Q: ... I've looked at the remarkable Defense Policy Guidance of 1992 --

Wolfowitz: Wait a minute. Did you look at the guidance or did you look at the draft that was leaked before I saw it?

Q: ... Actually all I saw were summaries of it ...

Wolfowitz: ... the way I remember it approximately is as follows. I gave a quite substantial briefing to Secretary Cheney and what was then called I guess the Defense Resources Board on a post-Cold War defense strategy, the essence of which was to shift from a strategy for being prepared to fight a global war, to being focused on two possible regional conflicts. And to downsize the U.S. military by some 40 percent.

...

As I recall, one of the pieces of hysteria was the idea that this is a blueprint for a massive increase in U.S. defense spending, when in fact it was a blueprint for a 40 percent reduction in U.S. defense spending.

...

Pat Buchanan's "Republic Not an Empire" book spends its first chapter attacking the so-called Wolfowitz Memorandum (ed: the defense policy guidance drawn up by Cheney and Wolfowitz in the 1st Bush Sr administration). ... And he laments the fact that these same Democratic senators who were attacking ... the Wolfowitze Memorandum, had climbed on board the whole policy when it became Clinton's policy in the mid 1990s. ... it was the defense policy of the Clinton years, ironically.

Q; In fact John Louis Gaddis said that.

Wolfowize: Who?

Q: John Lous Gaddis has asid that, that if you look at Clinton's policy it actually does come out of the '92 guidance to some extent.

Wolfowitze: Not to some extent. [Clinton's defense policy]'s pretty much [an exact copy of the defense policy guidance cooked up by the two most influential members of this current administration, Dick Cheney and myself, Paul Wolfowitz.]

Q: But you're --

Wolfowitze: --without acknowledement.