Axis of one

Christian Century, March 8, 2003 by Gary Dorrien

MANY CRITICS of the U.S. plans for going to war in Iraq point to oil as a motive. If that is true, it is worrisome indeed. But the policymakers who have long demanded this war are more concerned with ideological and strategic considerations than economic factors. The Bush administration is loaded with policymakers who have long maintained that the U.S. should use its overwhelming economic and military power to remake the world in the image of Western capitalist democracy. While holding office they cannot say that, but they did say it when they were not in office and they are closely allied with people who are saying it plainly.

After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, a number of hardline anticommunists began arguing that the U.S. must use its military and economic power to remake the world and put down America's remaining enemies. They declared that the "unipolarist moment" had arrived: the U.S. needed to use its overwhelming military and economic power to create a new Pax Americana. Not all hardliners went along with this transition. A few of them defected from the cause, notably Edward Luttwak and Michael Lind; and some rediscovered their realism, such as Irving Kristol and Jeane Kirkpatrick. Kristol characteristically opined that"no civilized person in his right mind wants to govern Iraq."

But a version of the unipolarist ideology was adopted by some key figures: Elliott Abrams, John R. Bolton, William F. Buckley Jr., Stephen Cambone, Richard Cheney, Angelo Codevilla, Eliot Cohen, Devon Gaffney Cross, Eric Edelman, Douglas Feith, Frank Gaffney, Donald Kagan, Prederick Kagan, Robert A. Kagan, Robert Kagan, Lawrence F. Kaplan, Robert Kaplan, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, I. Lewis Libby, Joshua Muravchik, Michael Novak, Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, Donald Rumsfeld, Ben Wattenberg, James Woolsey, Dov Zakheim.

In his article "Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World," Charles Krauthammer spelled out the unipolarist idea: "America's purpose should be to steer the world away from its coming multipolar future toward a qualitatively new outcome--a unipolar world whose center is a confederated West." Elsewhere he explained that unipolarism refers to "a single pole of world power that consists of the United States at the apex of the industrial West."

The term didn't catch on, but the idea was seized upon by hawkish conservatives and neoconservatives. Ben Wattenberg urged nervous politicians not to be shy about asserting American superiority: "We are the first universal nation. `First' as in the first one, `first' as in `number one.' And `universal' within our borders and globally." Because the United States is uniquely universal, he reasoned, it has a unique right to impose its will on other countries on behalf of an American-style world order. With a lighter touch, Wattenberg declared, "A unipolar world is a good thing, if America is the uni."

Joshua Muravchik put it this way: "For our nation, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. Our failure to exert every possible effort to secure [a new world order] would be unforgivable. If we succeed, we will have forged a Pax Americana unlike any previous peace, one of harmony, not of conquest. Then the 21st century will be the American century by virtue of the triumph of the humane idea born in the American experiment."

These comments were made in the early 1990s, when there was a debate within the first Bush administration about unipolarism. In 1990 Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney quietly commissioned a new strategic plan. Paul Wolfowitz (undersecretary for defense policy), Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff) and Eric Edelman (Cheney's senior foreign-policy adviser) outlined a policy of U.S. global domination.

Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell countered with a case for a moderately conservative realism that was backed by Secretary of State George Schultz and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Though Cheney leaned toward Wolfowitz's strategy, the realists held the upper hand in George H. W. Bush's administration. Cheney's attempt to create a new big-picture strategy was derailed by the Persian Gulf war and the leaking of Wolfowitz's plan to the press, and the unipolarists despaired of Bush's lack of ideological vision. A few of them supported Bill Clinton in 1992, largely because Clinton campaigned that year as a democratic globalist.

But most of the Pax Americanists stayed in the Republican Party, and Clinton soon disappointed the others. In 1997, a group of unipolarists led by Cheney, Libby, Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Eliot Cohen, Frank Gaffney, Donald Kagan, Norman Podhoretz and Donald Rumsfeld founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which issued a statement of principles that called for an aggressive American policy of global domination. This group forged an alliance with George W. Bush, who carried a personal grudge against Saddam Hussein and who turned out to be a strident unilateralist and debunker of humanitarian nation-building.