This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Defense Planning Guidance, which largely shaped the U.S. government’s national security approach at the end of the previous century and the start of the current one. Although it was not adopted as policy, the ideas embodied in it formed the basis of a number of American defense and foreign policy decisions. The plan is also known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, after its chief architect, neoconservative former US Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The authors examine key tenets of the strategy, applying them to events of subsequent years. Despite the repudiation of neoconservatism, some aspects of the Defense Planning Guideline persist in American foreign policy conceptions.