Domingo Soto: Because Freedom Isn't Dumb

The Weekly Standard's Influence On Power
Five years ago, during the Clinton administration, The Weekly Standard made the broad, seemingly preposterous assertion that America was entitled and even compelled to engineer regime change in Iraq. But under the current administration, driven by 9/11, that contention has become conventional wisdom.
...His magazine is not the only way that the younger Mr. Kristol's influence is delivered to the White House. In June 1997 he formed the Project for a New American Century, which issued papers supporting essentially unilateralist efforts to police the world. It was a call to arms that compelled neoconservatives, who say that America is best protected by exporting its values, but it also stirred people with allegiances to traditional conservatism, who have generally had more isolationist impulses and who have been wary about using American troops to patrol the world.
...Signers at the time included many people who are now in a position of power, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, along with others with a more neoconservative impulse, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who heads the Defense Policy Board, which advises the Pentagon.
...Western Europe, nestled beneath the nuclear wing of the last remaining superpower, has developed a naive belief in a new, post-conflict paradigm that was somehow inherently secure. America, he postulated, lived in a harsher, more traditional, Hobbesian world of threat and military power. He tartly concluded that "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus." The Weekly Standard is Mars central.
(NYT