When was pnac written

When the Towers came down, these men saw, at long last, their chance to turn their White Papers into substantive policy. Many other members have been long-time fixtures in the U.

Ikle , Peter W. Rodman , Stephen P. Rosen , Henry S. Rowen , Donald H. Rumsfeld , John R. It should not be surprising, therefore, that while the group devotes inordinate attention to Iraq, its most general focus has been on a need to "re-arm America.

To justify a need to "rearm" the country, however, reasons must be found. Second, the United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars and also to be able to respond to unanticipated contingencies in regions where it does not maintain forward-based forces.

Yet this standard needs to be updated to account for new realities and potential new conflicts. Third, the Pentagon must retain forces to preserve the current peace in ways that fall short of conduction major theater campaigns. 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.

PNAC, which phased out most operations by , was perhaps best known for its ability to attract divergent political factions behind its foreign policy agenda, which the group repeatedly demonstrated with its numerous sign-on letters and public statements.

The Project for the New American Century, a letterhead group closely associated with the American Enterprise Institute, served as the cornerstone of a neoconservative-led campaign to promote the invasion of Iraq, helping unite key figures from various ideological factions behind the cause.

By , as the United States became increasingly bogged down in a bloody counterinsurgency war in Iraq, the group phased out most operations. Many of its various directors and supporters, however, remain active today, particularly in the effort to push for war against Iran.

Before establishing PNAC, neoconservatives and their hardline nationalist allies, including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney , began aggressively promoting ideas meant to replace the militant anticommunism that dominated U. A key step in this process was the establishment of the Weekly Standard by two scions of the neoconservative movement—William Kristol son of Irving and John Podhoretz son of Norman. Together with Fred Barnes, a former correspondent for The New Republic , they secured funding from media mogul Rupert Murdoch to support the magazine, which quickly replaced Commentary as the high-profile outlet of neoconservative ideas.

In , Kristol and Kagan wrote an article for Foreign Affairs that become a sort of founding statement for the new neoconservative agenda. Benevolent global hegemony. The first objective of U. American hegemony is the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international order.

The appropriate goal of American foreign policy, therefore, is to preserve that hegemony as far into the future as possible. To achieve this goal, the United States needs a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of military supremacy and moral confidence.

PNAC served as an institutional vehicle for advocating the ideas laid out in this article. Housed in the same Washington, D. The younger neoconservatives had filled a space left by the increasing inability of older neoconservative views to provide a sufficient interpretative framework for the changing realities of international events in the s.

Establishing the format that would be used in later PNAC publications, the statement of principles was published letter-style and signed by an impressive list of supporters. Lewis Libby —there were also representatives from other political and social sectors, including Religious Right leaders like Gary Bauer ; mainstream Republicans like Steve Forbes , social conservatives like William Bennett ; hawkish nationalists like Peter Rodman , Rumsfeld, and Cheney; and prominent academic proponents of some neoconservative ideas like Francis Fukuyama and Eliot Cohen.

Nearly a dozen of the original signatories would, some four years later, obtain posts in the George W. Open Letters and Other Publications.