Lieven on Fukuyama
The Two Fukuyamas
Anatol Lieven
Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the
Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006),
226 pp., $25.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free
Press, 1992, 2006), 432 pp., $15.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of
Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1996), 456 pp., $16.
NEOCONSERVATISM, AT least as a powerful movement bearing that name,
now looks moribund. The mortal blow may well be seen in the future to
have been delivered by the defection of neoconservatism’s last truly
distinguished intellectual, Francis Fukuyama, and the shattering
critique of neoconservatism delivered in his new book, America at the
Crossroads. Fukuyama declares:
“Whatever its complex roots, neoconservatism has now become
inevitably linked to concepts like preemption, regime change,
unilateralism, and benevolent hegemony as put into practice by the
Bush administration. Rather than attempting the feckless task of
reclaiming the meaning of the term, it seems to me better to abandon
the label and articulate an altogether distinct foreign policy
position.”
Until 2002, Fukuyama was closely identified with the neoconservative
movement and in particular the related Project for a New American
Century (PNAC). He was a signatory to several PNAC public statements,
including one from 1998 accusing President Clinton of having
“capitulated” to Saddam Hussein and calling on the United States to
do everything necessary to remove him from power in Iraq. In America
at the Crossroads, Fukuyama suggests regret for that signature but
says that “an American invasion of Iraq was not then in the cards,
however, and would not be until the events of September 11, 2001.”
Nonetheless, on September 20, 2001, Fukuyama signed another public
PNAC letter declaring, “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly
to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism
and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam
Hussein from power in Iraq.” This statement also called for the War
on Terror to target Hizballah, and for U.S. “retaliation” against
Iran and Syria if they failed to break off support for that
organization. In other words, this document was an early introduction
to all the key strategic errors later committed by the Bush
Administration in the War on Terror.
In the course of 2002, however, Fukuyama took part in a study on long-
term U.S. strategy in the War on Terror: “It was at this point that I
finally decided the war [with Iraq] didn’t make any sense”, he writes
in America at the Crossroads. He also began to think through his
wider differences with the neoconservative movement. As a result of
this analysis, Fukuyama takes issue in his new book with the now-
widespread excuse of neoconservatives and liberal hawks that the
disasters in Iraq have been the result of unpredictably incompetent
execution by the Bush Administration, rather than of the ideas that
led to war:
“[These] abstract ideas were interpreted in certain characteristic
ways that might better be described as mindsets or worldviews rather
than principled positions. The prudential choices that flowed from
these mindsets were biased in certain consistent directions that made
them, when they proved to be wrong, something more than individual
errors of judgment.”
In the book he also accurately identifies three main areas of biased
judgment with regard to Iraq on the part of the administration and
its supporters: exaggerated threat assessment; indifference to
international public opinion, leading to underestimation of the
damage that the global backlash against the war would do to American
interests; and “wild over-optimism” concerning America’s ability to
pacify, reconstruct and reshape Iraq after the initial conquest. It
was above all these errors of judgment, Fukuyama says, that led to
his break with the neoconservatives.
With regard to that overoptimism, Fukuyama writes, “If there is a
single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques
carried out by those who wrote for the Public Interest, it is the
limits of social engineering.” Too many of those who took this line
at home, he says, forgot it utterly when it came to advocating vastly
more radical reshaping in vastly less propitious places than the
slums of the United States.
Even before Fukuyama’s recantation, the neoconservatives as such were
in very serious trouble. Their leading representatives in the Bush
Administration have been removed or marginalized. According to recent
polls, their leading ideas have been rejected by large majorities of
Americans. Intellectually and publicly, they are very much on the
defensive. While extremely welcome, America at the Crossroads is
therefore not quite the radical work it would have been three years
ago and is also of course a great deal less helpful to the United
States than it would have been if it had been published and debated
before, not after, the launch of the Iraq War.
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