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Joshua Muravchik is an erstwhile Socialist Party activist whose writings on democracy and anticommunism have been key harbingers of neoconservatism for decades. A former resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)—where he specialized in “the United Nations, neoconservatism, the history of socialism and communism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and global democracy, terrorism, and the Bush Doctrine”1 —Muravchik has been an outspoken proponent of an aggressive “war on terror” and has fervently championed U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, including in Iran. In a 2006 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Muravchik opened with the line, “WE MUST bomb Iran.”2

Muravchik, a trustee at Freedom House and board member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, served during the George W. Bush administration on the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Democracy, along with Vin Weber and Carl Gershman of the National Endowment for Democracy, Lorne Craner of the International Republican Institute, and Clifford May of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, among others.3

The committee—which was created in 2006 “to advise the Secretary of State and the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development on the consideration of issues related to democracy promotion in the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy and foreign assistance”4 —received unfavorable media attention in April 2007 after the press was forced out of one of its meetings. Reported the Washington Post, “About a third of the way through the meeting, and not long after Undersecretary Paula Dobriansky boasted to the television cameras that ‘our entire session today is open to the public’ and attended by the press, State Department officials ordered reporters to leave. ‘This is the way they wanted it to happen, and this is the way it's going to be,’ explained department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos. … The spokesman declined to say who ‘they’ were. ‘You got a problem?’ Gallegos challenged. ‘Write a letter.’”5

In December 2008, Jacob Heilbrunn of the National Interest reported that Muravchik, who had been at AEI for more than two decades, was forced out by a faction more favorable to the traditional realist wing of the Republican Party, including Danielle Pletka, a former staffer of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC). Heilbrunn reported that several neoconservatives he had spoken to saw Muravchik’s departure, as well as the then-recent resignations of two other high profile neocons at AEI (Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht), as part of “purge” at the think tank.6

Wrote Heilbrunn, “Muravchik has never been as unbridled in his writings as some other neocons. To put it another way, he does nuance. As the Soviet Union was collapsing, for example, he wrote an article stating that perhaps Mikhail Gorbachev was a Menshevik even as other neocons such as Norman Podhoretz condemned Gorbachev. Muravchik’s main mission has been to forward the democracy crusade. … I myself do not agree with his current endorsement of bombing Iran, but a recent piece in World Affairs, in which he gave a guarded endorsement to President Bush’s foreign policy, underscored that he is not simply a cheerleader for the administration.”7

A former chairman of the Young People's Socialist League, a youth group associated with the Socialist Party of America before the party’s breakup in the early 1970s, Muravchik has been a key player in the neoconservative advocacy world since the mid-1970s, when he served as the director of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, a hardline Democratic Party pressure group led by, among others, Penn Kemble and Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-WA) that aimed to curb the influence of anti-war elements within the party in the wake of the Vietnam War. Muravchik, like many neoconservatives, shifted to the Republican Party after being largely ignored by his Democratic colleagues. In the early 1980s, Muravchik and a group of like-minded hardline foreign policy elites tried to build on the momentum of Ronald Reagan's presidential election victory by forming the Committee for the Free World, a group led by Midge Decter (married to Commentary editor-at-large Norman Podhoretz) and Donald Rumsfeld. The group was devoted to promoting freedom "in the world of ideas" and opposing the influence of those in and outside the United States "who have made themselves the enemies of the democratic order."8

More recently, Muravchik has been associated with a string of hawkish pressure groups supporting the “war on terror” and interventionist policies in the Middle East. He signed multiple letters published by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) advocating a broadened antiterror fight; he supported the 2002 creation of the Coalition for Democracy in Iran, a group spearheaded by Michael Ledeen and Morris Amitay that advocates regime change; he was an advisory board member of the now-defunct Committee for the Liberation of Iraq; he is associated with the hawkishly pro-Israel think tanks Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs 9 ; he joined a plank of other neocons in forming a revived version of the Cold War Committee on the Present Danger; and he serves as an "international patron" of the Cambridge, England-based Henry Jackson Society,10 an organization that promotes a "forward strategy" aimed at assisting democratization across the globe.

His leading position in the neoconservative faction was demonstrated in November 2006 with the publication in Foreign Policy of a "Memorandum" from Muravchik to "My Fellow Neoconservatives." Lamenting neoconservatives’ tarnished reputation because of their association with the Iraq War, Muravchik tried to revive the spirit of his fellow travelers, many of whom he claimed had attempted to distance themselves from the “neoconservative” label. "Where is the joie de combat?" pleaded Muravchik. "The essential tenets of neoconservatism—belief that world peace is indivisible, that ideas are powerful, that freedom and democracy are universally valid, and that evil exists and must be confronted—are as valid today as when we first began. That is why we must continue to fight. But we need to sharpen our game."11

In outlining a new approach, Muravchik listed a number of mistakes neoconservatives had made, a list that notably did not include the group's efforts to drive the United States into an ill-advised war. Instead, according to Muravchik, neoconservatives are guilty "of poorly explaining neoconservatism;" of being "glib about how Iraqis would greet liberation;" of supporting "the revolution in military strategy that our neocon hero, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, has championed" and which "has left our armed forces short on troops and resources;" of failing to foresee the difficulties in democratizing the Middle East, where recent elections have seen the emergence of radical Islamists; and of insufficiently influencing Bush's disastrous public diplomacy efforts, since after all "no group other than neocons is likely to figure out how to do that."12

Muravchik's suggestions for the future were unsurprising: Neoconservatives "need to pave the way intellectually now and be prepared to defend the action" when Bush bombs Iran's nuclear facilities, which—"make no mistake"—he will have to do "before leaving office." Arguing that "twice in the last quarter-century we had the good fortune to see presidents [Reagan and Bush the younger] elected who were sympathetic to our understanding of the world," Muravchik implored his comrades to begin preparing for the 2008 presidential campaign, promoting "Sen. John McCain [or] former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani," both of whom "look like the kind of leaders who could prosecute the war on terror vigorously." He added: "As for vice presidential candidates, how about Condoleezza Rice or even Joe Lieberman?"13

During the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election, Muravchik championed the candidacy of Senator McCain. Discussing his support for the senator, Muravchik told a debate audience at the Nixon Center in September 2008, “If McCain is president, there will be an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.”14 Commenting on the talk, journalist Jim Lobe wrote, “I would have to take Muravchik’s prediction seriously given his longtime perch at AEI, McCain’s favorite foreign-policy think tank, and his long association with some of McCain’s closest advisers, including Robert Kagan.… Of course, bombing Iran has been a devout and explicit wish on Muravchik’s part for nearly two years if not more, so this may be an example of wishful thinking, but I can’t help but believe his associations give him some real insight on this question.”15

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Muravchik played an important role trying to adapt neoconservative ideas to the rapidly evolving international situation. Muravchik endeavored to craft a new interventionist mission for the United States as the Soviet Union crumbled, an event that wreaked havoc on the neoconservative anticommunist and anti-détente consensus that had been in place since before the election of Reagan. As scholar John Ehrman put it, "The neoconservatives' view of the world assumed a stable, malevolent Soviet Union that was immune from drastic change."16 With the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev and the ensuing warming relations between the two superpowers, neoconservatives experienced a sharp decline in their influence in the Reagan administration and a rupture within their own ranks. The neoconservatives entered "a period of increasing confusion," writes Ehrman, which was characterized by "an intellectual failure.”17 Lacking a clear enemy, some neoconservatives, like Irving Kristol, began reconsidering whether the United States needed to undertake an aggressive role in global affairs, while others sought to find renewed justification for continued military mobilization—some by attempting to rehabilitate the Soviet threat, others by envisioning new threats and missions for the United States.

Among the second group were people, including Muravchikand Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who championed a new mission, one aimed at capitalizing on the U.S. position as lone superpower to aggressively promote democracy and American values as a replacement for militant anticommunism. In his seminal 1990 Foreign Affairs article, "The Unipolar Moment," Krauthammer wrote that if "America wants stability, it will have to create it." The alternative to "such a robust and difficult interventionism," he argued, "is chaos." For his part, Muravchik argued that if "communism soon completes its demise, U.S. foreign policy still should make the promotion of democracy its main objective."18

For many first-generation neoconservatives like Irving Kristol, these ideas represented "a dangerous manifestation of Wilsonianism," as the conservative scholars Stephen Halper and Jonathan Clarke characterized the dissent in their 2004 book America Alone. Instead, Kristol advocated a new realism based on the prevailing circumstances in the international system. Arguing that there was no longer any "balance of power for us to worry about," efforts at "monitoring and maintaining a balance of power among other nations, large and small, in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere, would make the United States the world's policeman." "We are simply not going to be that kind of imperial power," he concluded.19 Likewise, Robert Tucker, a longtime contributor to neoconservative journals, warned against undertaking a new mission to impose freedom, promoting instead "a framework of stability and moderation within which democratic institutions may take root and grow."20 Presciently, however, although he opposed these new trends in neoconservative discourse, Kristol recognized that they would appeal "not only to liberals but to many conservatives who are ideologically adrift in the post-Cold War era."21 In the late 1990s, neoconservative-led groups like PNAC successfully began to exploit the appeal of their democracy rhetoric to enlist various factions, including many liberal internationalists and Christian Right leaders, behind their appeals for a more interventionist U.S. foreign policy. These neocon-led coalitions proved invaluable as neoconservatives began to push for war in Iraq after 9/11.22

For Muravchik and other neoconservative hardliners, people like Kristol and Tucker had ceased being neoconservatives by the end of the 1980s. Instead, they were, according to Muravchik, conservative neo-realists or "right isolationists." Around the ideas promoted by Muravchik and Krauthammer a new era of neoconservatism began to emerge, one spearheaded by what Halper and Clarke called a "Young Turk faction," which grew to include the offspring of many of the earliest neoconservatives, including William Kristol (son of Irving), Robert Kagan (son of Donald), John Podhoretz (son of Norman), and Daniel Pipes (son of Richard). Among this faction's early agenda items were: 1) aggressively advance democracy across the globe as the "touchtone of a new ideological American foreign policy," as Krauthammer phrased it in his 1989 article "Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World," which appeared in the Irving Kristol-founded National Interest; and 2) in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, promote the idea that rogue states equipped with nuclear weapons were America's new enemies—or, as Krauthammer defined them in "The Unipolar Moment:" "small aggressive states armed with weapons of mass destruction and possessing the means to deliver them." Such states, argued Krauthammer, "will constitute the greatest single threat to world security for the rest of our lives."23

Muravchik is a prolific writer, having published a number of books, including Heaven on Earth (2002), about the rise and fall of socialism that served as the basis for a PBS documentary by the same title, and The Future of the United Nations (2005), which argues for a dramatically reformed and less influential United Nations. Other books by Muravchik include Exporting Democracy (1991) and The Imperative of American Leadership (1996). He is also author of hundreds of articles for a variety of publications, including Foreign Policy, Commentary, National Review, and various U.S. newspapers.