Earlier this week, Francis Fukuyama of Johns Hopkins University visited the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Turnout was very good, even with students largely gone for the summer. Doing his part to reduce oil demand, Fukuyama arrived at the talk on a sparkling Harley-Davidson. The main hall was packed, as was the overflow room.
So what was the draw? Why has Fukuyama’s recently released book, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy (Yale UP) caused such a sensation? Quite simply, here we have a leading inner member of the neoconservatives in the Reagan and Bush Administrations breaking ranks with his former comrades. His book and his address at UVA explain why and set out a better course for American foreign policy.
In his lively prepared remarks, Fukuyama condensed his book into 30 minutes. He began with an overview of neoconservatism’s roots. Evolving far from its origins on the Trotskyite left in the 1930’s, neoconservatives after World War II retained an idealism about the universality of human rights and were impressed that American power could be used for noble purposes. On the domestic front, neoconservatives focused on counterproductive consequences of government social engineering efforts.
Yet between these two themes emerged a key contradiction and legacy. The same movement so eloquently skeptical of government’s capacity to enact social transformation was as sure in its convictions about the utility of international force to bring about “transformation” for other countries.
Applied then to the post 9-11 world, the Bush neoconservatives made three critical misjudgments. First was the expansion of the doctrine of “pre-emptive war” into that of “preventive war.” After 9/11, Fukuyama agreed that “containment was no longer an option” and invading Afghanistan was necessary – to pre-empt a demonstrated imminent threat. But too many variables of the presumed threat from Iraq were unclear. What imminent threat was to be pre-empted?
The second misjudgment in Fukuyama’s view was the neoconservative assumption of “benevolent hegemony,” a faith in “American exceptionalism” which presumed the world would accept American “leadership” because US motives were inherently laudable. But that faith woefully “failed to appreciate deep currents of anti-Americanism that were long-standing.” Fukuyama cites the raging debates over “globalization” as a cause, but does not mention widespread Middle Eastern disquiet over US policies deemed too tilted in favor of Israel.
As Fukuyama illustrates in his book, this cocksure faith in America’s exceptional motives resulted in a severe lack of international political legitimacy for the US-UK invasion of Iraq. The Bush Administration pressed ahead in contempt of such opinion, on the belief that America would receive the “approbation” of the international community after it demonstrated the correctness of its claims about Saddam’s Iraq. Unfortunately for the strategy, it backfired. Instead of finding real WMD’s, America reaped what in my judgment has been just as dangerous a WMD problem; “worldwide mass distrust” of Bush Administration policies, precisely at a time when the America needs more allies, not fewer, in the fight against terror.
The third misjudgment Fukuyama attributes to the Bush neoconservatives was that nation-building would be easy. It also happens to be ironic, as the Bush Administration came into office declaring that the US would foreswear it. Answering the question, “what were they thinking?,” Fukuyama cites false lessons from the end of the Cold War and the “political miracle” that had made harmonious transitions in eastern Europe seem so easy.
In the end, Fukuyama’s core complaint with the removal of Saddam was not about its “morality,” but with its execution. That is, was the strategy likely to have a positive outcome? In 2003, and now, he deemed the gambit as not prudent. At he put it in response to a question, “the neoconservatives meant well, but made bad policy choices.” That sounded to me uncomfortably close to the old saw about the pavement on “the road to hell.”
Going forward, Fukuyama takes issue with neoconservatives on their diagnosis of the presumed threat from Islam and the offered corrective – democratization. On the former, he rejects Krauthammer-style depicions of Islam as inherently unappeasable and anti-Western, bent on a global clash with the west. Instead, he follows the French scholar Olivier Roy in seeing much of radical Islam as a social problem of identity, wherein the ongoing forces of modernization have left traditional peoples uprooted, wandering, and vulnerable to siren songs from extremists. While compelling in part, Fukuyama again sidesteps the debates over resentments engendered by US and Israeli policies.
In any case, it follows from Fukuyama’s diagnosis that he does not accept Secretary Rice’s argument about the lack of democracy as the root cause of terrorism. The narrow focus on spreading democracy will not in and of itself reduce pressures for terror. Fukuyama instead has hope for the authentic expansion of an Islamist reformation which over time might provide a basis for “separating church and state.” Alas, that process took centuries in Europe and was not without immense strife; he sees little reason why it should be much quicker for Islam. On the other hand, its a struggle that America is ill-equipped to stage manage.
In the extended question period, Fukuyama was compelling on the challenge of terrorism. He characterized the immediate terror threat as boiling down to, “small groups of fanatics swimming within a much larger sea of those pissed off at the US for other reasons.” But the US is doing poorly at draining the swamp, as excessive US firepower has repeatedly been counterproductive. “The real battle is over ideas. But the US has a big credibility problem.” That is, its hard for America to be convincing in talking about the “rule of law” when we have so little “accountability” over American actions, beginning with the scandal of Abu Ghraib.
Professor Fukuyama struggled most with rather pointed questions on democracy. When asked to explain why the US pressured the Palestinians to have elections but then refused to deal with the victorious Hamas, Fukuyama lamely inserted the qualifier that the US ought to be pushing for “liberal democracy” not “democracy” per se. Subscribing still to the view that Fatah was too corrupt and having “no illusions about Hamas,” he gamely hopes that at least the old models of autocratic governance are no longer tenable. (In his book, he vaguely hopes that Hamas might yet “evolve.”)
Fukuyama flatly admitted that pressure for democracy in American foes like Iran but not for friends like Saudi Arabia is “hypocritical.” “Of course,” at times, “other interests override.” But Fukuyama doesn’t want to see America slide back into Kissinger-style realism and instead takes refuge in the long run, where “overall, the assertion of US ideals has mattered…. It would be worse if we didn’t care about democratization at all.”
I was mildly disappointed that Fukuyama did not have the time to expand on his book proposals for building an alternate model of “realistic Wilsonianism.” He’s not referring to the neoconservative penchant for building peace via the spread of democracy. Instead, he seeks to restore the Wilsonian ideal to work through international institutions to advance American interests and values – including democracy. While he has little confidence in the existing “undemocratic” UN, he favors a “dramatically demilitarized” US foreign policy that better mixes “hard” and “soft” forms of power and influence and works more energetically, if less arrogantly, to build more robust regional organizations for delivering development and fostering cooperation to achieve mutual goals.
In his book, Fukuyama anticipates that some Americans will ask why the sole superpower, why Gulliver, should risk binding itself into new organizations with so many nattering Lilliputians to tie it down. His answer, in part, cited America’s own domestic reliance upon “checks and balances” against concentrated power. So why then should the rest of the world be expected to trust a country that at least traditionally, doesn’t trust itself? International institutions, with all their faults, may yet be the best venue for crafting cooperative action and for providing the critically needed “international legitimacy” to see it through.
Fukuyama has surely added to our understanding of neoconservatism, its roots and its evolution. In the end, he remains comfortable with generic neoconservative goals, “but it’s the methods that have failed.” Yet he is no longer interested in rescuing neoconservatism, lamenting that it has become inextricably equated with catastrophic Bush Administration failures. Fukuyama aims then to bury neoconservatism as a foreign policy doctrine and his book may well stand as a first draft of its obituary.