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Norman Podhoretz has been a leading writer and ideologue of the neoconservative political faction since the group began to emerge in the late 1960s. Along with Irving Kristol, Podhoretz is widely regarded as one of the group’s trailblazers. Podhoretz edited the neoconservative flagship magazine Commentary from 1960 to 1995, using it as a soapbox from which he and like-minded writers shaped the contours of what he called the neoconservative "tendency.” (He remains an editor at large, and his son John is editorial director, of the magazine.) From that platform, Podhoretz and others lambasted the anti-war movement, extolled the virtues of military power, attacked so-called appeasers like George McGovern, and condemned the supposed amorality of the counterculture and liberal social policies. Podhoretz also co-founded the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) in the mid-1970s to serve as a pressure group aimed at resisting the politics of détente with the Soviet Union and championing a fierce anti-communism, which became the central theme of the early presidency of Ronald Reagan.

More recently, Podhoretz has preached his ultra-hawkish and U.S.-centric vision of global affairs while an adjunct fellow at the rightist Hudson Institute and as an adviser to politicians, including former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who tapped Podhoretz as a foreign policy adviser during his run for the 2008 Republican Party presidential nomination. The Jewish daily Forward reported that, “The former New York City mayor announced last week that he had assembled a team of foreign policy advisers featuring several prominent neoconservatives, including one of the movement’s founders, Norman Podhoretz. In addition to being an unwavering supporter of the war against Iraq, Podhoretz, a former editor of Commentary magazine, has grabbed headlines in recent months as one of [the] most vocal proponents of American military action against Iran” (July 18, 2007).

As Forward notes, Podhoretz has been among the louder advocates of bombing Iran, writing broadsides against “appeasers” and reiterating his case against Tehran in Commentary, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. In a January 2008 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Podhoretz took aim at the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that concluded Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program, by pulling out one of neoconservatism’s most common tropes: comparing current problems to Munich 1938, when Great Britain began its “appeasement” of the Nazis by allowing Germany to take over the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia.  Podhoretz wrote that, “When I first predicted a year or so ago that Mr. [George W.] Bush would bomb Iran's nuclear facilities once he had played out the futile diplomatic string, the obstacles that stood in his way were great but they did not strike me as insurmountable. Now, thanks in large part to the new NIE, they have grown so formidable that I can only stick by my prediction with what the NIE itself would describe as ‘low-to-moderate confidence.’ For Mr. Bush is right about the resemblance between 2008 and 1938. In 1938, as Winston Churchill later said, Hitler could still have been stopped at a relatively low price and many millions of lives could have been saved if England and France had not deceived themselves about the realities of their situation. Mutatis mutandis, it is the same in 2008, when Iran can still be stopped from getting the bomb and even more millions of lives can be saved—but only provided that we summon up the courage to see what is staring us in the face and then act on what we see. … If not—God help us all—the stage will have been set for the outbreak of a nuclear war that will become as inescapable then as it is avoidable now” (Wall Street Journal, January 23, 2008).

In a longer version of his views published in Commentary, Podhoretz argued that the publication of the NIE was a move aimed at making it “politically impossible” for Bush to exercise a military option, writing that, “To me it seemed obvious that it [the NIE] represented another ambush by an intelligence community that had consistently tried to sabotage Bush’s policies through a series of damaging leaks and was now trying to prevent him from ever taking military action against Iran” (Commentary, February 2008).

Impact on Neoconservatism

Discussing Podhoretz's influence on U.S. political discourse, the noted international relations scholar Andrew J. Bacevich wrote in his 2005 book The New American Militarism that, "Once his own fling with sixties radicalism ended, Podhoretz launched a 'scorched-earth campaign against the New Left and counterculture.' From his editorial command post at Commentary... Podhoretz did much to create and refine the fiercely combative neoconservative style. That style emphasized not balance (viewed as evidence of timidity) or the careful sifting of evidence (suggesting scholasticism) but the ruthless demolition of any point of view inconsistent with the neoconservative version of truth, typically portrayed as self-evident and beyond dispute" (New American Militarism, p. 72).

In the 1960s, Podhoretz began explicating themes that have since become commonplace in neoconservative discourse, including the constant preoccupation with weakness and betrayal, the centrality of the Holocaust, the belief in U.S. exceptionalism, and the view that U.S. military force is a unique arbiter of good in global affairs. Before Iran became the new “Munich” to Podhoretz, there was Vietnam, which for him was “the self-evident symbol of a policy that must never be followed again.” The debacle in Vietnam had resulted in the lessening of the possibility of the United States wielding its military power, a result that Podhoretz considered potentially catastrophic. He wrote in 1982 that, "The survival not only of the United States but of free institutions everywhere in the world depends on a resurgence of American power." Thus, he and other neocons in the 1970s, including his wife Midge Decter, struggled to overcome the post-Vietnam "malaise" in U.S. culture, which they thought was expressed in the counterculture and the "appeasement" polices of both the Nixon and Carter presidencies (quotes in this paragraph cited in Bacevich, pp. 74-75).

Podhoretz also gained a reputation while at Commentary for overusing Holocaust imagery to describe contemporary events. Peter Novick, author of The Holocaust in American Life, remarked about Podhoretz's work that, "Once one starts using imagery from that most extreme of events, it becomes impossible to say anything moderate, balanced, or nuanced; the very language carries you along to hyperbole. … Anyone who scoffed at the idea that there were dangerous portents in American society had not learned 'the lessons of the Holocaust.'" This preoccupation also found expression in neoconservatives' views on Israel. Decter once wrote while criticizing politicians whom she felt were not sufficiently supportive of Israel that, "In a world full of ambiguities and puzzlements, one thing is absolutely easy both to define and locate: that is the Jewish interest. The continued security—and in those happy places where the term applies, well-being—of the Jews, worldwide, rests with a strong, vital, prosperous, self-confident United States" (cited in Mark Gerson, Neoconservative Vision, p. 165).

Describing the sharp neoconservative reaction to perceived anti-Semitism in the United Nations following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the conservative scholars Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke argue that a consensus gradually emerged among key neoconservatives like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Irving Kristol, and Podhoretz that "America and Israel ... shared a common ideological struggle against common enemies. The 1970s saw the vague consensus of neoconservatism ... wrap itself tightly around the belief that America must have a self-assured and robust elite, which must be willing to employ U.S. power promptly and resolutely, if need be, and prepared to stand up to the USSR along with its anti-American and anti-Semitic allies at the UN and beyond" (Halper and Clarke, America Alone, p. 60).

For Podhoretz and his cohorts, the world is in a constant state of crisis. Living under this constant threat demands a stark choice between "surrender or war," as Podhoretz once wrote when criticizing the Carter administration (cited in Bacevich, p. 77). Near the end of the 1980s, as the Soviet Union began to crumble, Podhoretz's Commentary continued to warn of impending doom from the Soviets. In 1987, after Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the Perestroika and glasnost reforms that helped open up the Soviet Union to liberal changes, Podhoretz published an article by Eugene Rostow, which argued: "The Soviet program of indefinite expansion achieved by the aggressive use of force ... [is still] the central problem ... of world politics and American national security." A year later, the French writer Jean-Francois Revel wrote in Commentary that he believed glasnost was merely a new method for an old Kremlin technique of getting rid of opponents, writing that, "It is an instrument through which [Mikhail Gorbachev] can consolidate his own power by using the press to indict and, little by little, eliminate his predecessors' men" (quotes from Ehrman, p. 175).

With the end of the Cold War, Podhoretz quickly joined forces with a second generation of neoconservatives who began championing a new U.S. interventionist policy, a notion that found preeminent expression in Charles Krauthammer's 1990 Foreign Affairs article, "The Unipolar Moment," which argued that the United States should take advantage of its position as the unique global superpower to impose its priorities across the world. Unlike some of his contemporaries, such as Robert Tucker and Irving Kristol, Podhoretz fully embraced this new campaign, which eventually coalesced around the many ideologues who created the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in 1997. Podhoretz signed PNAC's founding statement of principles, which called for a "Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity" that would ensure "American global leadership." The statement added, "we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles."

“World War IV” and “Islamofascism”

After 9/11, Podhoretz became one of the most prominent supporters of the view, initially dreamed up by neoconservative academic Eliot Cohen, that the United States was fighting World War IV. In a 2004 Commentary article, Podhoretz opined that, "We are only in the very early stages of what promises to be a very long war, and Iraq is only the second front to have been opened in that war: the second scene, so to speak, of the first act of a five-act play. In World War II and then in World War III [the Cold War], we persisted in spite of impatience, discouragement, and opposition for as long as it took to win, and this is exactly what we have been called upon to do today in World War IV" (Commentary, August 17, 2004).

He added, employing standard neoconservative rhetoric equating “radical Islamism” with threats from the past, "For today, no less than in those titanic conflicts, we are up against a truly malignant force in radical Islamism and in the states breeding, sheltering, or financing its terrorist armory. This new enemy has already attacked us on our own soil—a feat neither Nazi Germany nor Soviet Russia ever managed to pull off—and openly announces his intention to hit us again, only this time with weapons of infinitely greater and deadlier power than those used on 9/11. His objective is not merely to murder as many of us as possible and to conquer our land. Like the Nazis and Communists before him, he is dedicated to the destruction of everything good for which America stands."

In 2007, Podhoretz continued this line of thinking in his book World War IV: The Long Struggle against Islamofascism, which was released, perhaps not unintentionally, on September 11. A new label rising in prominence in recent years among neoconservative circles due in large part to the writings of  David Horowitz and Frank Gaffney, the term “Islamofascism” melds in a single concept the neoconservatives’ alarmist attitudes regarding Islam, their unique vision of U.S.-Israeli relations, and their tendency to find exaggerated historical parallels between today’s threats and those of the past. Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of the New Republic who has supported some neoconservative policies, roundly panned the book, noting that Podhoretz fails even to explain his titular assertion. “‘Islamofascism’ … goes largely undefined,” Beinart wrote. “Podhoretz does call it a ‘monster with two heads, one religious and the other secular.’ But if fascism involves worship of the state, how exactly does the religious ‘head’—Al Qaeda—qualify, given that Osama bin Laden sees the state as a pagan imposition threatening the unity of Islam? And if the secular ‘head’ was Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, what made it Islamofascist? After all, Saddam's longtime foreign minister was Christian, as was Michel Aflaq, Baathism's ideological founder (though some claim that on his deathbed he converted to Islam).” Beinart concludes that, “His assertions are bold, sweeping, and almost wholly unencumbered by evidence. … World War IV is largely an excuse to insult his old foes on the left and titillate himself with fantasies of civic violence” (International Herald Tribune, September 8, 2007). (For background on this issue, see “Are There Echoes of Fascism in Certain Militant Islamic Groups?” Political Research Associates.)

Pondering the threats posed by “radical Islam” is not new for Podhoretz. In a 2002 speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Podhoretz borrowed a line from George Kennan's famous 1947 article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," which argued for a policy of containing and rolling back the Soviet Union, to describe the war on terror. Replacing the words "Russian-American relations" in the original with "Islamic terrorism," Podhoretz said, "The thoughtful observer of Islamic terrorism will ... experience a certain gratitude for a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear."

In 2004, Bush awarded Podhoretz the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor. “Mr. Bush could not have found a more kindred spirit,” reported the New York Times. “Mr. Podhoretz not only subscribes to the so-called Bush Doctrine of foreign policy, which embraces the concept of pre-emptive action against those who are viewed as a threat to the United States, but he is also taking the doctrine a step further in the next book he intends to write [World War IV]. … He sounds no less assertive than Mr. Bush in stressing the urgency of the doctrine, to the point of predicting that if the next Democrat to occupy the White House does not continue the policy, ‘we will be in danger of the most horrendously imaginable attacks, something infinitely worse than 9/11’” (New York Times, June 24, 2004).

Other Publications

Podhoretz is the author of several books, including The Norman Podhoretz Reader: A Selection of his Writings from the 1950s through the 1990s (2003); The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are (2002); My Love Affair with America (2000); Ex-Friends (1999); The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet (1986); Why We Were in Vietnam (1982); Making It (1980); The Present Danger (1980); Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (1979); and Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing (1966).