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March 02, 2020 READ The Paradox of America’s Endless Wars February 26, 2020 READ Neocons in the Age of Trump? The Case of the FDD and Iran’s “Fake Opposition” February 19, 2020 READ The American Chaos Machine: U.S. Foreign Policy Goes Off the Rails January 25, 2020 READ Project for the New American Century last updated: October 16, 2019 Share:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window) Please note: The Militarist Monitor neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site. Former Contact Information Project for the New American Century 1150 17th Street NW, Suite 510 Washington, DC 20036 Tel: 202-293-4983 Website: http://newamericancentury.org/ PNAC Participants A Complete List of PNAC Signatories and Contributing Writers (1997-2005)PNAC Contributors and Signatories from the Reagan AdministrationPNAC Contributors and Signatories from the George H.W. Bush AdministrationPNAC Contributors and Signatories from in the Clinton AdministrationPNAC Contributors and Signatories from the George W. Bush Administration Letters and Statements Letter to Congress on Increasing U.S. Ground Forces, January 28, 2005.Letter of 100 on Democracy in Russia, September 28, 2004.Statement in Support of the People of Hong Kong, Project for the New American Century and the U.S. Committee for Hong Kong, June 29, 2004.Second Statement on Post-War Iraq, March 28, 2003.Statement on Post-War Iraq, March 19, 2003.Letter to President Bush on the Defense Budget, January 23, 2003.Letter to President Bush on Hong Kong, Project for the New American Century and the U.S. Committee for Hong Kong, November 25, 2002.Letter to President Bush on Israel, Arafat and the War on Terrorism, April 3, 2002.Letter to President Bush on the War on Terrorism, September 20, 2001.Statement on the Defense of Taiwan, August 20, 1999.Letter to the President on Milosevic, September 20, 1998.Letter to Gingrich and Lott on Iraq, May 29, 1998.Letter to President Clinton on Iraq, January 26, 1998.Statement of Principles, June 3, 1997 Related: American Israel Public Affairs Committee American Islamophobia’s Fake Facts American Enterprise Institute New Revelations of the US in Iran American Security Council Foundation The End of the American Empire American Conservative Union The Unwritten American Rules of the Road Center for a New American Security Project for a New American Imbroglio The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was established in 1997 by a number of leading neoconservative writers and pundits to advocate aggressive U.S. foreign policies and “rally support for American global leadership.” One of the group’s founding documents claimed, “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. 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.”[1] PNAC, which phased out most operations by 2006, 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. PNAC forged an influential coalition of rightist political actors in support of its calls for an aggressive “war on terror” aimed largely at the Middle East, including the invasion of Iraq. Although some observers have exaggerated its impact—two scholars, for instance, argued in the Sociological Quarterly that PNAC almost single-handedly “developed, sold, enacted, and justified a war with Iraq”[2]—the group was arguably the most effective proponent of neoconservative ideas during the period between the beginning of President Bill Clinton’s second term and President George W. Bush’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq.[3] 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 2003 invasion of Iraq, helping unite key figures from various ideological factions behind the cause. By 2006, 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. PNAC’s 1997 “Statement of Principles” set forth an ambitious agenda for foreign and military policy that William Kristol and Robert Kagan, PNAC’s founders, described as “neo-Reaganite.”[4] Signatories of this charter document included many leading figures from the Christian Right and other conservative political factions. The statement argued, “We seem to have forgotten the essential elements of the Reagan administration’s success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the U.S. global responsibilities.”[5] PNAC staff and directors included Kristol (chairman), Kagan, Bruce Jackson, Mark Gerson, Randy Scheunemann, Ellen Bork (deputy director), Gary Schmitt (senior fellow), Thomas Donnelly (senior fellow), Reuel Gerecht (director of the Middle East Initiative), Timothy Lehmann, (assistant director), and Michael Goldfarb (research associate).[6] In addition, a host of both rightist ideologues and liberal hawks supported PNAC’s various sign-on letters and policy statements. (See “A Complete List of PNAC Signatories and Contributing Writers,” Right Web.) Origins and Agenda 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.S. policy during much of the Cold War. A key step in this process was the 1995 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 1996, Kristol and Kagan wrote an article for Foreign Affairs that become a sort of founding statement for the new neoconservative agenda. Entitled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” the article established several pillars of a post-Cold War foreign policy agenda, including maintaining a benevolent hegemony based in part on a willingness to use force unilaterally and preemptively. Kristol and Kagan asked rhetorically: “What should the U.S. role be? Benevolent global hegemony. Having defeated the ‘evil empire,’ the United States enjoys strategic and ideological predominance. The first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance by strengthening America’s security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests, and standing up for its principles around the world.”[7] The main enemy was internal; in Kagan and Kristol’s opinion, it was “time once again to challenge an indifferent America and a confused American conservatism.” They added: “In a world in which peace and American security depend on American power and the will to use it, the main threat the United States faces now and in the future is its own weakness. 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.”[8] PNAC served as an institutional vehicle for advocating the ideas laid out in this article. Housed in the same Washington, D.C. office building as the American Enterprise Institute, PNAC was staffed by a number of emerging neoconservatives who generated statements and open letters on various themes and marshaled the gathering of signatures of elite political actors. The founding of PNAC marked a “complete generational transition” in neoconservatism that occurred somewhere “between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Bosnian war,” write conservative scholars Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke in their 2004 book America Alone. “By the later half of the 1990s, Kagan, William Kristol, [Joshua] Muravchik, [Richard] Perle, [and Paul] Wolfowitz … had assumed the leadership roles that had long been held by Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Norman Podhoretz. 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 1990s.”[9] PNAC’s June 1997 statement of principles repeated many of the same goals laid out in Kristol and Kagan’s Foreign Affairs article, including the use of preemptive force. The statement argued that “the history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire.” Responding to what they saw as the confusion of the Clinton administration, the statement called for a “Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity” that would be based on several key pillars. “We need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future; we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values; we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad; we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.”[10] 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. Although many of the signatories to the statement of principles (and other PNAC documents) were neoconservatives, young and old—such as Elliott Abrams, Norman Podhoretz, George Wiegel, Midge Decter, Frank Gaffney, and I. 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. This range of support demonstrated PNAC’s success as an instrument for building a broader coalition of influential militarists around the neoconservative ideas and objectives of its founders. Nearly a dozen of the original signatories would, some four years later, obtain posts in the George W. Bush administration, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Paula Dobriansky, Zalmay Khalilzad, Abrams, and Libby.[11] In the wake of 9/11, the agenda items outlined in PNAC’s founding statement reemerged in the form of Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy, the definitive statement of the so-called Bush Doctrine.[12] As described by leading international relations scholar Robert Jervis, the Bush Doctrine is composed of “a strong belief in the importance of a state’s domestic regime in determining its foreign policy and the related judgment that this is an opportune time to transform international politics; the perception of great threats that can be defeated only by new and vigorous policies, most notably preventive war; a willingness to act unilaterally when necessary; and, as both a cause and a summary of these beliefs, an overriding sense that peace and stability require the United States to assert its primacy in world politics.”[13] Open Letters and Other Publications PNAC published more than a dozen open letters—usually sent to the president or other public officials—on issues ranging from the defense of Taiwan to the need to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic. Demonstrating PNAC’s ability to pull together different elements of the political landscape, some letters were supported by traditionally liberal groups and individuals like the International Crisis Group, Morton Abramowitz, and Morton Halperin, as well as by evangelical Christians, social conservatives, liberal hawks in the Democratic Party, and elite proponents of “realism.” PNAC’s first order of business was Iraq, which as George Packer wrote in his 2005 book The Assassins’ Gate, would serve “as the test case for [neoconservative] ideas about American power and world leadership.”[14] Upset over the failure of the first President Bush to oust Saddam Hussein, neoconservatives had long been agitating for more aggressive U.S. action, penning numerous articles on the subject, creating pressure groups like the revived Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf (whose members included Abrams, Khalilzad, Perle, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and David Wurmser), and attracting other factions of the Republican establishment to the cause.[15] In Iraq, PNAC and its allies apparently saw an opportunity to accomplish two separate but related goals: to show the world that the United States was the dominant global power by undertaking, in the words of Charles Krauthammer, “unapologetic demonstrations of will”[16]; and to begin a dramatic restructuring of the Middle East political landscape along lines consistent with the neoconservatives’ vision for Israeli security, which they had outlined in numerous documents since the mid-1990s.[17] In January 1998, PNAC published an open letter to President Bill Clinton arguing that “containment” of Iraq “has been steadily eroding,” jeopardizing the region and potentially beyond. “Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate.”[18] PNAC followed up a few months later with an open letter to Senate leader Trent Lott (R-MS) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA), arguing that the “only way to protect the United States and its allies from the threat of weapons of mass destruction [is] to put in place policies that would lead to the removal of Saddam and his regime from power.”[19] Those who signed these letters included many signatories to PNAC’s statement of principles, as well as future realist-inclined Bush administration officials Richard Armitage and Robert Zoellick. PNAC set up a meeting in 1998 between Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Perle, and Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor, to argue the case for intervention.[20] In February 1998, Wolfowitz had testified before the House International Relations Committee that regime change in Iraq was the “only way to rescue the region and the world from the threat” posed by Hussein. Revealing another aspect of neoconservative alliance-building in the years leading up to George W. Bush’s presidency, Wolfowitz added that the United States should recognize “a provisional government of free Iraq,” and that the best place to look for such a government was “with the current organization and principles of [Ahmed Chalabi‘s] Iraqi National Congress.”[21] Thus, write Halper and Clarke, “in only a few years since the Soviet collapse, neoconservatism had refocused itself as an interventionist lobby intent above all else on waging a second Gulf war.”[22] During Clinton’s second term, PNAC organized two open letters to the president (the first on Iraq; the second on Milosevic); one letter to congressional leaders (on Iraq); and one general statement (on the “Defense of Taiwan”). (See “A Complete List of PNAC Signatories and Contributing Writers,” Right Web.) In 2000, PNAC published a book and a report, both of which were designed as blueprints for a new U.S. foreign and military policy. The book, Present Dangers, included work from many PNAC associates and other neoconservatives; the report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” written largely by PNAC’s Donnelly, offered an agenda for military transformation that echoed many ideas that first gained prominence in the 1992 Draft Defense Policy Guidance.[23] In 2001, several individuals associated with PNAC letter-writing campaigns entered the administration of George W. Bush (in particular in the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President). It was not, however, until after 9/11 that the PNAC agenda began to take hold.[24] Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, on September 20, 2001, PNAC issued an open letter to Bush that commended his newly declared “war on terrorism” and urged him not only to target Osama bin Laden but also other supposed “perpetrators,” including Saddam Hussein and Hezbollah. The most notorious of PNAC’s many publications, this letter made one of the first arguments for regime change in Iraq as part of the war on terror, arguing that this was necessary even if the Hussein regime was unconnected to the attacks. “It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”[25] The letter also pointed out that to undertake this new war, it would be necessary to inject more money into the U.S. defense budget: “A serious and victorious war on terrorism will require a large increase in defense spending. Fighting this war may well require the United States to engage a well-armed foe, and will also require that we remain capable of defending our interests elsewhere in the world. We urge that there be no hesitation in requesting whatever funds for defense are needed to allow us to win this war.”[26] In April 2002, PNAC followed up its push toward war with a letter to Bush on “Israel, Arafat, and the War on Terrorism.” Calling for more assertive action in helping Israel fight terrorism, the letter stated, “Israel’s fight against terrorism is our fight.… For reasons both moral and strategic, we need to stand with Israel in its fight against terrorism.” It argued that “one spoke of the terrorist network consists of Yasser Arafat and the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.… … truncated (22,151 more characters in archive)