So what happens when the United States bases its foreign policy on this worldview? The answer: nothing good.

NEOCONSERVATISM HAS been around since the 1970s, but its impact on U.S. foreign policy was modest until 2001. Neoconservatives like to portray Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy as epitomizing their ideas, but it was only Reagan’s rhetoric that echoed the neocons’ Manichean worldview. Reagan’s policies were closer to the realist ideal: he lifted the grain embargo on the Soviet Union in 1981, sold advanced weaponry to Saudi Arabia, supported authoritarian states provided they were anti-Communist, withdrew U.S. troops from Lebanon in 1983 when he saw a quagmire looming and sought a balance of power in the Persian Gulf by backing Saddam Hussein’s Iraq against revolutionary Iran. Even the vaunted “Reagan Doctrine” was really just a cost-effective way to pressure Soviet clients rather than a genuine attempt to export democracy. After all, many of the warlords and rebels that Reagan backed (such as the Afghan mujahedeen) were hardly apostles of freedom and liberty.

Reagan’s reaction to glasnost and perestroika departed from neoconservatism too. Wedded to an exaggerated view of Soviet power and convinced that Communist regimes could never change, the neocons were caught flatfooted by Mikhail Gorbachev and among the last to realize that the Soviet Union was unraveling. In fact, leading neocons were deeply disappointed when Reagan stopped condemning the “evil empire” and engaged Moscow in constructive diplomacy. They were equally upset by the realist foreign policy of George H. W. Bush, despite his skillful handling of the Soviet collapse and his wise restraint in the 1991 Gulf War. Thus, reports of neoconservatism’s earlier influence have been greatly exaggerated, and the neocons deserve little or no credit for America’s cold-war victory.

The true test of neoconservatism began after the 9/11 attacks, when it became the intellectual blueprint for U.S. foreign policy. Although there were a handful of realists in the George W. Bush administration, neoconservatives occupied key positions in the Defense Department and in the influential office of Vice President Dick Cheney. Prominent neoconservatives inside the Bush administration included Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, vice-presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Assistant Secretary of State (and later UN Ambassador) John Bolton, Defense Policy Board chair Richard Perle, as well as aides like Elliott Abrams, John Hannah, David Wurmser, Michael Rubin, Abram Shulsky, Aaron Friedberg and Eric Edelman. Other neoconservatives served as cheerleaders and enablers from their vantage points at the Weekly Standard, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal editorial pages. This situation led Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer to declare that “what neoconservatives have long been advocating is now being articulated and practiced at the highest levels of government . . . it is the maturation of a governing ideology whose time has come.” Similarly, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol proudly proclaimed in 2003 that “our policy . . . is now official. It has become the policy of the U.S. government. . . . History and reality are about to weigh in, and we are inclined simply to let them render their verdict.”

Not since Neville Chamberlain has history delivered such a swift and crushing judgment.

Their chief failure, of course, is Iraq, which columnist Thomas Friedman termed “the war the neoconservatives wanted, the war the neoconservatives marketed.” The neocons were wrong about Iraq’s WMD, wrong about its alleged links to al-Qaeda and above all wrong about what would happen after the United States ousted Saddam. Kenneth Adelman announced the war would be a “cakewalk,” and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz dismissed Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki’s estimates that the occupation would require several hundred thousand troops as “wildly off the mark.” Wolfowitz also told Congress that the war and reconstruction would cost less than $95 billion. Wolfowitz was “off the mark” by just a hair: the price tag for the war already exceeds $500 billion and will probably exceed several trillion by the time we are finished.

Neoconservatives also loudly, naively and wrongly predicted that Saddam’s ouster would yield far-reaching benefits in the region. Fouad Ajami reportedly told Vice President Cheney that the streets in Basra and Baghdad would “erupt in joy the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans,” and Kristol foresaw a “chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy.” Joshua Muravchik predicted that the invasion “will set off tremors that will help rattle other tyrannies including the mullahs of Iran and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez,” Richard Perle thought Syria and Iran would “get out of the terrorism business,” and Michael Ledeen claimed “it is impossible to imagine that the Iranian people would tolerate tyranny in their own country once freedom has come to Iraq.” None of these rosy scenarios has come to pass.

The most consistent source of dubious forecasts was Kristol himself, who predicted the occupation would require only seventy-five thousand troops and that U.S. forces “could probably be drawn down to several thousand soldiers after a year or two.” On the eve of the invasion, he reassured readers that “very few wars in American history were better prepared or more thoroughly than this one by this President.” One month later, he announced that “the battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably.” Kristol also derided warnings of a Sunni-Shia conflict as “pop sociology” and claimed there was “almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq’s always been very secular.”

The war dragged on, and the Kristol ball remained cloudy. He and coauthor Robert Kagan greeted the first anniversary of the Iraq invasion by announcing that Iraqis “had made enormous strides” toward liberal democracy, smugly deriding prewar predictions “that a liberated Iraq would fracture into feuding clans and unleash a bloodbath.” Nine months later, Kristol judged the Iraqi elections of January 2005 to be “a genuine turning point.” Wrong again: Iraq spiraled ever deeper into sectarian violence in 2006 and 2007, and the bloodbath Kristol had dismissed became a reality.⁶

This string of failed forecasts flowed directly from the neocons’ naive belief that democracy would be easy to establish and from their ignorance about Iraq and the broader region. These beliefs also made them easy prey for the blandishments of unscrupulous individuals like Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi. Because they assumed the occupation would be easy and cheap, they saw no need to prepare for protracted war and dismissed the realists’ warnings that establishing a stable political order would be a long, expensive and uncertain undertaking.

Neoconservatives now proclaim that the “surge” is working and that victory is within reach. Unfortunately, this is not true. There was never any question that the United States could dampen the violence by increasing troop levels. The key issue, however, is whether the surge will enable Iraqis to create a workable political system and an effective military that can disarm powerful local militias. That has not happened, which is why the United States will remain stuck in Iraq for the foreseeable future, trying to prop up a government that still cannot stand on its own.

In any case, the tactical success of the surge hardly vindicates the neoconservatives’ larger strategic blunders. Not only did they get us into a quagmire in Iraq, but their war helped increase Iran’s power in the region. Pro-Iranian leaders now govern in Baghdad, and U.S. threats have given Tehran additional incentives to acquire nuclear weapons. Remarkably, the neocons could hardly have done more to help Iran and hurt the United States had they been on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s payroll.

But Iraq is hardly the neocons’ only failure.

By marching us into Baghdad while refusing to negotiate seriously with “evil” North Korea, they made it possible for Kim Jong Il to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, recycle nuclear material and test a nuclear weapon. Efforts to contain Pyongyang’s program made progress only after Bush abandoned the neocons’ approach to North Korea and engaged in patient diplomacy.

By insisting on elections in the Palestinian territories while impeding any genuine effort toward peace, neoconservatives helped Hamas win a parliamentary majority in 2006 and made a two-state solution that would preserve Israel’s Jewish character even more elusive. The subsequent refusal to recognize Hamas then exposed the hypocrisy of the Bush administration’s alleged commitment to spreading democracy in the Arab world. And by backing Israel’s ill-conceived strategy during the summer 2006 Lebanon war, neoconservatives undermined the pro-Western Siniora government, prolonged a conflict that cost Israeli lives and strengthened Hezbollah. They claim to be committed to Israel’s well-being, but the neoconservatives’ policies have in fact been deeply harmful to the Jewish state.

The neoconservative approach to foreign policy has driven America’s global image to new lows and given millions of people reason to doubt our commitment to the rule of law, justice and basic human rights. And while the United States has floundered, a rising China has quietly expanded its power, prestige and influence.

This record is not simply a run of bad luck; only policy makers committed to a deeply flawed worldview could achieve results so far from their declared objectives. In each case, failure occurred because neoconservatives inflated threats, exaggerated what military force could accomplish, eschewed diplomacy and blithely ignored facts that didn’t fit their preconceived notions.