...neoconservatives' shaping Bush doctrine makes it important to understand this obsession with promoting democracy, and to analyze its viability. Prior scholarly explanations of the Bush doctrine and the strategic thinking of neoconservatism emphasized power seeking in light of the 11 September 2001 terror attacks and the attendant threats of global terrorism, rogue states, and weapons of mass destruction (WMD); (2) the philosophy of Leo Strauss; (3) visions of national exceptionalism and imperial aspirations; (4) ideological and religious articles of faith; (5) and the drive to control the oil market. (6) The role played by certain international relations theories, however, was mostly left out of the picture.

This article will demonstrate the role of the structural theories of the democratic peace thesis in generating the neoconservative grand strategy. (7) These are theories that try to explain the absence (or near absence) of war between democracies by pointing to the structural attributes of democracies, such as checks and balances, division of powers, and periodic elections. I argue that those theories played--and still play--multiple and crucial roles in shaping and in marketing the neoconservative agenda of promoting democracy abroad. The democratic peace thesis helped neoconservatives overcome their post-Cold War identity crisis and the demise of their old archenemy, communism. The strategic program of promoting democracy revived neoconservatism and gave it new coherence and purpose.

A decade after the Cold War ended, the neoconservatives faced yet another identity crisis when confronted with the apparent incompatibility between two major conservative theoretical frameworks: the pessimism and relativism of Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the optimism and universalism of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History. The structural theories of democratic peace offered the neoconservatives a middle ground between the two, along with a political platform that is both cautiously optimistic and mildly relativist. The political platform consists of three major premises: first, expanding democracy will enlarge the zone of peace and overcome the threats of civilizational wars, global terrorism, and rogue states; second, democracy should be understood structurally rather than culturally and morally; and third, building the structures of democracy is also possible in civilizations whose cultures and moralities are incompatible with those of the democratic West.

Those three premises explain neoconservatives' preoccupation with promoting democracy abroad, particularly in the Middle East, and by force if necessary. In other words, endorsing the structural theories of democratic peace resolved some of the neoconservatives' major difficulties, and generated the grand strategy of forceful democracy promotion. Moreover, by insisting on the scientific validity of the claim that democracies do not fight each other, the neoconservatives successfully marketed their agenda to the American public and to the administration of George W. Bush, proclaiming the proved strategic merits of exporting democracy. These thus constitute one of the sources of influence for the Bush doctrine and its preoccupation with democracy promotion.

A word of caution is in order. As will become clear below, not all neoconservatives endorsed the structural theories of the democratic peace, nor do all of them advocate democracy promotion. However, some prominent neoconservative thinkers did endorse the theories and the policy of promoting democracy. Furthermore, this policy came to be identified with neoconservatism. For this reason and the sake of brevity, I will use the general form of "the neoconservatives" throughout the article, rather than the more accurate but cumbersome terminology "some prominent neoconservative thinkers."

The article has four sections. The first outlines the major reasons for the neoconservatives' endorsement of the structural theories of democratic peace. The second explores the democratic peace thesis and its various theories to explain why the neoconservatives choose the structural theories rather than the normative ones. The third section demonstrates the strategic outcomes of adopting those theories, maintaining that it turned neoconservatism into what I metaphorically term the "civilization of clashes," an ideology of endless military crusades to spread democracy. The last section offers both a critique of the neoconservative grand strategy, pointing to two acute internal incoherencies, and an outline of an alternative theory of world affairs and democratization.

THE REASONS FOR ENDORSING THE STRUCTURAL THEORIES OF DEMOCRATIC PEACE

Five factors contributed to the neoconservatives' adoption of the structural theories of democratic peace:

* The end of the Cold War;

* Neoconservatives' affiliation with Israeli politicians such as Benjamin Netanyahu and Natan Sharansky, who, in the latter half of the 1990s, made use of the democratic peace thesis in attempting to delegitimize the Oslo Accords;

* The long-standing neoconservative agenda of toppling Saddam Hussein;

* The terror attacks of 11 September 2001;

* The intellectual perplexity resulting from the conflicting theoretical frameworks of two major conservative works: Fukuyama's The End of History and Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations. (8)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, American foreign policy, following what was seen as its greatest success with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, underwent a phase of bafflement. The loss of the archrival brought the collapse of the purpose and coherence of a well-institutionalized foreign policy. What was bafflement for some verged on existential crisis for others, primarily the neoconservatives, for whom the main--almost sole--raison d'etre was fierce anticommunism.

This crisis manifested itself in various ways. In 1989-1990, one of the flagship neoconservative journals, The National Interest, published a series of articles, mostly by conservatives and neoconservatives, on America's purpose after the Cold War. Irving Kristol, one of the godfathers of neoconservatism, wrote:

It is very difficult for a great power--a world power--to articulate a foreign policy in the absence of an enemy worthy of the name. It is, after all, one's enemies that help define one's "national interest," in whatever form that definition might take. Without such enemies, one flounders amidst a plentitude of rather trivial, or at least marginal, options. That, it seems to me, is the condition of the United States today, as we enter the post-Cold War era. (9)

In their search for a new rationale, some prominent neoconservative thinkers such as Joshua Muravchik and Carl Gershman, and later also Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, and others, adopted the relatively new theories of democratic peace, calling for a revived Wilsonian commitment to democracy promotion. As Muravchik wrote in his 1991 book Exporting Democracy: "The more democratic the world, the more peaceful it is likely to be. Various researchers have shown that war between democracies has almost never occurred in the modern world." (10) These thinkers claimed that the democratic peace thesis showed that there is no real gap between morality and interest in foreign policy, that it was high time to stop supporting local dictators in the name of stability, and that promoting democracy would broaden the zone of peace. Moreover, as Michael Williams points out, it was also the neoconservative vision of American exceptionalism that provided the reasoning for the idea of promoting democracy. (11) By drawing the connection of the American present to the past, and especially to the founding era of the American republic, the neoconservatives were able to lend some continuity and coherence during the time of the identity crisis that succeeded the Cold War.

It is worth stressing, however, that neoconservatism is not a monolithic creed. Furthermore, not all neoconservatives endorsed the democratic peace thesis. As Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke rightly argue, with the end of the Cold War--and especially during the second half of the 1990s--an ideological gap, based mainly on generational lines, divided the neoconservatives. (12) The older cohorts of the neoconservatives, most notably Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer, aligned themselves with the realist cause, thus abandoning the Cold War rhetoric of anti-totalitarianism and pro-democratization. The younger cohorts, including Muravchik, Gershman, Krauthammer, and Kristol, aligned themselves with the interventionist cause of promoting democracy as a way to stabilize regions plagued by authoritarianism and war, although, as the example of Norman Podhoretz demonstrates, this ideological divide is not purely generational. While belonging to the older cohorts, Podhoretz did endorse, as we will see below, the democratic peace thesis. Many of the young cohorts even opted for a short-lived cooperation with Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential campaign, as they judged President George H.W. Bush to be a pragmatist and realist in foreign affairs. As can be learned from Muravchik's public endorsement of Clinton, it was the issue of promoting democracy abroad that became the point of convergence between Clinton and the neoconservatives. (13) Soon thereafter, however, the same issue drove them apart; the neoconservatives blamed Clinton for being a pragmatist and realist and for failing to commit the United States to promoting democracy. (14)

Following the 1993 Oslo Accords, two prominent Israeli rightist politicians mobilized the democratic peace thesis to delegitimize the agreements. Netanyahu, who was soon to become prime minister, and Sharansky--the famous Soviet dissident and prisoner of the Gulag, associate of Andre Sakharov, recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal, and future cabinet minister--criticized Oslo on the grounds that peace with the Palestinians would be impossible until they had democratized. Netanyahu attributed his argument to Immanuel Kant, (15) and Sharansky credited Sakharov with the origins of his thinking. (16) Both of them, however, also relied on the democratic peace thesis. (17)

The neoconservatives lauded Netanyahu and Sharansky's position. (18) This led to a revival of their interest in the democratic peace thesis and particularly its application to the Middle East, specifically, the Palestinian Authority. The result was a neoconservative demand, adopted by President Bush in his roadmap announcement of 24 June 2002, that the...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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