Neoconservative foreign policy — which is to say bellicose nationalism crossed with an idealistic faith in America’s capacity to transform the world for the better — is dead. Iraq was its Frankenstein’s monster, and the beast has turned on its creator. Our central task today is to devise a new way of thinking about the post-9/11 world.
[Those are the opening lines, incidentally, in James Traub's review of a new book about Richard Perle]
Even a stopped clock is right twice daily, and the neo-conservatives were right that the end of the Cold War did not make the world safer. But any ideology is like that – a convenient yet inaccurate shorthand for how to deal with the real world. Only when we really sustain a focus on root causes will we have a better grasp. But try to condense that into a sound bite or a manifesto (no please, really, try!)