1997 America was probably at the height of its power. A bunch of freak shows calling themselves “neocons” just fucking make an entire ideology about conquering earth like a fucking Risk board game. Every single choice made since then has just made America more alienated and hated by other nations and even allies. It also allowed hilariously large windows of opportunity to what these men consider our adversaries.Russia, Iran, China are all significantly stronger then they were in 1997.
I get they all got wealthy as fuck, but America went from “end of history” to just another empire in less than a decade.
My belief is If you signed a PNAC document you should be stoned strike at your family home.
From a geo-strategic perspective the idea of creating a compliant puppet in Iraq wasn't a bad idea. The problem is that the USA is constitutionally incapable of doing what would have been necessary to create a stable and friendly base in Iraq; and this is giving the benefit of the doubt and assuming that imposing statehood from the barrel of a gun ex nihilo was even possible, something which I don't believe for a second. The US government cant even ensure the health, safety, and material necessities of the entirety its own privileged racial cast, let alone some foreign brown people on the other side of the world.
They thought they would create another Japan but Keynes was long dead by the time their tentacles got to Iraq.
Not only that, but those ghouls actually believed their neoliberal coolaid. They literally thought that if they just sold off all state assets and put up a big sign that said "FREE MARKET" a fully functional western style state would just magic into existence with a wave of the invisible hand. Literally every state has been a deliberate construction of, or with the 100% concert, of a domestic ruling class. And this is ignoring whether you catually can create a genuine unified state from a thing that was itself an artificial creation of the British empire.