Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet

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While campaigning for president in 2000, George W. Bush downplayed his lack of foreign policy experience by emphasizing that he would surround himself with a highly talented and experienced group of political veterans. This core group, consisting of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, and Condoleezza Rice, has a long history together dating back 30 years in some cases. Dubbing themselves the Vulcans, they have largely determined the direction and focus of the Bush presidency. In this remarkably researched and fascinating book, Mann traces their careers and the development of their ideas in order to understand how and why American foreign policy got to where it is today.

As Mann makes clear, there has never been perfect agreement between all parties, (the relationship between the close duo of Powell and Armitage on one side and Rumsfeld on the other, for instance, has been frosty) but they do share basic values. Whether they came from the armed services, academia, or government bureaucracy, the Vulcans all viewed the Pentagon as the principal institution from which American power should emanate. Their developing philosophy was cemented after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and is best reflected in the decision to invade Iraq. They believe that a powerful military is essential to American interests; that America is ultimately a force for good despite any negative consequences that may arise from American aggression; they are eternally optimistic about American power and dismiss any arguments about over-extension of resources; and they are skeptical about the need to consult allies or form broad global coalitions before acting.

Rise of the Vulcans succeeds on many levels. Mann presents broad themes such as the gradual transition from the Nixon and Kissinger philosophies to the doctrine espoused by Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the rest in clear and logical terms. He also offers minute details and anecdotes about each of the individuals, and the complex relationships between them, that reveal the true personalities behind the politicians. This is essential reading for those seeking to understand the past quarter century and what it means for America's future. --Shawn Carkonen


From Publishers Weekly
Mann, a former correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, offers a lucid, nonpolemical and carefully researched history of President Bush's foreign policy team, the self-described "Vulcans" (after the Roman god of fire). In doing so, Mann illuminates the administration's rationale for the Iraqi war with impressive clarity. For the Vulcans, he shows, the war is not an anomalous foreign adventure or a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11. On the contrary, the foreign policy, devised by Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, was 35 years in the making and has its roots in the Republican Party faction that opposed detente with the Soviet Union. Vulcan philosophy has three major tenets: the embrace of pre-emptive action, the notion of an "unchallengeable American superpower" and the systematic export of America's democratic values. Implicit is the rejection of both the notion that transatlantic relationships are the natural focus of U.S. foreign policy and the Kissingeresque realpolitik that dominated much of 20th-century policy. Mann's purpose is to explicate Bush's foreign policy, not to make sweeping value judgments about its wisdom; he takes care to expose not only errors in the Vulcans' assumptions about the war in Iraq but also those of the war's opponents. This well-written, serious, evenhanded effort should be essential reading for anyone interested in American foreign policy. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
In the second of his debates with Al Gore, George W. Bush surprised many people, including some of his own advisers, by calling for a level of "humility" in American foreign policy. "I just don't think it's the role of the United States," he said, "to walk into a country [and] say, 'We do it this way; so should you.' " Rarely have a candidate's words proved less reliable as a guide to his future actions. Telling other nations to behave as the United States expects has become a hallmark of America's current relationship with the world.Bush was not being deliberately misleading. He very likely believed that this was an appropriate approach to international relations, consistent with his frequently stated philosophy: "I want to help people help themselves, not have government tell people what to do." But it was clear from the first weeks of his presidency that this philosophy would not guide American foreign policy: A far more muscular, ambitious and unilateralist vision would determine the conduct of the new administration. The reason for this radical disjunction between the candidate's apparent preferences and his administration's subsequent behavior was the remarkable influence of a group of military and foreign relations officials who established control over international policy early in 2001 and moved it decisively in a direction determined by their own fervently held beliefs. These are the people whom James Mann, a writer in residence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, describes as the "Vulcans" in this informative, well-researched and largely nonjudgmental book. Mann offers brief biographies and intellectual profiles of six of the most important of these Vulcans: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz. In doing so, he reveals both the complex web of relationships, some of them stretching back more than 30 years, that bound these policymakers together and the powerful assumptions they came to share about America's role in the world.The ideas that now shape American foreign policy are not new to the current administration. Most of the Vulcans grew up steeped in Cold War ideology, and more than any other single factor, Mann argues, that ideology continues to shape their current views. So, too, does the legacy of the Vietnam War, during which all of these figures save Rice began their public careers. For Rumsfeld and Cheney, in particular -- men who were intimate colleagues beginning in the Nixon administration -- the American failure in Vietnam was a central event in shaping their assumptions about foreign and military policy. Throughout the 1980s and '90s and into the new century, the Vulcans worked ceaselessly to restore America's willingness to use its power actively in the world and to rebuild the nation's confidence in the superiority of American ideals and goals. Although some of them began their careers in service to Henry Kissinger -- supporting his tough, unromantic view of international relations -- all eventually rejected realpolitik and embraced a highly ideological vision of American power as a force capable of bringing progress and morality to a troubled world. And while all of these figures worked in the first Bush administration, in which multilateralism was a guiding principle (as the 1991 Gulf War vividly demonstrated), all of them eventually rejected the Bush I strategy and moved instead toward a commitment to unilateralism. This unilateralist turn was partly in reaction to the senior Bush's defeat in 1992, which the Vulcans attributed to his failure to satisfy the hawkish right. But it was even more a product of their own deeply held vision of U.S. moral superiority and of the nation's duty to shape a new world order, with allies if possible, but alone if necessary. America's current, aggressively unilateralist, highly militaristic and powerfully interventionist foreign policy -- controversial at home and reviled through much of the rest of the world -- is not, therefore, simply a response to the terrorists attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, although the events of that day provided this policy with an unexpected opportunity to legitimize itself. It was the product of a generation of experiences that forged a tightly knit cohort of policymakers. They came to believe that much of the rest of the world (including America's closest allies), the Democratic Party and even many Republicans were wrong in thinking that global stability depends on a robust system of alliances and strong international organizations.That belief had become something close to an article of faith to a generation of liberal internationalists. The intensity of their opposition to the Bush administration reflects their horror at seeing a global system that they had worked for decades to create being dismantled before their eyes. But liberal internationalism, it is now clear, is not the only vision of the world that Americans have held in the last 60 years. It has always competed with an alternative set of beliefs: that alliances and international organizations are shackles that America must shed; that the United States has little to learn from the benighted nations of the Old World; that America is, as some of the first Europeans in North America centuries long ago claimed, a "city on a hill," a beacon of morality and justice, and a fit model for other nations. "We have it in our power to begin the world over again," Ronald Reagan liked to say, quoting Thomas Paine. But the efforts of the Vulcans to create a new world order today, Mann persuasively argues, are at heart not new at all. They are an effort to repeal the inhibitions and restrictions that have constrained American power in the last 30 years and to revive an earlier moment when the unapologetic and unbridled pursuit of global primacy was a widely accepted national goal. Reviewed by Alan BrinkleyCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
Referred to among themselves and by fellow Bush insiders as the Vulcans, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, and Condoleezza Rice are largely responsible for forging a new and radical foreign policy for a president admittedly lacking in international savvy and experience. Since most of these Bush advisors already knew each other and had worked together in previous Republican administrations, the ties among them were tight when they were selected to fill the premier jobs in the Bush administration. As a group, their collective legacy and foreign policy resume are extremely impressive. Despite the fact that their experiences were long and similar, the Vulcans did not direct a return to the status quo of the previous Bush administration, which was rooted in more traditional paths of international diplomacy. Rather, they adopted a far more controversial, confrontational, and parochial worldview. Tracing the evolution of the Vulcans both as individuals and as a cohesive unit, Mann provides an illuminating glimpse into the inner workings of the current Bush administration. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


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Intricately shaded and scary profile of President George W. Bush's foreign policy team: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, and to a lesser degree Condoleeza Rice. In a steady voice that likes to hew to the facts, Mann (About Face, 1999, etc.) profiles a group of associates with close, intricate, and overlapping ties. Dubbing themselves the Vulcans in honor of the Roman god of fire, they craft, in the stead of a president with little to no experience in the greater world, the global vision of the current administration, which the author broadly summarizes as a willingness to deploy sledgehammer and fire to protect and further American interests abroad. Not that this chorus sings in harmony, notes Mann: they have manifold strategic and tactical differences, but they share an overriding sense of the country's potential as a unilateral military power, with its unbridled ability to affect events on the global stage. The author anatomizes in exquisite detail the players' backgrounds and the experiences that shaped them, to whom they are beholden, and the trajectories of their careers-no mean feat with this seemingly incestuous and opportunistic lot, whose alliances and perspectives shift through time and space. But they all emphasize US supremacy, confrontational and self-interested, diplomatically thuggish, built on "coalitions" or "ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted." Iraq, of course, is the unpersuasive field test for their belief in retaliation, an emphasis on weapons on mass destruction (real or otherwise), stanching terrorism, containing the "axis of evil" states. None of these rationales obviously apply, but all are brought tobear. Mann doesn't address the thorny question of how the Vulcans plan (or have failed to plan) to contend with the swarm of variables that assert themselves once the facade of tyranny is dismantled. A neat dissection of current American tactics overseas that, understandably, as history has yet to be played out, leaves hanging the question of their efficacy.


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