After the fall of the Soviet Union, neoconservatives were among the first to proclaim the joys, the challenges and the opportunities of a “unipolar world.” The “center” of world power was now the United States, Charles Krauthammer wrote in a special 1990-91 issue of Foreign Affairs. The United States, he said, was “the only country with the military, diplomatic, political and economic assets to be a decisive player in any conflict in whatever part of the world it chooses to involve itself.”
As provocative as Krauthammer’s essay was, the most distinctive neocon anthem appeared in the July/August 1996 issue of Foreign Affairs.
William Kristol and Robert Kagan said that the United States had the duty and the power to, in effect, police the world: “American hegemony is the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international order. The appropriate goal of American foreign policy, therefore, is to preserve that hegemony as far into the future as possible.”