Francis Fukuyama and the neoconservatives

by LOUIS MENAND

On February 10, 2004, the columnist Charles Krauthammer gave the annual Irving Kristol address at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington. The lecture was called “Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World.” It defended the Bush Administration’s policies of unilateralism and preëmption, and proposed that their application be defined by means of a doctrine: “We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity-meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.” The new “existential enemy,” Krauthammer said, is “Arab-Islamic totalitarianism,” and he compared the war that the United States should fight against this entity to the war against Fascist Germany and Japan-a war committed to the eradication of a deadly and evil culture.

Francis Fukuyama was in the audience, and he could not believe the approval with which Krauthammer’s speech was greeted. It seemed to Fukuyama that by the winter of 2004 the policies of unilateralism and preëmption might have been ripe for some reconsideration-they clearly had not performed well in Iraq-but, all around him, people were applauding enthusiastically. Fukuyama had always regarded himself as a neoconservative. He had had close relations with many of the leading figures associated with neoconservatism: Paul Wolfowitz, Albert Wohlstetter, Allan Bloom, Irving and William Kristol. Now he began to wonder if he still shared the world view of neoconservatives who, like Krauthammer, supported the Bush Administration’s war on terror. The day after the lecture, Fukuyama ran into John O’Sullivan, then the editor of the National Interest (a journal founded by Irving Kristol), and told him that he would be writing a response to Krauthammer. That article ran in the summer, 2004, issue. It was called “The Neoconservative Moment,” and in it Fukuyama announced that neoconservatism had evolved into a set of views that he could no longer support. Krauthammer published a response to Fukuyama’s response (“In Defense of Democratic Realism”) in the fall issue of the National Interest. Last spring, Fukuyama delivered the Castle Lectures, at Yale, in which he responded to Krauthammer’s response to his response to Krauthammer’s speech, and expanded his criticism of the Bush Administration. He proposed a new approach to foreign policy, which he called “realistic Wilsonianism.” Those lectures have been expanded, in turn, and published as “America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy” (Yale; $25).

Fukuyama argues that neoconservatism was founded on four principles. The first is “a belief that the internal character of regimes matters.” Until the election of Ronald Reagan, American foreign policy during the Cold War was guided by the doctrine of “realism”-the theory that the national interest is best served by checking and containing existing Communist regimes and preventing the establishment of new ones, not by intervening in the internal affairs of other states. In a strict realist world view, every state is equally in competition with every other state, and that is the primary fact that a foreign policy must confront. Whether a given regime is liberal or oppressive toward its own people is, from a national-security standpoint, of secondary importance. Of course, the United States would like more liberal democracies in the world, because, historically, liberal democracies do not go to war against one another; but we are obliged to play with the cards that are on the table, and not all of them will be hearts. Thus, Richard Nixon, a career anti-Communist, following the instructions of his national-security adviser, the arch-realist Henry Kissinger, went to China.

Neoconservatives are unhappy with this sort of agnosticism, which is why they were excited when Reagan started speaking of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Neoconservatives also supported the Reagan Administration’s attempts to intervene in the internal affairs of Nicaragua, since-and this is Fukuyama’s second principle of neoconservatism-they believe in the use of American power for moral purposes. Cold War liberals also believed in the use of American power; that’s how the United States got stuck in Vietnam. But the Vietnam War (in the minds of the people who directed it) was fought to prevent Communism from expanding, not to roll it back in territories where Communists were already in power; the rationale was “stopping Communist aggression,” not “liberating an oppressed people.” When the Warsaw Pact countries overthrew their Communist regimes, and the Soviet Union dissolved, it seemed to many neoconservatives that the realists had been proved wrong: liberation was a legitimate and attainable goal of foreign policy. After September 11th, the next liberationist mission became clear.

Fukuyama identifies the third principle of neoconservatism as a “distrust of ambitious social engineering projects.” After all, neoconservatism arose not in foreign-policy debates but in criticism by liberals of the programs of the Great Society in the nineteen-sixties. Kristol’s definition is famous: “A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” Most neoconservatives of Kristol’s generation had been members of the anti-Stalinist left in the nineteen-thirties and forties, and (Fukuyama says) they tended to see a connection between Great Society liberalism and the blind faith in economic and social planning that once led many leftists to believe that Soviet Communism was a genuinely progressive ideology.

This skepticism about the uses of state money and power to address social problems is paired with another skepticism-the fourth element of neoconservatism-about the “effectiveness of international law and institutions to achieve either security or justice.” Neoconservatives have been especially dismissive of the United Nations, an organization that they regard as a charade kept alive by liberal piety about international coöperation and world peace. Again, there are bad nations and good nations out there. When everyone is obliged to pretend that all states are equally worthy of respect, moral authority becomes impossible. Fukuyama points out that in 2003 the chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights was Libya.

As its provenance suggests, “America at the Crossroads” is a polemic (a mild-mannered one), not a theoretical treatise on statecraft. Fukuyama’s argument is that the war on terror, and, in particular, the invasion of Iraq, is not an application of neoconservative principles as he understood them. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld are not neoconservative intellectuals; they are right-wing messianists, and their prosecution of the war has been disastrous for American interests. They globalized a conflict that they should have sought to contain. “We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and against the international jihadist movement, that we need to win,” Fukuyama writes. He goes on:

But conceiving the larger struggle as a global war comparable to the world wars or the Cold War vastly overstates the scope of the problem, suggesting that we are taking on a large part of the Arab and Muslim worlds. Before the Iraq war, we were probably at war with no more than a few thousand people around the world who would consider martyring themselves and causing nihilistic damage to the United States. The scale of the problem has grown because we have unleashed a maelstrom.

The United States acted as though simple regime change in Iraq, with no adequate plans for reconstruction and economic development, were sufficient reason for declaring “Mission Accomplished.” We now confront an expensive, long-term struggle to keep a fractious society from spinning dangerously out of control, and our unapologetic near-unilateralism has left us without much sympathy, or support, from our nominal allies. Fukuyama thinks that neoconservatives like Krauthammer either have been seduced by the rhetoric of liberation into thinking that deposing Saddam Hussein is the twenty-first-century equivalent of deposing Hitler or have abandoned neoconservative principles and turned into knee-jerk “American exceptionalists” who think that the superiority of our values authorizes us to act toward the rest of the world as benevolent hegemons, and exempts us from the considerations of deference and prudence by which we expect the behavior of other states to be constrained.

Although “America at the Crossroads” is intended, in part, for policy intellectuals-the journal-of-opinion writers and editors, political advisers, and think-tankers who deal with questions of governance from a philosophical point of view-Fukuyama is not, fundamentally, a policy intellectual himself. He is an original and independent mind, and his writings have never seemed to be constructed on a doctrinal foundation. He takes ideas seriously and he tries to see the big picture, and even if you think that he takes ideas too seriously, and that his pictures tend to be too big to help with the practical challenges of political decision-making in the here and now, his views on American policies and their implications deserve thoughtful attention. Such attention might begin, in the case of the present book, with the observation: No duh. It took Fukuyama until February, 2004, to realize that Charles Krauthammer, who has been saying basically the same thing since the end of the Cold War, is the intellectual cheerleader of a politics of American supremacy that appears to recognize no limit to its exercise of power? And that the Bush Administration, to the extent that it has any philosophical self-conception at all, operates on the basis of the crudest form of American exceptionalism? And that neoconservatism, whatever merits it once had as a corrective to liberal wishfulness and the amorality of realpolitik, long ago stiffened into a posture of reflexive moral belligerence about everything from foreign policy to literary criticism?

The present condition of the neoconservative movement is the outcome of a classic case of the gradual sclerosis of political attitudes. All the stages of the movement’s development were based on the primitive psychology of the “break”-the felt need, as one ages, to demonize the exact position one formerly occupied. The enemy is always the person still clinging to the delusions you just outgrew. So-going all the way back to the omphalos, Alcove 1 in the City College cafeteria, where Kristol and his friends fought with the Stalinists in Alcove 2-the Trotskyists hated the fellow-travellers they once had been; the Cold War liberals hated the Trotskyists they once had been; and the neoconservatives hated the liberals they once had been. Now the hardening is complete. Neoconservatism has merged with the politics that its founders, in their youth, held in greatest contempt: the jingoist and capitalist American right. We look from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but it is impossible to say which is which.

This helps explain why Fukuyama, instead of writing a straightforward indictment of the war on terror, apparently felt it necessary to present his position in the form of a “break” with neoconservatism-why Krauthammer, an entirely epiphenomenal figure in the creation and implementation of American policy, was the initial target of his indictment, rather than Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Krauthammer has ideas; Cheney and Rumsfeld-Fukuyama as much as says so-do not. The theory is what went wrong, so the theory is what must be fixed. Fukuyama’s “realistic Wilsonianism” is the repaired version: Wilsonian because he wants to retain the spirit of liberal internationalism that informs neoconservative critiques of foreign-policy realism, but realistic because he recognizes the limits of military power and the need for multilateral coöperation and engagement. Let’s continue to try to shape the world, but let’s not be so stupid about it, is the general idea.

Still, it’s a little strange that Fukuyama ever saw himself as unambiguously in the neoconservative camp. “America at the Crossroads” is not quite a recantation, because Fukuyama was quickly a dissident from the war on terror. His position has been consistent since 2002, when he warned against exaggerating the threat represented by Al Qaeda and other jihadists. But the seeds of his split with neoconservatism started before that. They appear, in fact, in the work that identified him publicly with neoconservatism in the first place. This is the famous article “The End of History?,” which appeared in the National Interest in 1989 and became a book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” in 1992. (A second paperback edition, with a new afterword, has just been published by the Free Press.)

“The End of History and the Last Man” is a deeply interesting book (“scandalously brilliant,” Krauthammer says on the back cover, in a blurb evidently written when the marriage was still good). It is a meditation on world history-via the influential lectures of the French-Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève, given in Paris in the nineteen-thirties-in the tradition of Hegel, Marx, and Weber. Because the original article appeared the year the Berlin Wall came down, and because the book appeared right after the formal demise of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama’s thesis about the “end of history” was taken to be a kind of celebratory meta-historical frosting on America’s victory in the Cold War. History (in Hegelian terms) had realized its Idea, and the Idea was us. Fukuyama has spent a great deal of time since 1989 explaining that this was not what he meant. His book was not about America or even about democratic ideals. It was about modernization, a subject on which his take is closer to Marx’s and Weber’s than to John Locke’s or Adam Smith’s.

Modernity, Weber said, is the progressive disenchantment of the world. Superstitions disappear; cultures grow more homogeneous; life becomes increasingly rational. The trend is steadily in one direction. Fukuyama, accordingly, interprets reactionary political movements and atavistic cultural differences, when they flare up, as irrational backlashes against modernization. This is how he understands jihadism: as a revolt, fomented among Muslim émigrés in Western Europe, against the secularism and consumerism of modern life. (This is also how he interprets Fascism and Bolshevism: as backlashes against the general historical tendency.) Jihadism is an antibody generated by our way of life, not a virus indigenous to Islam.

Fascism and jihadism are nihilisms; they cannot be co-opted into the modern system of pluralism, and so they have to be wiped out. But they stand, in a perverse way, for the dark side of disenchantment, which is that, as life becomes more rational and transparent, people lose the sense that there are spiritual forces in the universe greater than themselves. Supernaturalism goes, but so does the idea that anything transcends the biologically human. The “last man” was Nietzsche’s term for the citizen of the completely modern society; “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart” was Weber’s description. Fukuyama’s thesis proposes a kind of fatalism that is worth resisting, but it is not an intellectual ornament on the edifice of American hegemony-or a rationale for invasion, occupation, and conversion of the non-Westernized world. The whole world will modernize eventually, Fukuyama believes, though (like Marx) he is not averse to some coaxing and shaping on the part of a cadre of advance-guard intellectuals and benevolent superpowers. He now argues-and, in this respect, “America at the Crossroads” announces a new dimension in his thinking-that economic development and the creation of social capital, “soft power,” are the proper tools of foreign policy, and that regime change by forceful means is a discredited option. He is sliding back toward sixties liberalism. One hopes that others, inspired by his “break,” will start sliding in the same direction. It would certainly be nice to see the independent intellectuals who should have known better when they loudly supported the Bush-Cheney war on terror explain publicly, as Fukuyama has done, where they went wrong. Who did they think was going to run that war, the Committee on Social Thought?

“The End of History” understood the outcome of the Cold War in a spirit quite different from that of the standard neoconservative account, according to which we won the Cold War because Reagan adopted a policy of liberationist interventionism. We changed the political regimes in Russia and its satellites, and the pieces of a liberal society just fell naturally into place there. Fukuyama thinks that we won the Cold War mainly because an unworkable system reached its inevitable point of collapse, helped by the actions and inactions of Mikhail Gorbachev; that, apart from oratory and some funding of pro-democracy groups, we did little in the way of intervention; and that we ought to thank our stars and decline to draw grand policy lessons. Grand lessons were drawn, though, and that is why so many American intellectuals believed that regime change in Iraq was not only readily achievable but cosmically mandated. If they thought that this is a view shared by the author of “The End of History,” they know better now.

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/060327crbo_books