Dick Cheney and the twilight of the neocons
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Cheney during a 2012 interview. Photo: David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images
Former Vice President Dick Cheney was at the center of foreign policy debates in every Republican administration from Gerald Ford to George W. Bush, but virtually no one in today's GOP would openly associate themselves with his worldview.
The big picture: Cheney, who died Monday at 84, will be remembered as one of the driving forces behind the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. He continued to insist the invasion was "the right thing to do" as recently as 2018, but a vanishingly small number of active politicians from either party agree.
- Beyond Iraq, Cheney's was a frequent champion of displays of U.S. force overseas and a consistent advocate for a president's right to order them with minimal congressional oversight.
- In the aftermath of 9/11, Cheney helped shape nearly every element of the "global war on terror," from the expansion of surveillance powers at home to the indefinite detention and torture of suspected terrorists at black sites overseas.
Zoom out: Cheney served as defense secretary at the conclusion of the Cold War and vice president in its aftermath — an era when confidence in America's ability to dictate outcomes globally, through military force if necessary, was at its height.
- The decades-long interventions he championed ultimately helped shatter that belief.
Breaking it down: "Cheney never bought into the ideological part of neocon-ism," says Richard Haass, a top State Department official in the run-up to Iraq and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
- "There were those who favored the Iraq War to spread democracy. Cheney wasn't one of them. For him, it was about avoiding a terrorist incident involving weapons of mass destruction," Haass told Axios.
- "In that sense, he was he was hawkish, he was interventionist, but his purposes were narrow."
- "There was a very unsentimental quality about his foreign policy," Haass said.
The intrigue: The staggering costs of Iraq in blood and treasure helped make "neocon" a toxic label in the MAGA movement and American politics more broadly.
- But Cheney's unsentimentally — the preference for hard power over soft, the "critics be damned" approach to allies — is also reflected in the second Trump administration.
- And Trump is now standing at the precipice of a potential regime change war of his own, in Venezuela.
- One lesson Trump seems to have taken from Iraq and from Cheney, though, is that interventions overseas should be limited in scope — get in and out with minimal U.S. casualties and limited costs.
The bottom line: Cheney's brand of unapologetic interventionism was different, Haass said. "He was willing to see the United States pay a large price for what it did in the world."
