It is also instructive that one of George Bush’s only foreign-policy successes occurred when he ignored the neocons’ advice. Building on the Clinton administration’s earlier efforts, the Bush team convinced Libya to abandon its WMD programs in 2003. A key step was the decision to forego “regime change” and leave Muammar el-Qaddafi in power. Had Bush listened to the neoconservatives who opposed this compromise, Qaddafi might still have WMD today.

 

NEOCONSERVATISM’S inadequacy as a guide to policy is no longer debatable: we have run the experiment and the results are in. If a physician misdiagnosed ailments with the regularity that neoconservatives have misread world politics, only patients with a death wish would remain in their care.

Yet politicians like John McCain and media outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post continue to treat neoconservatives as fonts of wisdom, while giving only occasional space to the realists whose track record has been far superior. However disappointing this may be to those who hope for better, realism offers one consolation: a country as powerful as the United States can afford to make lots of mistakes and still survive. But that is small comfort when one contemplates the array of problems the next president will inherit from the neoconservative moment. Until politicians and media organizations consign neoconservatism to the same ash heap reserved for Leninism, Lysenkoism, phrenology and other failed beliefs, anyone who wants a more effective U.S. foreign policy had better get used to disappointment.

 

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Relations at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

 

¹See Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), chap. 8; Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), pp. 179–180; John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Soviets Can’t Win Quickly in Central Europe,” International Security, vol. 7, no. 1 (Summer 1982).

²See Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft and Richard Murphy, “Differentiated Containment,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 76, no. 3 (May/June 1997).

³See William Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World,” International Security, vol. 24, no. 1 (Summer 1999); Stephen M. Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).

⁴See George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), pp. 489.

⁵See Brent Scowcroft, “Don’t Attack Saddam,” Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2002; John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “An Unnecessary War,” Foreign Policy, vol. 134 (January/February 2003); Andrew J. Bacevich, “The Nation at War,” Los Angeles Times, March 20, 2003.

⁶The Iraq Body Count database, which is based on published death reports, estimates that there have been between eighty-five thousand and ninety-two thousand violent deaths since the U.S. invasion in March 2003. Estimates by the Iraqi government, the World Health Organization and others are significantly higher, in some cases well over five hundred thousand dead. The United Nations reports that nearly 5 million Iraqis had fled their homes by 2007, and that 2.5 million Iraqi refugees had left the country.

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