FOR LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE CRITICS of the Bush administration, it is an article of faith that neoconservatives have hijacked American foreign policy. The neocons accomplished this, the theory goes, by selling their half-baked ideology to a president too unschooled, dim-witted, or panicked to resist it. Yet, as Charles Krauthammer noted in his excellent essay The Neo-Conservative Convergence, none of the president’s most influential foreign policy counselors–not Dick Cheney, not Donald Rumsfeld, not Condoleezza Rice–was considered a neoconservative prior to 9/11. Rice, in fact, is the protégé of Brent Scowcroft, a leading proponent of the opposing foreign policy school known as “realism.” Cheney, too, had been associated with that school through his key role in the “realist” administration of the first President Bush.

The argument that the strong-willed Cheney and Rumsfeld were brainwashed by neoconservatives in lower levels of the current administration is too implausible to entertain. Thus, one of two things must be true: Either they switched to the neoconservative approach in response to the events of 9/11 (“mugged by reality,” as Krauthammer would have it) or the administration’s approach is not distinctively neoconservative.