The Project for the New American Century Quiz

Answer: a non-profit educational organization

According to its own web-site, the PNAC is "a non-profit educational organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world; and that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle." Its mission statement declares that it "intends, through issue briefs, research papers, advocacy journalism, conferences, and seminars, to explain what American world leadership entails. It will also strive to rally support for a vigorous and principled policy of American international involvement and to stimulate useful public debate on foreign and defense policy and America's role in the world."

The current PNAC home page and its mission statement can be found at http://www.newamericancentury.org/index.html

Answer: published an open letter to president Clinton about Iraq

In January of 1998, the PNAC published an open letter to President Bill Clinton on their website, in which they articulated their position that Saddam Hussein's Iraq constituted a serious security threat to the United States and that the only acceptable means of addressing that threat was via military action aimed at toppling Hussein.

The open letter can be read at http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

Answer: Reaganite

This should come as no surprise given the fact that numerous members of the PNAC were members of the Reagan administration.

While certain elements of the policies of both Truman and Jackson may well be favorably regarded by PNAC members, the organization was founded in large part in opposition to the policies of President Clinton, so it is unlikely they would ever describe their position as "Clintonite."

Answer: Colin Powell

Bush appointed 17 members of the PNAC to his administration, many of them in high ranking positions, including: Dick Cheney (Vice President), Elliott Abrams (Deputy National Security Advisor), Eliot Cohen (Defense Planning Board), I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby (Vice-Presidential chief of staff), and Zalmay Khalilzhad (Ambassador to Iraq.)

Colin Powell has long articulated a view of foreign policy emphasizing diplomacy and focused, limited military engagement that is pointedly at odds with the PNAC.

Answer: They wanted the U.S. to explicitly state it would come to Taiwan's defense.

From the end of the Chinese revolution in 1949 until the early days of the administration of George W. Bush, the United States had followed a policy of 'strategic ambiguity' with regard to China and Taiwan. Under this policy the U.S. sold large quantities of arms to Taiwan and presented the impression that it would come to Taiwan's defense in the event of a Chinese assault, but refused to state as much openly. This policy was intended to make China worry that it would be at war with the U.S. if it attempted to invade Taiwan, and cause Taiwan to fear that it would not have U.S. support if it provoked China by declaring independence. The PNAC argued that it had "become essential that the United States make every effort to deter any form of Chinese intimidation of the Republic of China on Taiwan and declare unambiguously that it will come to Taiwan's defense in the event of an attack or a blockade against Taiwan."

While the PNAC would probably not have opposed Taiwanese independence, they did not specifically call for it, instead holding that "The United States should also make clear that while it is prepared to accept any resolution regarding Taiwan's future status to which both sides voluntarily agree, the future of Taiwan must reflect the will of the people of Taiwan as expressed through their duly elected government."

Answer: "We need to partner with cooperative regimes regardless of their internal characteristics."

The fourth policy prescription outlined in 1997 was that "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."

While they did declare that "We need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad," many signatories of that statement went on to occupy positions in the Bush administration from which they crafted policies that seemed to endorse the idea that "We need to partner with cooperative regimes regardless of their internal characteristics," specifically with regard to the U.S. relationships with nations such as Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, etc. However, many of these relationships had existed well before these individuals came to power, and it may not have been possible for them to end all of them, whether they wanted to or not.

Answer: All of these

The PNAC embodies a foreign policy position that is usually described as 'neoconservative' - a term that has enjoyed immensely popular usage over the course of the Bush administration, but has something of a nebulous meaning. Neoconservatives and neorealists have had prescriptive disagreements as long as they have coexisted. While the 'neocons' tend to speak in the core language of the neorealists, that of state interests and the centrality of power in achieving them, they tend to go about achieving those interests in a manner that neorealists believe leads to strategic overstretch and a weakening of United States power.

This disagreement came to a public head in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, in which most neorealists opposed the war, while most neoconservatives supported it.

Answer: anti-Semites

In his April 6, 2006 op-ed piece in The Post, Cohen accused Walt and Mearsheimer of holding "obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews," accusing Jews of "disloyalty, subversion [and] treachery," believing that Jews "[have] occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments," and insinuates an affiliation between the political scientists and white supremacists by opening his column with the observation that "John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" has won David Duke's endorsement."

Cohen's criticism is interesting in light of a later op-ed he wrote in April 2004, in which he recognizes "the efforts of Jewish organizations to suffocate any criticism of Israel and to hurl the epithet "anti-Semite" at anyone with an odd bent to his thinking."

Mearcheimer and Walt's paper can be read in pdf format at http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf

Eliot Cohen's 2006 op-ed piece can be read at http://www.spinwatch.org/content/view/2796/9/

Answer: 1998

They first called for regime change in their 1998 open letter to President Bill Clinton, in which they called for him to announce a new strategy in his State of the Union Address that would "aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power." They asserted that Saddam Hussein was "almost certain" to obtain weapons of mass destruction if such a strategy were not implemented. Among the signatories to this open letter were Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle, Richard Armitage, and John Bolton, all of whom would later take up high level positions in the Bush administration's Departments of State and Defense, in which they implemented a policy of removing Hussein.

The calls for toppling Hussein in 1998 have caused many to doubt the sincerity with which many of these same individuals claimed that military action against Hussein was a last resort in 2003.

Answer: the mob

He said that "The genius of American power is expressed in the movie The Godfather II, where, like Hyman Roth, the United States has always made money for its partners."

Materials from the debate, including video and a transcript, can be found at http://www.aei.org/events/eventID.428/event_detail.asp