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Fred Iklé, a distinguished scholar at the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and a former defense undersecretary, is an erstwhile Cold Warrior who has worked for several Republican administrations dating back to Richard Nixon. A one-time supporter of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and an advocate of several neoconservative-led advocacy campaigns, Iklé ultimately soured on the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” arguing in a 2006 book that an excessive focus on Islamic terrorists could make the United States more vulnerable to other potential threats.

Iklé, an advisor to the Frank Gaffney-led Center for Security Policy (CSP), served as a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board (DPB) from 2001 to 2005, during Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure as defense secretary in the George W. Bush administration. At the time, Richard Perle chaired the DPB, and serving alongside Iklé were a number of other hardline policy advocates, such as Newt Gingrich, Ken Adelman, James Woolsey, Eliot Cohen, Richard Allen, and Martin Anderson. Many of these men had risen to prominence in the Reagan administration after joining forces in the late 1970s in the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), an anticommunist pressure group (see "Advisors of Influence," Center for Public Integrity, 2003). The 1970s CPD (the group was revived after 9/11 to promote aggressive U.S. foreign policy in the “war on terror”) was a neoconservative-led outfit whose anti-détente policies were criticized by some observers for helping reignite the Cold War (see Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing Détente: The Right Attacks the CIA).

In the early 1970s, after working for several years as a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Iklé joined the administration of Richard Nixon, serving as director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1973 to 1977. He later served as an adviser to then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan and was the chairman of the Republican National Committee’s Advisory Council on International Security in 1977-1978 (for more on Iklé’s backgound, see his CSIS biography). His close connections to Reagan and other prominent conservatives made him a prime candidate for an administration post after Reagan was elected president.  Recounts the scholar Philip Burch in his book Research in Political Economy, "With the rise to power of rightwing interests following Reagan's election, Iklé was appointed Under Secretary of Defense for Policy largely because of the conservative ties he had established.... [H]e had served on the [American Enterprise Institute's] advisory council on foreign policy and the advisory board of Georgetown's [Center for Strategic and International Studies], and had been associated with both the influential Committee on the Present Danger and the Hudson Institute.... [T]wo conservative writers claim that the intercession of North Carolina's Sen. Jesse Helms weighed heavily ... in the decision to appoint Iklé.”

After the Cold War ended, Iklé continued to support militarist policy initiatives. In 1997, he signed the founding statement of principles of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, a pressure group that later played an instrumental role in pushing for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He also participated in a study that produced the National Institute for Public Policy's 2001 report, “Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control,” which was meant to serve as a blueprint for the Bush administration's nuclear weapons policies.

Despite his ties to hardliners associated with promoting the invasion of Iraq and other hawkish post-9/11 campaigns, Iklé soured on some Bush administration policies during the president’s second term. In his 2006 book Annihilation from Within: The Ultimate Threat to Nations, Iklé argued that the “global war on terrorism” was a misleading notion that served to rally America’s enemies. He lambasted the administration for failing to adequately pursue domestic protections against terrorism, and he rejected calls by neoconservatives and other foreign policy militarists to undertake a preemptive attack against Iran, saying that it would be a “catastrophic failure” (cited in Financial Times, November 23, 2006).

Parting with his neoconservative associates, many of whom paint “Islamic extremism” as an existential threat to the United States and the West, Iklé writes in Annihilation from Within that attacks from Islamic terrorists are incapable of “defeating established democracies or indeed any nation that is not already a failed state.” He adds, “The fact is that contemporary Islamic terrorism does not have a strategy for victory. It is swayed by impulses animated by a fervidness for revenge and religious utopias.… While these murderous assaults hurt us, they also spur us to increase our military power and to strengthen the defense of the homeland. What does not kill us makes us stronger” (p. ix).

Rather than focus its resources and attention on defeating “militant Islamists,” the United States, according to Iklé, should look out for a charismatic “evildoer” who has a keen strategic sense and access to weapons of mass destruction. He writes, “Any such evil but charismatic leader will be able to attack a major nation from within even if that nation possesses enormous military strength and capable police forces. If this new tyrant turns out to be strategically intelligent, he could prepare to launch a couple of mass destruction weapons against carefully chosen targets—without training camps in another nation, without help from a foreign terrorist organization, without a military campaign across the nation’s borders. He would thus offer no targets for retaliation and render useless a nation’s most powerful deterrent forces. By contrast, an expanding caliphate—the utopia that jihadists dream about—would offer the leading democracies plenty of easy targets” (p. x).

Iklé has also expressed regret over the decision to invade Iraq. When the Financial Times asked him whether he had been opposed to the 2003 decision to invade, Iklé said, “I wish I could say I was. Enormous and incredible mistakes in Iraq may end up driving us out, but if we handle the exit correctly it will not make the U.S. more vulnerable, and can be made worse for our jihadist adversaries who are killing each other.” He added, “Pulling out of Iraq will lead to feelings of guilt, with some justification. In some ways we have made things worse than under Saddam Hussein."

Along with Christopher DeMuth, James Woolsey, and others, Iklé is also a member of the board of governors of the Smith Richardson Foundation, an important funder of a several influential rightist think tanks. He is also on the board of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, along with Richard Allen, Nicholas Eberstadt, and Carl Gershman, among others. Over the years, Iklé has donated to the political campaigns of several conservative politicians or candidates, according to Federal Election Commission records, including Fred Thompson, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Chris Cox, and Raymond Tanter (see NewsMeat.com for Iklé’s full list of contributions).

Ikle’s books include How Nations Negotiate (1964) and Every War Must End (1970).