Getting to the bottom of this 'neo' nonsense: Before you talk about conservatives, know what you're doing.

Have neoconservatives hijacked the Bush administration's foreign policy? That's the charge of opponents of the Iraq war on both the left and the right. Eric Alterman thinks that an "easily manipulated" president has been the neocons' victim. Michael Lind agrees: "The neo- cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience" to take over American foreign policy, and Don Rumsfeld, an "elderly figurehead," was unable to stop them. Patrick Buchanan claims that a "neoconservative cabal" is running American foreign policy in the interests of Israel. Similar theories are widely expressed, with less coyness, in the Arab world.

The cabal thesis is chiefly a testament to the paranoia that has infected opponents of the war. They appear to find the overthrow of Saddam Hussein so self-evidently foolish a policy that its supporters must be members of some weird cult. Bush's supporters have decried these lurid, and sometimes anti-Semitic, conspiracy theories. They have insisted that administration officials, including Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Bush himself, are capable of reaching their own judgments. And they have been convincing on each point. What they have not contested, however, is the conspiracy theorists' fundamental premise: that the administration is pursuing a neoconservative foreign policy.

In effect, they argue that it is incorrect to depict President Bush as manipulated by neoconservatives because he has become a neoconservative himself. On this point, everyone seems to agree: The administration's foreign policy can accurately be characterized as neoconservative, guided as it is by the idea that America should transform despotic polities into liberal democracies.

Gary Schmitt, himself a neoconservative, sounded a triumphalist note on the first anniversary of September 11, writing in The National Interest that "9/11 and the promulgation of the Bush Doctrine [mean] that the debate between conservative realists and neo-conservatives over the priority given to the character of states ('regimes') has been settled in favor of the latter." In National Journal, Jonathan Rauch treats this conclusion as current conventional wisdom: "Unless you live at the bottom of a well, you've probably noticed that 9/11 and Iraq have had a transforming effect on the American Right. The short formulation is that so-called neoconservatism has triumphed."

On the face of it, it's an odd assertion. If it were true, it would mean that the conquest of Iraq was a distinctively neoconservative rather than a conservative project. Thus unhyphenated conservatives who supported it -- and almost everyone who considers himself a conservative did support it -- had either absorbed the neocon premises or had, as the cabal-mongers say, been hoodwinked. It's worth remembering that right-wing opponents of the first Gulf War in 1990-91 said that it, too, was a neocon war. Support for the war on the right was much more uniform this time. Yet for some reason the claim that the war reflected the priorities of a small faction within the Right has gotten more credence than it did a decade ago.

The media's enduring incomprehension of conservatives goes a long way toward explaining why Iraq has gone down, in the official discourse, as a "neoconservative war." The media can accommodate two, or at most three, kinds of conservatives in their mental map of the world. So there are hawkish "neoconservatives" and isolationist "paleoconservatives." In discussions of domestic affairs, libertarians will sometimes get thrown in as a third faction; in foreign affairs, the third camp will be said to consist of alleged "realists" such as Brent Scowcroft and James Baker. Both neos and paleos have a tendency to simplify the intra-conservative debate in just this fashion.

But the truth is that the vast majority of conservatives interested in foreign policy have never belonged to any of these camps. Most conservatives have been "realists" in the sense that they favored foreign policies based on hardheaded calculations of national interest. But they have never been "realists" in the academic sense of the term, denoting indifference to the "internal" or "moral" character of states. Long before the neoconservatives came along, Barry Goldwater saw that the Soviet Union's foreign policy was not a mere extension of traditional Russian imperialism but was inseparable from its Communist ideology and practice.

Traditional conservatives supported military action against Iraq because its totalitarian regime was a threat to America, and because the spread of freedom there might promote American interests in a strategically important part of the world. Their stance implies no support for a generalized program of global good works.

This kind of conservative realism is very different from the Baker- Scowcroft type. James Baker may regard himself as a pragmatic realist, but conservatives have generally considered this self-image delusive. Republicans of his stripe profess concern for stability and prudence, but, in conservative eyes, they confuse blind support for the status quo with these goods. The first Bush administration was dominated by this kind of Republican. In the Soviet Union, Iraq, and Yugoslavia, their pragmatism led them to make futile attempts to shore up inherently unstable, or dangerous, states. Conservatives and neoconservatives alike rejected their prescriptions, although the latter tended to go further, pouring rhetorical scorn on the very ideas of prudence and stability.

The invisibility of what I am describing as the mainstream conservative position is not only a function of media ignorance. It is also the case that this position is sparsely represented in the universe of foreign- policy intellectuals. William F. Buckley Jr., Adam Garfinkle, John Hillen, John O'Sullivan, Peter Rodman, and the editors of this magazine can be taken as representatives of the school. But its real power lies in the fact that most conservatives -- ordinary voters as well as public officials -- tend instinctively to line up with it.

The war on terrorism has, at least for the moment, submerged intra- conservative disagreements on foreign policy. Very few conservatives are isolationists, and those who are have never been more isolated. The vast majority of conservatives -- whatever their views on the proper role of the United States in world affairs -- have agreed on the major issues of the day concerning Afghanistan, Iraq, and, yes, Israel. Henry Kissinger and Fareed Zakaria can be seen as standing on the border between mainstream conservatives and the Baker-Scowcroft types; they would certainly fit more easily in Schmitt's "conservative realist" than in his "neoconservative" camp; and both of them supported the Iraq war. For the last two years, the differences among the conservative camps have been more theoretical than actual.

Deciding just who counts as a neoconservative, and what the content of neoconservatism is, is a notoriously difficult enterprise. William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Eliot Cohen are all described with some justice as neoconservatives, but Cohen has explicitly recognized the virtue of prudence in foreign policy in a way that the other two do not. David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, and Joshua Muravchik have all been taken to be part of the neocon cabal scheming for a world empire; yet all three parted from most neocons in their opposition to President Clinton's intervention in Kosovo.

If one tries to sort out the camps by ignoring the historical origins of neoconservatism -- if, that is, one pays no attention to who is Jewish, who used to be a liberal, and who published in Commentary in the 1980s, and instead looks at what foreign-policy views people have been advocating in recent years -- it is possible to divine a sort of "neo-neoconservative" position. Kristol, Kagan, Max Boot, Michael Ledeen, Lawrence Kaplan, and Norman Podhoretz seem to want America to become a kind of revolutionary liberal power. (It's hard to identify a historical precedent that does not seem like a caricature: 1790s France?) But even within this small group there are important theoretical and practical differences. Kristol and Kagan disavow the legacy of Woodrow Wilson, while Boot has taken to embracing it. Boot wants to end America's traditional support for ever-tighter European integration, while Kagan would continue that policy.

Does Bush subscribe to the neo-neos' revolutionary creed? The conventional narrative about Bush's foreign policy has him running for president as a cautious realist, prescribing American humility, and then morphing, after September 11, into a neocon crusader. But there were attempts to define Bush as a neocon even during the 2000 campaign. In November 1999, Bush gave a major speech on foreign policy. Kristol and Kagan lauded the speech as "Reaganite" in philosophy -- the same term they apply to their own foreign-policy ideas. But the views Bush adumbrated in the speech were quite different from those of Kristol and Kagan.

Kristol, for example, dismisses the argument that free trade with China will promote peace and democracy as Marxist in its economic determinism. Bush's speech made that very argument. During the Clinton administration, Kagan repeatedly rejected the idea that America was overextended and counseled conservatives not to criticize foreign commitments, even unwise ones, lest that criticism encourage isolationism. Bush's speech, on the other hand, included this line: "American internationalism should not mean action without vision, activity without priority, and missions without end -- an approach that squanders American will and drains American energy."

That episode should inspire skepticism about the facile labeling of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld as neoconservatives. Everything in Cheney's record suggests that he is a conventional western, business-oriented conservative. In the first Bush administration Cheney was not exactly eager to stand up for liberalism and democracy in the Balkans; he wanted to avoid American involvement. Kristol and Kagan spent much of the 1990s warning about a commercially-driven foreign policy that undermined American interests and values; Cheney was at the same time advocating that sanctions against thuggish regimes be relaxed because they hurt American businesses.

Paul Wolfowitz and John McCain are the two public officials most commonly associated with neoconservatism. But neither of them signed up for the chief neoconservative campaign of the late 1990s -- imposing trade sanctions on China. Wolfowitz has also argued that the first Bush administration was right to end the fighting in Iraq when it did.

The strongest argument for the claim that the Bush administration's foreign policy is neoconservative is its willingness to engage in "nation building" in Afghanistan and Iraq. During the Clinton administration, most conservatives were hostile to nation building in Somalia and Haiti. Now conservatives are willing to use American power to build democracy in places where it has never had any purchase. Surely this shift is a matter of conservatives' coming to accept neoconservative premises?

Well, no. Sensible opposition to nation building has rested on two premises: It is extremely difficult, and it should not be attempted merely for the sake of helping foreigners. Our experience in Iraq has hardly disproved the first point, and the second does not apply to it, since our nation building is in the service of American interests. The hallmark of conservative realism in foreign policy is that it is based on prudence rather than ideology. One of the great advantages of a policy based on prudence is that it is flexible. It can mimic a policy based on ideology when circumstances warrant it.

As people have had to think through just how to promote liberal democracy, they have come to appreciate the importance of democracy's cultural preconditions. Zakaria's new book, The Future of Freedom, argues that the rule of law and economic reform should come before elections in the process of liberalization. The book's positive reception may signal a realist turn in our thinking about how to go about exporting democracy when we have decided to undertake the task.

Gary Schmitt's comment to the contrary notwithstanding, the principal theoretical debate between neoconservatives and other kinds of conservatives in the 1990s did not concern whether the internal character of states affects their external behavior and should therefore affect U.S. policy. It concerned, rather, the wisdom of military intervention for purely (or almost purely) humanitarian purposes. Neocons supported military action against Slobodan Milosevic for moral reasons. Most conservatives either opposed it, or supported it grudgingly and only because previous American action in the Balkans had created derivative national interests there. The war on terrorism has settled this question for the moment, and not in the neocons' favor. We are involved in a war to protect a core national interest: the physical security of our countrymen. Merely humanitarian intervention is a luxury that we are doing without. If Milosevic were starting an ethnic-cleansing rampage in the Balkans today, we probably would not be taking military action against him.

If the principal theoretical debate concerned humanitarian intervention, the principal practical debate concerned American policy toward China. The neocons argued that the United States should adopt the overthrow or transformation of the Chinese regime as a policy goal. They wanted to abandon the Clinton administration's policy of "engagement" with China in favor of an aggressively confrontational policy, starting with trade sanctions. That campaign fizzled, and the neoconservatives rarely talk about it these days. Almost all conservatives revile the Chinese regime and want a watchful eye kept on it, but nobody imagines that America can make a priority of fomenting revolution there.

Certain neocon rhetorical tropes have spread widely on the right. It is quite common these days to hear conservatives denigrate the idea of stability, for example. In my view, this is unfortunate. But it has not yet had any practical effect since policymakers do not, in practice, follow the implications of this rhetoric. It is inconceivable that the Bush administration will roll the dice on destabilizing Saudi Arabia, for example, in the mere hope that something good will come of it. But when you look at what the administration has actually done or is going to do, there is very little that your garden-variety, unprefixed conservative would find objectionable.

A final point. It is puzzling that when the neoconservative influence on this administration is discussed, the focus should be so exclusively on foreign affairs. Once upon a time it was thought that the chief difference between neoconservatives and conservatives lay in the former's greater tolerance for the welfare state. Bush's support for big government at home reflects public opinion, not the views of neoconservatives or any other elites. But it is interesting to consider that the administration's record on education, national service, faith- based charities, and federal spending is in line with the "national greatness" theme that many leading neoconservatives have championed. If you were inclined to emphasize the role of neoconservatives, you could make a better case that Bush is a neocon in domestic affairs than that he is one in foreign affairs. But you would still be wrong.