For many, Dick Cheney epitomized idealistic foreign policy hubris. Because of his role in the 2003 Iraq War, the former vice president has come to represent the ultimate neoconservative in the popular imagination. He was a fanatical warmonger, a man who got away with filling a friend’s face with birdshot, and never met a regime change project he didn’t like.
Yet Cheney once repudiated the very regime change war that would later define him. In 1994, in a discussion about the 1991 Persian Gulf War, he was asked if the United States military should have toppled Saddam Hussein. Cheney, who had been secretary of defense under George H.W. Bush, dismissed the notion. Going on to Baghdad would have been “a quagmire,” he said. “How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?” he asked. “Our judgement was not very many, and I think we got it right.”
The popular image of Cheney is inaccurate. Since 2016, conservatives talk about national interest, restraint, and realism, contrasted to neoconservative or liberal universalism. Yet if they want to reckon with and avoid repeating Cheney’s foreign policy failures, they need to face a difficult truth. Cheney was once one of them. Meanwhile, the progressives who reviled him this week need to acknowledge how close their own views came to Cheney’s in the last years of his life.
To understand a man, Napoleon said, look to how the world was when he was in his twenties. Flunking out of Yale in the early 1960s, Cheney was by his own admission more interested in beer than study. Yet his time there did shape his views of foreign policy. Cheney fell under the influence of H. Bradford Westerfield, a professor of politics known for his fervent anti-communism and hawkish views on Vietnam. Cheney would later describe the Vietnam War as one lost by civilians who refused to listen to the military. That’s what conservatism meant for Cheney. Its mortal enemy was the emerging New Left, which regarded the war as the exercise of a militarized national security state, an imperial power in which civilian leaders were brushed aside.
Cheney joined Congress after his work in the Nixon and Ford Administrations, and assembled a thoroughly conservative record. In 1980, he endorsed Ronald Reagan for president rather than George H.W. Bush. He helped ensure that a resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela failed to pass. As part of the investigating committee on Iran-Contra, he defended presidential prerogatives on national security. These stances all reflected those of movement conservatism. Reagan had been the conservative presidential favorite since 1968. Cheney’s defense of Reagan during Iran-Contra followed conservative fears that in the wake of Watergate, the New Left had helped cripple the executive and damage the intelligence community.
Ford later complained that by elevating men like Cheney in his administration, he had handed over the reins of government to “ultraconservatives,” calling it “the biggest political mistake of my life.” Yet by the mid-1980s, Cheney’s hawkish anti-communism and defense of the national security state did not isolate him; his stance on South Africa may have infuriated the left, but accorded with the bipartisan consensus at the time. Iran-Contra was for the Democrats an opportunity to embarrass a Republican president. Nevertheless, the hearings were conducted to shield the president’s foreign policy from too much criticism, and they never really looked closely into covert operations. Cheney’s critique was within the Overton window. It reflected a growing consensus across the aisle that presidents may come and go, but the national security state stayed. It could be trusted to advance American supremacy.
When George H.W. Bush appointed Cheney secretary of defense in 1989, he was confident he was getting a Washington insider with a strong bipartisan reputation in Congress. After his unanimous confirmation, Cheney does not seem to have been captured by much “end of history” euphoria. He believed the Soviet Union still posed a threat and acted to ensure that the United States maintained a sizable military presence in Europe. He was an early proponent of NATO expansion and, in the words of Brent Scowcroft, “thought we ought to do everything we could to break up the Soviet Union.” He was hesitant to accept bilateral arms reductions, for example on tactical nuclear weapons. This put him at loggerheads with more cautious members of the Bush Administration who believed that in the new environment, reducing stockpiles was key to ensure nuclear non-proliferation.
“Cheney sought to downsize the defense budget.”
With the end of the Cold War, though, Cheney sought to downsize the defense budget, sometimes going further than Congress asked. As the 1992 leak of the Defense Planning Guidance showed, his team had concluded that Washington could “prevent the reemergence of a new rival” with much less, maintaining military supremacy at a lower cost. Such frank language could shock, especially in Western Europe. It suggested that America should act to keep its old “friends” weak. Yet Cheney’s management of the Department of Defense reflected less an ultraconservative cabal taking over the government than a growing consensus toward advancing American global supremacy. The dispute was about the means. Cheney believed that thanks to America’s military technological advantages, a carefully calibrated strategy could achieve supremacy with little risk. He helped push the more cautious voices of the George H.W. Bush Administration aside, but his strategic focus often made him appear more restrained than his successors: Al Gore, for instance, had called in 1991 for Saddam Hussein’s removal. A new foreign policy mindset was taking shape. During the Cold War, the goal had been to maintain enough military supremacy to win; now America would reap the results of victory, enhancing its military supremacy through calibrated interventions, and parading its invulnerability.
That’s why 9/11 proved to be such a shock. The psychological response from the US leadership class, as the political scientist Michael Mazaar has shown, was swift. 9/11 exposed vulnerabilities the country did not think it had. To show the country was unbowed and ever stronger, America needed to do something. In the first chaotic hours after 9/11, the key figures of the Bush administration had already decided that to strike back, they needed to undertake a broad, global war against terrorism and its state sponsors. One of the president’s advisors wrote a memo with the president’s message: “Don’t go small. Go big. Find everyone connected to terrorism and crush them.” And going big meant going into Iraq.
The Iraq war wasn’t conceived out of a desire to spread democracy around the world. Those justifications came later. It was born out of what Mazaar calls the “demonstration effect:” an effort to display one’s martial and military prowess. Every other argument was subordinated to that original effort to demonstrate American supremacy. That’s how conservatives who had scoffed at nation-building only months earlier were suddenly roped into the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history. After Al Qaeda struck, the administration’s priority was simply—in Bush’s words—to “kick their ass.”
Cheney was at the forefront. “From day one George Bush made clear he wanted me to help govern,” Cheney wrote in his memoirs. He began enunciating the “one percent doctrine,” which tossed aside notions of caution, prudence, and pragmatism. “If there’s a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda” get nuclear weapons, “we have to treat it as a certainty.” “9/11 changed everything,” he wrote, again and again. One might say that 9/11 scrambled his mind. The one percent doctrine became his most important legacy. In the past, Cheney thought that technology favored America using precise attacks. But now, technological advances seemed to make America more vulnerable, requiring much more aggressive projection of power around the world to preempt threats. The old arguments for restraint seemed anachronistic.
During the years when Cheney was the number one villain of progressives, his doctrine was reshaping the national security bureaucracies. He lost on torture, at least where US agencies were directly involved. But he won on information collection. Thereafter, more surveillance was always needed. In 2008, the Republicans had lost control of Congress and the anti-war left was at its high-water mark. The administration proposed a FISA amendment that expanded surveillance powers and protected telecommunications companies that had cooperated with the Bush Administration from lawsuits. A junior senator switched his vote to ensure it passed; his name was Barack Obama.
Like many conservatives, Cheney saw Obama as an embodiment of the anti-imperialist New Left, the bane of his youth, going on apology tours and withdrawing American forces around the world. But Cheney was fighting phantoms. Obama was doing no such thing. He ended no alliance or security guarantee. He increased troop deployments abroad in Europe, and doubled down on Bush’s counter-terrorism strategy. Cheney railed against Obama’s contempt for a strong military, but as secretary of defense, he had presided over a much larger defence drawdown than Obama ever did.
In 2015, he co-authored a book with his daughter Liz Cheney. Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America is set up as a furious polemic against the Obama Administration. In reality, the book revealed a deeper agreement. Cheney’s career ended not in disgrace but success. He had helped forge a new bipartisan consensus, a world where the hawkish and the very hawkish waged a war of words against each other without having much substantial disagreement over what should actually be done. His last act was to showcase his conquest of the Democratic Party. Cheney’s appearance alongside Kamala Harris in 2024 was the culmination of a political synthesis that from the perspective of 2008 would be hard to imagine, but by 2024 made perfect sense. Under Obama, the Democrats became the party of the national security state.
“Today’s populists reassure themselves they are immune to Cheney’s cunning.”
Today’s populists reassure themselves they are immune to Cheney’s cunning; they’ve put the fiasco of Iraq behind them and that is that. But they should look closer at some of Cheney's proposals in the winter of his life. As the foreign policy class coalesced around interventionism, Cheney began to look rather moderate. In Exceptional, he compared the Iran deal to Munich and Obama to Chamberlain. But he never endorsed an invasion of Iran. He wanted tougher sanctions and more aid to help Ukraine fight Russia, but he did not endorse military deployment. From 2022 onwards, these positions were considered the more dovish ones, even within the Trump Administration.
If there were another shock akin to 9/11, today’s restraint right would once again embrace full-bore hawkishness. Cheney wanted to demonstrate to the world that America was supreme, always and everywhere. Demonstrating martial and military prowess matters above all else. To many, that’s what America First really means. Until we see a movement articulate what the national interests are, what America’s influence should be in its regional and civilizational sphere, and what our technological advantages should and should not do, the urge to “go big” will remain. And the deepest challenge of all is to reckon with the legacy of Cold War conservatives and their failure to chart a new, fresh course after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Cheney believed he was seeing his Cold War-era Republican Party die. That party is far from moribund, given that the current GOP endorses an unending proxy war with Russia. Yet Cheney did see one political movement die. He got to witness not just the demise of the anti-war New Left that had infuriated him in his youth, but to see their chosen heirs campaign alongside him and embrace the imperial national security state he made. Cheney got the last laugh—or at least one of his trademark smirks.