Francis Fukuyama’s criticism of the Iraq war put him at odds with neoconservative friends both within and outside the Bush administration. Here he explains how, in its decision to invade Iraq, the Bush administration failed in its stewardship of American foreign policy. First, the administration wrongly made preventive war the central tenet of its foreign policy. In addition, it badly misjudged the global reaction to its exercise of “benevolent hegemony.” And finally, it failed to appreciate the difficulties involved in large-scale social engineering, grossly underestimating the difficulties involved in establishing a successful democratic government in Iraq. Fukuyama explores the contention by the Bush administration’s critics that it had a neoconservative agenda that dictated its foreign policy during the president’s first term. Providing a fascinating history of the varied strands of neoconservative thought since the 1930s, Fukuyama argues that the movement’s legacy is a complex one that can be interpreted quite differently than it was after the end of the Cold War. Analyzing the Bush administration’s miscalculations in responding to the post–September 11 challenge, Fukuyama proposes a new approach to American foreign policy through which such mistakes might be turned around—one in which the positive aspects of the neoconservative legacy are joined with a more realistic view of the way American power can be used around the world.
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Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), resident in FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.
Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues relating to questions concerning democratization and international political economy. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent books are America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, and Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap between Latin America and the United States. His latest book, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution will be published in April 2011.
Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation from 1979-1980, then again from 1983-89, and from 1995-96. In 1981-82 and in 1989 he was a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State, the first time as a regular member specializing in Middle East affairs, and then as Deputy Director for European political-military affairs. In 1981-82 he was also a member of the US delegation to the Egyptian-Israeli talks on Palestinian autonomy. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.
Dr. Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of The American Interest, which he helped to found in 2005. He holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), and Kansai University (Japan). He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, and member of the advisory boards for the Journal of Democracy, the Inter-American Dialogue, and The New America Foundation. He is a member of the American Political Science Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Pacific Council for International Affairs. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.
When Francis Fukyama writes a book critiquing the war in Iraq and the neo conservatives who backed the policy, one must sit up and take notice. His previous book, "The End of History," with its positivist view and thesis that history is inexorably marching towards liberal democracy and capitalism formed a central text in describing the neo conservative world view. Given his background, Fukuyama's decision to write a book attacking the Bush administration's Iraq policy will surely not be easily lumped with many other books opposing the war, nor will he make as easy a target for lambasting by the White House press office.
Fukayama's book focuses on two critiques of the war, on practical and the other philosophical. The first offers no real surprises as it simply states facts now widely published and generally accepted by all but the most ardent supporters of the Iraq War. These include the lack of troops on the ground, the absurd idea that all Iraqis would welcome the US as liberators, failure to quickly quell looting and lawlessness after the fall of Saddam, general lack of interest in the specifics of Iraqi culture and history, bureaucratic sidelining of experts from the state department, and the list goes on. Again, the only thing that makes this particularly interesting is that this author cannot be simply dismissed with hollow phrases like "leftist" or "Bush Basher."
In the second category, Fukuyama's book truly stands out for both a unique approach and perspective. Yes, the author does believe that world history moves towards democracy, but he looks wearily at the idea that American power can hasten that march through military power.... However, the neo cons at the White House believed exactly that idea; that if one simply removed the stones of totalitarianism in Iraq, democracy would blossom. Accepting this given as an almost religious truism, the authors of the Iraq policy could simply ignore the cultural and historic realities that made it failure so tragically predictable. In an interesting connection, Fukuyama points to the simplistic idea held by many neo cons that the fall of the Soviet Union is almost entirely the result of the American military buildup in the 1980s, instead of one factor in a complex historical matrix. The author argues persuasively that, once having accepted the idea that military might led to this great historic sea change, one can easily conclude that military might can accomplish anything.
Fukuyama is not one who believes in shrinking from the use of American power. Instead, he argues it must be used judiciously or else risk a backlash. In particular, he examines the idea that American hegemony should not frighten the world because American policy is conducted with a high degree of morality, a concept near and dear to the hearts of the neo conservative movement. Fukuyama does not reject this premise, but rightly points out that it only can be meaningful if the rest of the world believes the US is moving from a point of high minded principles. Lamenting that America now stands near alone in the world, having squandered the great outpouring of international sympathy that came after 9/11 and led to the world standing almost united in the war in Afghanistan, Fukuyama offers powerful arguments about the value of diplomacy and cooperation.
In the end this more than anything else stands at this book's heart. When an American government takes a "with us or against us" approach, resentment and anger will follow as night follows day. Policy conducted based on high minded ideals may be all to the good, but one cannot simply dismiss real world concerns and expertise as "old thinking." While Fukuyama's belief in the importance of so-called "soft power," (economic aid, cultural connections, and diplomatic resources) clearly fell on deaf ears in this White House one can only hope future administrations will take such ideas more seriously. In any case, citizens wishing to formulate a post-Bush foreign policy would do well to spend time with this excellent work.Read more ›
For anyone who followed the Krauthammer/Fukuyama feud of 2004, this book, a follow-up, should come as no surprise. To summarize, Krauthammer gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute extolling the Bush administration's policies of unilateralism, preemption, regime change, and benevolent hegemony (empire?). For Krauthammer, it was the correct strategy for confronting the evils of Islamic totalitarianism. For Fukuyama, it was the breaking point; he could no longer support these policies and wrote his response for "The National Interest" called "The Neoconservative Moment."
Since then the debate has been raging and Fukuyama has started his own journal "The American Interest," fleshing out his post-neoconservative position.
In the present work, he traces the origins of neoconsevativism to a group of leftist intellectuals (Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz being the most prominent) at the City College of New York who were anti-Stalinist during the Cold War and anti-New Left during the Vietnam War. From this group emerged a set of principles that defines neoconservatism. 1)They believe that liberal democratic states are by their nature non-threatening and should therefore be promoted; 2)they believe in the use of American military power for moral purposes; 3)they are dismissive of international institutions for being too corrupted by illiberal regimes; and 4) they do not believe in government projects that entail "social engineering" or "nation building."
One can see from the fourth principle why the project in Iraq went awry. Removing a totalitarian regime with no civil society to fall back on, only forced the people into warlordism, sectarianism, and jihadist insurgency groups.... Fukuyama, the Bush administration, and just about everyone else now realize that we are in an expensive long-term struggle to reconstruct a society that is coming apart at the seems. Our unilateralism and our disregard for the views of our traditional allies (cheese-eating surrender monkeys?) will make the task all the more difficult and costly. That said, he correctly believes that we should see this project through to the end. Pulling out now would only leave more fertile ground for Islamic totalitarianism.
Fukuyama feels that the neocons were seduced by the success of Reagan's policies toward Europe in the 1980's. They thought that as the Baathist regime collapsed the people would spontaneously embrace liberal democracy as they did in Eastern Europe earlier. It was a serious misreading of Middle Eastern culture. This is not to say that Iraqis won't achieve a liberal democracy, they will probably first have to experience a Reformation and an Enlightenment.
Fukuyama devotes the last part of the book staking out a revised version of his prior neoconservative position, calling it a "realistic Wilsonianism." He is a policiy wonk and a social scientist who believes that if the policy does not fit, it should be rectified. His updated version recognizes the limits of American military power and the limits of our ability to change other cultures. State-bulding in the narrowest sense is possible, nation-building is not. We should consult more with our allies and rely more on the proverbial "soft power." It is more effective, more likely to succeed, and it is cheaper to exercise power through mulitilateral institutions. We can still be the predominant power, but we have to be smarter about it.
Fukuyama is a very independent and creative thinker, but he is still the Hegelian author of "The End of History and The Last Man." He believes that all societies must inevitably embrace globalization and modernity. And that it is the proper role of American power to push this process along. But instead of using military force, we should be promoting it with the power of ideas. Fukuyama is very close to getting it right. I definitely recommend this book.Read more ›
In 1992 Francis Fukuyama, professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University, published his controversial book The End of History and the Last Man in which he argued that humanity had made no significant political progress since the French Revolution and that the collapse of communism in 1989 signaled the "end" of history. By "end" Fukuyama meant that western, liberal democracy had triumphed over all political options. He revised his thesis a decade later in Our Posthuman Future; Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002), not because he thought it was wrong, but because he failed to consider the role of science as perhaps the chief engine that drives human history. Science drives any number of interests--technological, economic, ethical, social, and so on, but Fukuyama realized that it also increasingly drives our political life.
A speech at the annual dinner for the conservative American Enterprise Institute in February 2004 by the syndicated columnist and leading neoconservative Charles Krauthammer caused Fukuyama to change course again, this time rather drastically. Krauthammer's speech came about a year after America's invasion of Iraq, and described the war as a virtually unqualified success. Whereas everyone applauded, Fukuyama was flabbergasted. Although for a long time he regarded himself as a leading neoconservative, he concluded that he could no longer support neoconservativism as "a political symbol and a body of thought." His newest book is thus "an attempt to elucidate the neoconservative legacy, explain where in my view the Bush administration has gone wrong, and outline an alternative way for the United States to relate to the rest of the world."
In his longest chapter Fukuyama considers "The Neoconservative Legacy" (pp.... 12-65), starting in the 1940s with its two "godfathers" Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. He argues that neoconservativism's detractors "vastly overstate the uniformity of views that has existed within the group of self-identified neoconservatives since the 1980s." But he also admits that most people understand neoconservativism as it was later shaped by Robert Kagan and William Kristol. Despite the disclaimer about any party line, Fukuyama identifies four basic principles of neoconservativism: the belief that the internal character of regimes matters and that foreign policy must therefore promote liberal democracies (since they are friendly and therefore not dangerous); the belief in the use of military power for moral purposes; a distrust of ambitious social engineering projects (a huge irony, to say the least, given American interventionism); and skepticism about the legitimacy and effectiveness of international institutions.
At least in his first term, says Fukuyama, Bush was not an ideological neoconservative; his horrible errors involved lack of prudence and the implementation of policies (overstated threat assessments, underestimated global anti-Americanism, and wildly over-optimistic about the reconstruction of Iraq) rather than mistakes of underlying principles. By now, though, Bush's name is forever linked with preventive war, regime change, unilateralism, American exceptionalism, and benevolent hegemony, all of which Fukuyama now either rejects or greatly qualifies. Nor does the rest of the world think we have been morally good, wise, or trustworthy in the use of our might as the world's only superpower. They resent and distrust us, and restoring our credibility will require concerted efforts over a long time.
"It seems very doubtful at this juncture," writes Fukuyama, "that history will judge the Iraq war kindly." The war has emboldened jihadists, fostered anti-American resentment among both friends and enemies, created a weak Iraq that will remain heavily dependent upon the United States economically and militarily, spent hundreds of billions of dollars, sacrificed tens of thousands of lives, and distracted us from broader issues, all at a huge political cost. Fukuyama proposes what he calls a "realistic Wilsonianism" that pushes back from discredited neoconservativism and is characterized by drastic demilitarization, greater multilateralism, renewed efforts to create international institutions that are effective and legitimate (he believes the United Nations is discredited), and sustained commitment to development. How these generalities will effectively combat terrorism remains unclear. Clearly, in his latest view, global history is far from over. To find out where he thinks it is going, tune in to his new journal The American Interest, meant to supercede his neoconservative past.Read more ›
