The term stuck, although the “neocons” hadn’t jumped all that far right yet. Remaining relatively liberal on social and economic issues and rejecting conservatives’ isolationist impulses, these neocons—and some younger, internationalist hawks such as Richard Perle—spent the 1970s in a space occupied by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. They wanted to engage the world, not “come home.” They wanted to confront, not contain or compromise with, communists. And they wanted to apply American power to pursue interests and ideals abroad.

Neocons truly migrated in 1980. They found, or thought they’d found, a savior in President Ronald Reagan. They celebrated his more aggressive and ambitious approach to the Cold War, although they also howled at any overtures to the Soviets they considered too friendly. When the Cold War came to a close and the Soviet Union began to collapse, neocons felt vindicated in preferring confrontation to containment, democracy to totalitarianism, and capitalism to communism.

With the end of the Cold War, however, neoconservatives lost their common cause. For decades, they’d cultivated ideas and attitudes in a garden of global threats to American ideals and interests. Those threats were gone. Some, especially elder, neocons believed that Americans could indeed now tend to their gardens—to say nothing of roads, schools, churches, hospitals, parks, and theaters. Kristol and Jeane Kirkpatrick—who served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under Reagan—believed that Americans could now live in “a normal country in a normal time.” Other younger neocons pushed for Pax Americana: Kristol’s son, Bill, who’d later establish The Weekly Standard and Project for the New American Century; Robert Kagan, who along with Kristol, tried to reinvent and rebrand the neoconservative impulse as a “neo-Reaganite” worldview; and Dr. Charles Krauthammer, who in his snappy, entertaining prose wrote that the world was in a “unipolar moment” which the United States could and should turn into a “unipolar era” by embracing power and exercising it properly. They wanted to forge a peaceful and prosperous world order built on the allure of American ideas, enriched by U.S.-driven economic growth, managed by U.S.-led alliances if and when possible, and preserved by American military might if and when necessary. Like other Americans, neocons disagreed within and across lines and labels.

Against that backdrop, three U.S. Department of Defense officials—Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, and Zalmay Khalilzad—drafted the “Defense Planning Guidance” in 1992. In the innocuously titled paper, they jotted down some big ideas and grand designs. “Our first objective,” they wrote, “is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival.” With this “dominant consideration” in mind, American leaders would work to “prevent any hostile power from dominating [any] region”—including, for instance, Western Europe and Southwest Asia—“whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.” Someone leaked the draft to The New York Times. Leaders on the right and left blasted the authors for what they saw as an imperialistic and impossible vision. Redoing their draft with closer supervision from U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, the authors adopted a subdued style but stayed true on substance.