Bill Clinton struggled to hold on to the presidency because of Monica Lewinsky scandal (orchestrated by the Neocons), the neoconservatives used the policy board to convince congressional Republicans to adopt the radical idea they had formed only that year: The United States should topple the Iraqi government. The Iraq invasion was planned in 1998.

The neoconservatives' case for Iraq was abstract and highly ideological, positing not that Saddam posed a substantial threat to the United States, but rather that removing him would allow democracy and pro-American politics to organically sweep the Middle East.

The specifics of their argument hardly mattered; congressional Republicans saw an opportunity to embarrass Clinton on his Iraq policy, which in Washington was widely considered a failure. They passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which declared regime change as official US policy; a reluctant but embattled Clinton caved in, accepted it, and signed it.
<br> They planted their seed.

BREAKING via The New York Times

Ismail Haniyeh was killed by an explosive device covertly smuggled into the Tehran guesthouse where he was staying.

The bomb had been hidden approximately two months ago in the guesthouse.

Once it was confirmed that he was inside the… pic.twitter.com/7aIeE30K4c

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) August 1, 2024

In 2019, Robert Kagan, a prominent neoconservative, along with Antony Blinken (current Secretary of State) wrote an article urging the US to abandon Trump’s America First policies and continue the policies of George W. Bush. Specifically, they called for a policy of “preventive diplomacy and deterrence” against “US adversaries,” calling for containment of Russia and China.

Robert Kagan’s wife is Victoria Nuland, former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in the Obama and GWB administration. She played an active role in organizing and supporting the color revolution in Ukraine in 2014, infamously advising to the US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyat to “Fuck the EU”.

From 2003 to 2005, Victoria Nuland was a foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney, the US Vice President that filled the US Administration with neocons.

In the Biden-Harris administration she is serving as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. This is currently the third-ranking position in the United States Department of State, after the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary.

Trump

Neoconservatism as a foreign policy ideology had been badly discredited over the last two decades, thanks to the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump had made clear his distaste for the neocons’ belligerent approach to global affairs, much to the neocons' own entitled chagrin.

Thus Trump sounded neoconservatism’s death knell. He announced his policy of “America First” in a speech at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel in 2016, signalling that he would not adhere to the long-standing Reaganite principles.

Trump had already decided to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. He was staging exuberant photo-ops with a beaming Kim Jong Un and was willing to hold talks with the president of Iran, while clearly preferring trade wars to hot ones.

Donald Trump did not drag US into war with Iran. But the neocon military-intellectual complex was very much still intact, with the ability to spring back to life from a state of suspended animation in an instant. Its hawkish tendencies remained widely prevalent not only in the Republican Party but also in the media, the think-tank universe, and in the liberal-hawk precincts of the Democratic Party. And the neocon complex supported Biden's presidential campaign.

President Obama inherited the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, and various aspects of the War on Terror. Although Obama tried very much to oust all elements of the neocons for his state department, reidues of this sect of republicans remained in his adminstration, and following their advice , Obama heavily increased the US military presence in Afghanistan.

Obama, pressured by what remained of neocons, helped organize a NATO-led intervention in Libya and was then involved in Syria, which underwent a long, multi-party civil war between the government , the Syrian opposition, and ISIS. The US supported the opposition throughout the civil war. In 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and intervened in Ukraine, Obama imposed sanctions that contributed to a Russian financial crisis. Russia later intervened successfully in the Syrian Civil War.

President Obama’s final State of the Union address came at a time when, for the first time in his administration, the public believed that the nation’s most serious problems involved foreign policy rather than domestic issues. The majority disapproved of the President’s handling of foreign affairs, and 73% did say they wanted the next President to take a “different approach” to foreign policy.

George W Bush

After 9/11 Donald Rumsfeld (Secretary of Defence) and Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Secretary of Defense) teamed up with Vice President Dick Cheney to push for war and isolate the reluctant Colin Powell (Secretary of State). The intelligence agencies were tasked to buttress and even concoct the case that Saddam had intimate ties with Al Qaeda and that he possessed weapons of mass destruction.

President George Bush was happy with that but he was criminally culpable in his naïveté and incuriosity about the costs and consequences of war. At the same time, Cheney and Rumsfeld were inveterate neocon schemers whose cynicism about going to war was exceeded only by their ineptitude in conducting it.

In his second inaugural address, three and a half years after 9/11, George W. Bush cemented neoconservative ideology into presidential doctrine: “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”