The First Thousand Issues

What struck me first is the magazine’s consistency. Many of the same writers and editors who were there in 1995 continue to put out the magazine today. The format of each issue—Scrapbook, Casual, short articles, feature articles, book reviews, Parody—hasn’t changed in 20 years. Nor have the quality of the writing, the witty caricatures, and the general point of view.

If I had to sum up that editorial philosophy, I would say it’s a belief in the difference between right and wrong, truth and lies, nobility and baseness, and in the corollary idea that domestic and foreign policy are not exempt from these moral categories. “Politics—real politics, not Bill Clinton’s politics—is about pursuing justice and deterring and punishing injustice,” wrote William Kristol in a February 1997 article. That’s enough to keep you busy for decades.

It is striking how often the so-called social issues—abortion, affirmative action, drug use, gambling, public corruption, euthanasia, predation of minors, cloning, sexual norms—grab the attention of The Weekly Standard’s editors. A large constitutional democracy cannot function, the argument runs, if its elected officials do not adhere to common standards of decency and honesty and ethical conduct. As David Tell put it in an October 1996 editorial: “It’s the veracity, stupid.”

The presidency of Bill Clinton brought morality to the fore both domestically and internationally. There is a line that connects the magazine’s support for Clinton’s impeachment with its opposition to a fawning engagement with China. Some practices—perjury and obstruction of justice on the one hand and political oppression and authoritarianism on the other—cannot be countenanced. America and her people, this thinking goes, have a responsibility to support, stand up, and fight for what is right. Failure to do so not only endangers the U.S.-led international system that has brought freedom and prosperity to billions of people. It also dishonors our heritage as a democratic republic.

Conserving America’s global position requires intervention overseas. “Americans could save themselves and the world a great deal of trouble if they developed a bit more confidence in the prudent and timely use of force, a confidence commensurate with their nation’s capabilities,” Robert Kagan wrote in the first issue. “Military missions will always be fraught with risks, but the leadership role that politicians in both parties claim for the United States cannot be won without some risk.” This unflinching attitude toward foreign intervention is probably the magazine’s most famous characteristic.

When the United States commits soldiers to battle, the integrity of the office of the president is also at stake. “Any major rejection of the man also, unavoidably, impeaches his office—the institution against which foreign governments judge American resolve,” wrote David Tell in December 1995. “If the president must make his way overseas against furious opposition, or fails to make his way at all, then U.S. international credibility and influence are damaged, at least in the short run.” And because the defense against threats to the liberal democratic order is a bipartisan responsibility, The Standard has supported presidents of both parties when they have intervened in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

The interesting thing about viewing history through the lens of The Weekly Standard is how you can see the dominant concerns of one presidential administration emerge in the closing years of another. The Balkans, Haiti, Somalia, China, and the larger question of America’s post-Cold War foreign policy were all waiting for Bill Clinton when he moved into the White House in 1993, and for The Weekly Standard when it was founded in 1995. Similarly, Clinton spent the final months of his second term failing to confront the overriding challenges of George W. Bush’s presidency: Islamic terrorism and the despotism of Saddam Hussein.

The bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 was a premonition. “As long as the unipolar moment lasts, then, unconventional attacks like that on the Cole or on the Khobar Towers or the ambush of the Rangers in Mogadishu will continue to punctuate the headlines,” Tom Donnelly wrote at the time. “The American response to these acts of war should be to use the instruments of war—intelligence gathering and military force—not only to avenge them and deter similar acts, but also to frustrate the political aims of our enemies.”

As for Saddam, a 1998 editorial by William Kristol and Robert Kagan stated the matter succinctly:

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the cover stories and editorials of The Weekly Standard were about evenly divided between domestic and foreign policy. After 9/11, however, the magazine was focused on the global war on terror and its fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq. “If we are going to defeat bin Laden, his allied holy warriors, and others who have supported them,” Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, “we are going to have to understand that friendship for and partnership with the United States in the Middle East primarily hinges on American power.”

The Weekly Standard campaigned for the widespread application of this power—in pursuit of terrorists inside the United States and without, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Iran, and in all the other branches of what Bibi Netanyahu has described as the “poisonous tree” of Islamic radicalism, resentment, and violence.

It would be an evasion to deny or ignore the ambiguous outcomes of some of these policies. Needless to say, the present attitude of the public toward George W. Bush and the wars he commenced in Afghanistan and Iraq is hostile. But a careful reader of The Weekly Standard would acknowledge that its editors called for additional troops to be sent to Iraq as early as the summer of 2003. It was also in these pages that Frederick W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan outlined, explained, and advocated the “surge” strategy of reinforcements and counterinsurgency that succeeded against all odds in quelling the violence in Iraq.

Nor has the opposite approach increased U.S. power or made the world any safer. Barack Obama campaigned on a platform of retrenchment. He pledged to restart U.S.-Russian relations, withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program. The Standard has catalogued the perverse consequences of these policies since Obama assumed office in 2009. American withdrawal from Iraq was followed by renewed sectarian war. The lack of American follow-through in Libya fractured its society and opened a safe haven for terrorist cells.

American ambivalence in Syria led to the formation of a terrorist state ruled by ISIS and a humanitarian disaster of biblical proportions. Iran has been empowered and enriched by the nuclear deal. President Obama’s desire not to behave like George W. Bush contributed to this metastasizing violence and also weakened America’s position in Europe and the Pacific vis-à-vis Russia and China.

Just as the waning days of Bill Clinton’s presidency offered a vision of George W. Bush’s time in the Oval Office, Bush’s final months presaged the Obama years. Russia invaded Georgia in the summer of 2008, a sort of preview of coming attractions for the annexation of Crimea six years later. The debut of Sarah Palin on the national stage was, in retrospect, the first tremor of the populist earthquake that would only gather force. And the financial crisis that ended Bush’s presidency was the beginning of a renegotiation of the American social contract, in which the federal government played a larger role in the life of the nation.

This liberal Democratic resurgence is one of the most important stories of recent years. The Weekly Standard has spent much of the Obama administration on the defensive, opposing the president’s stimulus, health care, and immigration bills, and the bulk of his foreign policy. And though the magazine took a positive view of Palin and the Tea Party, its editors somewhat differ on the latest iteration of conservative populism in the person of Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, The Weekly Standard has become a home for so-called reform conservatism. In 2005 the magazine published Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam on the party of Sam’s Club. Yuval Levin’s “Putting Families First” ran the following year. Salam, Levin, Adam White, and other scholars and journalists associated with this movement continue to publish here. The Standard also identified a rising generation of Republican leaders, from its “Young Guns” cover of Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and Eric Cantor in 2007 (well, two out of three ain’t bad), to its trendsetting profiles of Palin, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, and Joni Ernst.

These new faces underscore the fact that in recent years the magazine witnessed a generational change. Starting around 2008, major figures in the history of American conservatism and neoconservatism began to leave the scene. More contemporary intellectuals and writers, such as Christopher Hitchens, Dean Barnett, Andrew Breitbart, and other dear friends, departed ahead of their time. The last decade has been a period of transition, not only politically but also demographically.

What comes next? As Fred Barnes has written many times, the future is never a straight-line projection of the present. But it is clear nevertheless that President Obama’s successor will have to respond to the wars in Syria and Iraq as well as to Iranian, Russian, Chinese, and North Korean belligerence. Those problems are not going to disappear. Nor will the rising murder rate in some of our major cities, nor the opioid and heroin addiction spread throughout the country, nor the shambolic welfare state.

No doubt The Weekly Standard will spend its next 1,000 issues applying its rigorous moral code to all of these dilemmas. No doubt, too, those issues will include the same political and cultural reportage, commentary, and humor that readers have come to expect—along with an anagram of Leo Strauss hidden in every article.

Matthew Continetti is editor in chief of the Washington Free Beacon and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. He worked at the magazine in a variety of editorial jobs from 2003-2011.