Akkam’s Razor

All emphasis below (bolded) are mine.

Right Web | Analysis | The Rise and Decline of the Neoconservatives

1992 Draft Defense Planning Guidance. The DPG is a regularly updated classified Pentagon policy document that outlines U.S. military strategies and provides a framework for developing the defense budget. After the Gulf War, the task of developing the new DPG, the first since the end of the Cold War, was given to then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz and his chief aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, two of the few neoconservatives who had held posts in the administration of the elder President Bush. Their draft guidance called for a post-Cold War world in which the United States would act as the ultimate guarantor of peace and security and commit itself to “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” (Other contributors included influential Pentagon officials Zalmay Khalilzad, J.D. Crouch, and Andrew Marshall, as well as Perle and RAND Corporation founder Albert Wohlstetter.) The draft guidance called for a global order in which U.S. military intervention would become a “constant fixture” and Washington would rely on “ad hoc assemblies” (later known as “coalitions of the willing”) to enforce its will, rather than on the UN Security Council. (Despite having authorized U.S. military action in the first Gulf War, the Security Council was not mentioned in the draft guidance.) These ad hoc coalitions would be directed above all at preempting—either through co-option or confrontation—potential rivals from challenging U.S. hegemony and at preventing rogue states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction (WMD), particularly in “regions critical to the security of the United States and its allies, including Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia, and the territory of the former Soviet Union.”

When the draft DPG was leaked to the press, it provoked a storm of controversy. Democrats charged that the strategy would bankrupt the nation and transform it into a “global policeman,” involving it in wars without end. Other top officials in the realist-dominated administration of George H.W. Bush, endeavoring in the wake of the Gulf War to reassure the world that Washington would accept constraints on its freedom of action, quickly disavowed its contents. According to some reports, Wolfowitz and Libby were nearly fired as a result of the controversy but were rescued by their boss, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who agreed to substantially tone down the document in its final form.

But the draft DPG and its core ideas did not entirely disappear. Cheney himself was impressed by the document, reportedly commending Khalilzad, the draft’s principal author, for “discover[ing] a new rationale for our role in the world.” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer was also impressed. “What’s the alternative?” he asked. “The alternative is Japanese carriers patrolling the Strait of Malacca, and a nuclear Germany dominating Europe.” For Krauthammer and other neoconservative cadre, the DPG’s vision of a “unipolar” world not only made sense, now that the Soviet Union was history, but also constituted a strategic and moral necessity—one that was elaborated several years later by PNAC. The draft DPG would ultimately come to serve as the broad framework for forging a new consensus embraced by neoconservatives (like Libby and Perle), aggressive nationalists (like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and John Bolton), as well as key allies among the Christian Right, and even some liberal interventionists within the Democratic Party.

Some excerpts from that 1992 Draft can be found here.  Additional background can be found here on Rightweb.