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 and let its website expire temporarily in May 2008,2 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” 3 —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.4
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."5 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."6
Among PNAC's staff and directors were 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).7 In addition, a host of mainly conservative figures 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 allies among hardline nationalists, 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."8
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."9
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."10
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."11
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.12
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.13 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."14