Rise of the Vulcans

"The Vulcans is a name given to the foreign policy advisers who advised the first Bush campaign in 2000. The book is essentially an intellectual history of the people who made Bush foreign policy – people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, Condi Rice and Colin Powell. It’s modelled on two other books – David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest , which is an intellectual portrait of the advisers who got America into Vietnam, and The Wise Men , which is about the foreign policy figures who charted America’s course in the decades after World War II. Rise of the Vulcans does a good job of showing that the trajectory for many of the figures who influenced Bush foreign policy was really an arc – in some ways similar to the arc that I try to trace in The Icarus Syndrome – that begins in the 1970s, at a time when American power is inhibited and the presidency is weak. Over the course of the careers of these figures, American and presidential confidence and power is on an upward trajectory. I would say there was an escalation in foreign policy post-9/11. But this is precisely what a lot of these post-9/11 debates were about. Was Bush foreign policy a continuation or a rupture? And is this thing called neoconservatism a deeply rooted American tradition or does it represent a mutant strain? All of these books, particularly Kagan and Bacevich and my book, all are engaged with that question from different perspectives."