While a Republican House opposed war on Serbia, neocons cheered Bill Clinton’s 78 days of bombing that tore Kosovo from the mother country.

When some on the right opposed the invasion of Iraq as an unwise and unnecessary war, National Review denounced them as “unpatriotic.”

On reflection, the neoconservative rage made sense.

If one believes America is not a normal nation with definable interests, but a creedal nation dedicated to democracy, equality and human rights, one has converted to what Kristol called a “civic religion.” And the mission of that faith is to advance the work begun in 1776, to make America—then the entire world—free, democratic and egalitarian.

Either our ideology triumphs or another shall, neocons believe. We are in a world historic struggle for the hearts and souls of mankind.

This ideology, this political religion, causes neocons, as Gottfried and Russell Kirk observed—the latter in his 1988 Heritage Foundation lecture on the species—to see opponents on the right as heretics and enemies of the true faith.

Yet, in the final analysis, the neoconservatism of Irving Kristol, writes Kerwick, future-oriented and utopian, “is not … a form of conservatism at all.”

Decades ago, when Irving called for a “Republican ideology,” the scholar Gerhart Niemeyer upbraided him: “All modern ideologies have the same irrational root: the permeation of politics with millenarian ideas of pseudo-religious character. The result is a dream world.”

Like 19th-century Marxists, neocons envision a future that is utopian—i.e., it is unattainable. For in the real world, history, faith and culture shape peoples, and peoples shape countries to reflect who and what they are.

Nations constructed from ideological blueprints like the Soviet Union of Vladimir Lenin and the China of Mao Zedong eventually collapse when their ruling ideas collide fatally with reality and human nature.

The one great success of the neocons came about by accident. In the shock of 9/11, George W. Bush was converted to global democratic revolution “to end tyranny in our world.” And off we marched.

And after decade-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we reaped the harvest: 6,500 dead, 40,000 wounded, trillions in debt, a nation divided and pandemic hatred of America across the Islamic world.

Perhaps the new wars for which our neocons clamor in Syria and Iran will prove at last the great leap forward into the brave new world of their dreams.