US foreign adventurism. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (centre right) shares a laugh with Attorney General John Ashcroft and US military leaders outside the White House ahead of a meeting with President George W Bush in March 2003 when the US invaded Iraq In the 1990s and 2000s, neoconservatives like Irving Kristol of The National Interest and Norman Podhoretz of Commentary were commonly lumped in with a younger generation of thinkers and fellow travellers, like William Kristol, foreign policy analysts Robert Kagan and Max Boot, Bush speechwriter David Frum and others who served in the George W Bush administration. What was first used to describe a group of New York-based intellectuals and former liberals, neoconservativism has come to be defined by support for aggressive foreign policy through military might. But these conservative thinkers and practitioners who saw their foreign policy ambitions put into practice on the world stage were not new. In the early 2000s the term neoconservative – or when often used derisively, “neocon” – became part of the common American lexicon. “That effort has proven to be a costly failure.” “American conservatives assumed that military power would enable the United States to accomplish a radical ideological agenda, particularly in the Middle East,” said Andrew Bacevich, author of After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed. Today, as the last US troops have departed Afghanistan, weary after years of war, the legacy of the neoconservatives remains widely criticised. “Neoconservatives were one of the more cohesive intellectual and political groups that made a strident case for US global military dominance and, after 9/11, a series of open-ended wars.” “Neoconservatives proved to be extremely influential in shaping American foreign policy after the Cold War,” said Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy. While the level of influence of the neoconservatives on the Bush administration is often debated, their heeded calls for a hawkish American presence defined the first years of the twenty-first century. What followed over the next few years – US invasions of two nations that lasted decades – changed the course of history. Although Clinton ignored their advice, the signers included names of men who would later hold sway as part of George W Bush’s presidential administration: Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, to name a few. The letter stood as a statement of policy in concert with a school of thought commonly called neoconservatism. Keep reading list of 4 items list 1 of 4 Timeline: How Septemled to US’s longest war list 2 of 4 Biden to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan by September 11 list 3 of 4 Pentagon survivors recall horror of 9/11 attack, reflect on war list 4 of 4 Twenty years after 9/11, did US win its ‘war on terror’? end of list
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