Cold War Revival: Neoconservatives and Historical Memory in the War on Terror

During the Cold War, Americans made choices in places like Berlin and Korea whose implications continued to resonate for decades. Now we face decisions of similar weight and consequences in places like Afghanistan and, most of all, Iraq.

—Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol, The War Over Iraq (2003)¹

Among other things, the so-called “global war on terrorism” will be remembered for returning neoconservatism—even if temporarily—to American political discourse. As of this writing, dozens of books, several documentary films, websites galore, and hundreds of articles in the American press alone have explored, bemoaned, celebrated or critiqued the contemporary influence of defense policy intellectuals like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, or Richard Perle, think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), or working groups like the Project for a New American Century (PNAC).² From the onset of the war against terrorism in 2001, neoconservative contributions to foreign policy discourse were highly visible and controversial. Properly or not, the war on Iraq will likely be remembered as a neoconservative campaign, in much the same way the Spanish-American war is popularly, if erroneously, recalled as the ideological gift of the yellow press.

As with most intellectual movements, neoconservatism eludes narrow definition. Not long before her death, Jeane Kirkpatrick, one of the most prominent first-generation neoconservatives to emerge from the Reagan administration, diagnosed “an almost epidemic use of the term” in contemporary arguments about United States foreign policy.³ In everyday usage, the term has acquired an incoherent array of meanings, many of which are ahistorical and contradictory—as, for example, when “neoconservative” is used as a synonym for the Christian right, or when neoconservatives are described as merely a domestic analog to Israel’s Likud Party.⁴ As one of the primary ideological artifacts of the cold war, neoconservatism emerged from arguments over domestic and foreign policies that came to crisis during and after the American war in Vietnam. Yet neoconservatives were also preoccupied with questions of history and national identity. For prominent neoconservatives like Perle and David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Michael Ledeen and others, the onset of the war on terrorism drew on a reservoir of collective character that extended back to the nation’s founding. Indeed, Ledeen called it a “very old kind of war . . . right out of the eighteenth century, the very kind of war that gave us our national identity.” ⁵ Challenging the idea that war serves merely to defend American interests and assure its security, neoconservatives asserted that war actually fleshes out national identity and that any successful war would broadcast the United States’ political values and cultural norms.

These beliefs are certainly not without precedent in American history. The presumed link between war and national identity, for example, would have been familiar to Progressive Era imperialists like Josiah Strong and Theodore Roosevelt, and aggressive varieties of American expansionism have been a consistent feature of American culture since the nation’s founding.⁶ Yet neoconservatism, I argue, is unique in its obsession with the past as a model for the reconstruction of national virtue and for the assertion of American power on a global scale. While President George W. Bush himself preferred to invoke images of the “greatest generation” when describing the nation’s character and mission during wartime, neoconservatives turned instead to the cold war as resource for their historical lessons.⁷ Unlike World War II, which typically summons to mind images of national unity, popular memories of the cold war evoke a fractious domestic order, one in which Americans contended with anti-communist hysteria, countercultural revolution, traumatic political realignments and perilous foreign policy choices in Vietnam and elsewhere. Reflecting on that past, neoconservatives have emphasized a national history marked by clear choices, squandered opportunities, and national redemption; they have drawn sharp lines between “freedom” and “tyranny” abroad and between patriots and appeasers at home.

Here, the crucial question is not whether the cold war actually supplies a usable past that might aid the American war against terrorism, nor am I asking whether neoconservative versions of cold war history are empirically...