American history does not have tightly organized parties that set policy. Policies sometimes emerge out of informal networks. And key foreign policy decisions have often come about in exactly that manner. In the 1890s, a group of intellectuals that included Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Brooks Adams met on Lafayette Square to discuss, among other things, the need to abandon America’s insular foreign policy and to join the global struggle for empire. They urged the McKinley administration to invade Cuba and the Philippines to replace Spanish with American rule. They had connections to the important magazines and newspapers of the day. And when Roosevelt became McKinley’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy, they had a crucial voice within the administration. McKinley, like George W. Bush, was a foreign policy neophyte who was pushed, prodded and even (in the case of Roosevelt) manipulated into becoming a champion of American imperialism.

The neo-conservatives of the mid-1990s played a very similar role in the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq. They were different from the first generation of neocons: they were more focused on foreign than domestic policy; they embraced a quasi-Trotskyist strategy of transforming the world in America’s image through hard as well as soft power; they saw Israel and to some extent Taiwan as irreproachable outposts of American power and idealism; and they were obsessed with overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

These neo-conservatives established a network of intellectuals, publications (led by William Kristol’s Weekly Standard) and policy groups (including the Project for the New American Century, which later spawned the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq). They promoted resolutions in Congress, and when Bush was elected, got people in key second-level positions in the Pentagon and Vice President’s office. Bush himself ran as an anti-interventionist, but taken aback after September 11, became a convert to the neo-conservative view of the world. He made the final decisions, but he made them within a strategic framework that the neo-conservatives had developed. If you want this story in detail —along with the analogy with the 1890s—I wrote about it in The Folly of Empire.

Now to the present. What about Romney? After the disaster in Iraq, many of the key neo-conservatives, including Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, left the administration, but neo-conservatives have remained at the center of Republican foreign policy. Randy Scheunemann (the former head of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq) was John McCain’s foreign policy aide in 2008, and after McCain’s defeat, Kristol and Robert Kagan, along with Senor and Eric Edelman, a former Pentagon official and aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, founded the Foreign Policy Initiative. Like the Project for the New American Century, it publishes open letters and holds forums and is better funded and organized than its predecessor. FPI’s very first forum in September 2009 featured a conversation between Senor and an aspiring presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. Senor, of course, became one of Romney’s key people, and now travels with Ryan, and Edelman is one of his foreign policy advisors.