'A Balance of Power that Favors Freedom'. The Historical and Ideological Roots of the Neo-Conservative Persuasion

The paper offers a genealogy of neoconservatism, concentrating on its ideological and historical foundations in the early 1970s. In the first part, it shows how neoconservatism represented a reaction to the crisis-real and perceived-the United States was undergoing, and an answer Cold War liberalism gave to Kissinger's realism, to the radicalism of the New Left and to the emerging theories of interdependence. In the second part, the paper examines the influence neoconservatives were able to exert on the foreign policy of George W. Bush, particularly after the terrorist attacks of September the 11th, 2001. It argues that neoconservatism, as a visionary and utopian form of 'crisis internationalism', was ideally fit to dominate post 9/11 U.S. foreign policy discourse. But it underlines also the intrinsic limits and contradictions of the neoconservative project.