The two-party system 53of this persuasion was Irving Kristol, a former Trotskyite, who described how
he saw the role of neoconservatives:
The historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem
to be this: to convert the Republican Party, and American conservatism
in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative
politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.For Kristol some of the tenets of the traditional conservatives and the
libertarians were mistaken. Neocons should accept the reality of a strong
state ‘seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable’, because ‘people have always
preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly
have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government.’ Al-
though sharing the traditional conservative preference for lower taxes, the
neocons are quite happy to accept large budget deficits in order to stimulate
the economy and to finance necessary government expenditure, particularly
on the military. They are even prepared to acknowledge some debt to the
ideas of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was anathema to traditional conserva-
tives. In the field of foreign affairs, Kristol asserts that there is no set of neo-
conservative beliefs concerning foreign policy, ‘only a set of attitudes derived
from historical experience.’ Patriotism and antipathy to world government
are at the heart of these attitudes, as is a rejection of isolationism. The over-
whelming military superiority of the United States must be used to further
the national interest and its ‘ideological interests’ as well as more material
interests. ‘The United States will always feel obliged to defend... a demo-
cratic nation under attack from non-democratic forces, external or internal
... That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival
is threatened.’ Their commitment to the spread of democracy throughout
the world, by the use of military force if necessary, was one of the ideological
underpinnings of the invasion of Iraq.
The neocons might have remained simply a small group of intellectuals,
but they formed alliances with two other groups which transformed them
into a formidable force in American politics. They gained the support of a
number of prominent figures who had held office in previous Republican
administrations and were destined to hold office in the administration of
George W. Bush, the most important being the future Vice-President, Rich-
ard Cheney, Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Deputy
Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz. In 1997, during the administration
of President Clinton, all three of these signed a Statement of Principles is-
sued by a pressure group, the Project for a New American Century, which
completely embraced the neoconservative foreign and defence policies and
foreshadowed the invasion of Iraq.
The other, perhaps rather unlikely, allies of the neoconservatives were the
fundamentalist Christians, who were becoming increasingly aware of their