# Wolfowitz Doctrine The **Wolfowitz Doctrine** is the informal name for a leaked 1992 draft of the U.S. Defense Department's **Defense Planning Guidance (DPG)** for fiscal years 1994–1999. Prepared in the office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy [[Paul Wolfowitz]], it argued that after the Cold War the United States should act to prevent the emergence of any rival superpower and preserve a unipolar world. In [[Dave Troy]]'s "[[The Big History Behind January 6th]]" series it marks the moment American grand strategy reorganized itself around permanent primacy — the strategic backdrop against which Cold War anti-communism mutated into post-Soviet great-power competition. ## What it said Drafted as the first DPG after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Gulf War, the document framed the United States as the world's sole superpower and made it the central objective to "prevent the re-emergence of a new rival." Key tenets included: - Maintaining military dominance sufficient to deter any potential competitor from even aspiring to a larger role. - Preserving the ability to act **unilaterally** when collective action could not be arranged. - Discouraging allies such as Germany and Japan from developing independent great-power ambitions. ## Authorship and the leak The drafting was overseen by Wolfowitz's deputy [[Lewis Libby]], who delegated the writing to Zalmay Khalilzad. Khalilzad completed the draft in early 1992; it was dated February 18, 1992, and within days was leaked to *The New York Times*, which ran it on the front page on March 8, 1992 under the headline "U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop." The blunt unilateralism drew immediate criticism. Under public pressure, the guidance was rewritten under the supervision of Secretary of Defense [[Dick Cheney]] and Joint Chiefs Chairman [[Colin Powell]] and released in softened form on April 16, 1992. ## Legacy Though disowned in its raw form at the time, the doctrine's logic resurfaced a decade later in the 2002 National Security Strategy and the Iraq War, advanced by many of the same figures (Wolfowitz, Libby, Cheney). It is widely treated as the foundational text of post-Cold War neoconservative grand strategy — and, in the Octopus framing, as the establishment counterpart to the private anti-communist networks: both reaching for a world in which American power answers to no rival. ## See also - [[Paul Wolfowitz]] · [[Lewis Libby]] · [[The Octopus]]