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The literary editor of the New Republic since 1983, Leon Wieseltier is a liberal promoter of hawkish, Israel-centric policies in the Middle East. He supported the advocacy work of several key neoconservative formations during the lead up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, including the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. A respected writer of books, articles, and essays on everything from religion to culture, Wieseltier often uses his media perch to disparage critics of Israel.

An early Wieseltier work that garnered attention was his review of the Palestinian scholar Edward Said's book Orientalism (a highly regarded opus on Western study of the East), which appeared in the New Republic in 1979. Wieseltier called Said's analysis "little more than the abject canards of Arab propaganda" (New Republic, April 7, 1979).

On the influence of the so-called Israel Lobby in the United States, Wieseltier has been particularly venomous, arguing that promoters of the idea of "the Lobby" are conspiracy theorists, including highly respected scholars Tony Judt, Steve Walt, and John Mearsheimer. When a scheduled talk by Judt in October 2006 at the Polish Consulate in New York Embassy was cancelled after the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee complained, Wieseltier wrote in the Washington Diarist in October 2006: "The more significant point is that what Judt was prevented from delivering at the Polish consulate was a conspiracy theory about the pernicious role of the Jews in the world. That is what the idea of 'the Lobby' is. It is Mel Gibson's analysis of the Iraq war. It is not just an analysis of the impact of AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] on particular resolutions and policies: such an analysis requires a detailed knowledge of American government, specifically of Congress, that I suspect Judt does not possess and that his fellow heroes Mearsheimer and Walt have been shown to lack. It is a larger claim, a historical claim, a claim about a sinister causality, about the power of a small group to control the destiny of a large group. And it is a claim with a sordid history."

Though often a critic of the George W. Bush administration, Wieseltier endorsed many of the Bush administration's goals for the Middle East. He was a signatory of a PNAC letter to Bush that laid out an aggressive series of interventions as part of the "war on terror," just nine days after the 9/11 attacks. The letter named three key targets: Osama bin Laden, Hezbollah, and Iraq, stating that even if Baghdad was found not to be involved in the attacks, the war "must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq." In 2002, Wieseltier signed on as a member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an organization set up to push for the invasion.

While Wieseltier has expressed regret over his initial support for the war, these regrets are tempered by his insistent support for it. In a signed editorial for the New Republic, Wieseltier wrote that "an absence of regrets and recrimination on the part of a supporter of this war now amounts to an absence of intellectual honesty" because there were no weapons of mass destruction. Like many of the war's initial boosters, however, Wieseltier largely takes exception to the way the war has been conducted, writing in the same editorial that he has "come to despise some of the people who are directing it" (New Republic, June 28, 2004).

A longtime friend of Wieseltier is I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney who was convicted on charges of lying, perjury, and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame affair. Before Libby was sentenced, the judge reviewed letters from nearly 200 writers, including one from Wieseltier, who wrote: "I am in no sense a neoconservative, as many of my neoconservative adversaries will attest. I am, to the contrary, the kind of liberal who many neoconservatives like to despise, and that's fine with me." Wieseltier explained his stance later: "Generally, I detest this White House for many reasons and I think Scooter is a kind of state-of-the-art fall guy in this particular plot" (National Public Radio, June 6, 2007).

As a child, Wieseltier attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush, an ultra-Orthodox school in Brooklyn, where he was a classmate of fellow right-wing pro-Israel hawk Dennis Prager. He later attended Columbia and Oxford University before pursuing a doctorate in Jewish studies at Harvard. On the strength of work for the New York Review of Books written concurrently with his studies, he was lured away from academia by an offer from Martin Peretz, the publisher of the New Republic (New York Times, January 24, 1999).