Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 16

MODERN AGE

That political religion, fully developed in
Wilsonian idealism,26 overwhelms attention
to the moralistic motives of our interven-
tion in World War I, the "Crusade" that
described our engagement in World War
II, the military defense of the "right to self-
determination" of the South Vietnamese
that Lyndon Johnson used to justify the
war in Vietnam, the Balkan intervention by
the Clinton administration, the invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq of the George W. Bush
administration. Even today, calls for inter-
ventions around the world to protect women
are made from a sense of moral right, not
merely to advance feminist ideology.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, the
coalition of forces within the Republican
Party lost an anchor that tethered them to
a common foreign policy. Anticommunism
was the glue that held together libertarians,
Evangelical and millenarian Christians,
"country club" Republicans, the remaining
members of the Eisenhower and Rockefeller
wings of the Republican Party, supply-side
economists, Reagan Democrats, traditional
political conservatives, and anticommunist
liberals, who came to be called neoconser-
vatives. Absent that threat to our national
survival, the Republican-Conservative coali-
tion could not hold, nor could it act effec-
tively. After the collapse of the Soviet Union,
George H. W. Bush was unable to design
a unifying vision for his administration.
When faced with a recession, President Bush
broke his word, raised taxes, and cut the only
ties he had to economic conservatives. In
the presidential contest of 1992, forty-seven
years after the end of World War II, the
electoral power of the "Greatest Generation"
had weakened with age, and a younger can-
didate, William Jefferson Clinton, defeated
the last president who had fought in the
Second World War.

16

FALL 2014

A political vacuum existed that was filled
by a neoconservative "Statement of Prin-
ciples" issued by the Project for the New
American Century in June 1997 and signed
by twenty-five Republican leaders.27 Project
staff and directors included William Kristol
and Robert Kagan.
Though admirable in its patriotic senti-
ments and its call for the revival of "a Rea-
ganite policy of military strength and moral
clarity," in hindsight, the "Statement of Prin-
ciples" of the Project for the New American
Century was used to advocate, and slavishly
justify, the imperial policies of President
George W. Bush. In the wake of that admin-
istration's policies, the nation's financial
resources were exhausted, the lives of yet
another generation of young Americans were
sacrificed in wars committed to nation build-
ing, new and costly welfare programs were
instituted that expanded the administrative
state and endangered constitutionally pro-
tected rights by empowering a Department
of Homeland Security to execute the Patriot
Act, which militarized the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, the National Security Agency,
and the Central Intelligence Agency. Neo-
conservative influence thus destroyed the
hard-won, limited-government "brand" of
the Republican Party.
In 1997, though not today, we might have
missed the ideological tone of the Project
for the New American Century to "shape a
new century," to maintain a strong military
that can meet "future challenges," the need
to meet our "responsibilities of global leader-
ship" and pursue a role "in maintaining peace
and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle
East," and the need "to shape circumstances
before crises emerge." The "Statement" ends
with a call to embrace a "cause."
Anyone familiar with nineteenth-century
ideologies and the manifestos with which
Modern Age - Fall 2014

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