1. In the atmosphere of punch-drunk Cold War triumphalism that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse, a small group of neoconservatives in Dick Cheney’s Defense Department started planning for a unipolar world. The document they drafted in the waning days of the George H. W. Bush administration, the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), was a road map for permanent US global hegemony.

2. The document’s drafters were a rogues’ gallery of figures who would become notorious a decade later as architects of the Iraq invasion. Led by Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Scooter Libby — who, as a top Cheney aide, would be convicted in 2005 for exposing the covert identity of Valerie Plame in retaliation for her husband’s public questioning of the Bush administration’s Iraq intelligence — the drafters included Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Abram Shulsky (who led the intelligence-doctoring Office of Special Plans in 2002–2003).