The End of Neoconservatism? (Fukuyama article)

[Kimstu]

Conservative historian Francis “The End of History” Fukuyama has published an article in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine entitled “After Neoconservatism”. His basic theme seems to be that neoconservatism has discredited itself as a naive, quasi-Leninist approach to foreign policy, and that the United States needs “new ideas” for promoting liberty and democracy, which however will probably not have a positive short-term effect on the problems of radical Islamism and anti-Western terrorism. Is this true? If so, what should these new ideas be?

Some excerpts from the article illustrating some of Fukuyama’s main points:

The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration’s first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America’s perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before. […]

Perceived failure in Iraq has restored the authority of foreign policy “realists” in the tradition of Henry Kissinger. Already there is a host of books and articles decrying America’s naïve Wilsonianism and attacking the notion of trying to democratize the world. […]

More than any other group, it was the neoconservatives both inside and outside the Bush administration who pushed for democratizing Iraq and the broader Middle East. They are widely credited (or blamed) for being the decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq, and yet it is their idealistic agenda that in the coming months and years will be the most directly threatened. […]

The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside. […]

This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration’s incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war’s supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform. […]

“The End of History,” in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support. […]

Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments. […]

The worst legacy that could come from the Iraq war would be an anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled a sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United States with friendly authoritarians. […]

We need in the first instance to understand that promoting democracy and modernization in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian election bringing Hamas to power. Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society. […]

If we are serious about the good governance agenda, we have to shift our focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those institutions of the United States government that actually promote democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations like the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like. […]

Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American hegemony. What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world […]

[Quartz]

There’s one thing Fukuyama seems to have missed: Bush didn’t screw up the war; he’s screwed up the occupation.

[Merijeek]

@Quartz

There’s one thing Fukuyama seems to have missed: Bush didn’t screw up the war; he’s screwed up the occupation.

Screwed up the AIMS of the war. Without accomplishing the aims of the war it is a failure no matter how many ay-rabs we managed to blow up.

-Joe

[Gadarene]

Ah…Francis, Francis, Francis. You got us into this mess, and now…hmph.

We can stop conflating markets and democracy when mucking around abroad; that’d be a good start.

[Gladstone]

@Francis Fukuyama

What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a “realistic Wilsonianism” that better matches means to ends.

Why is moderation and reasonableness always a revelation to policy wonks and political theorists?

[David_God_of_Frogs]

Fukayama was against the war wasn’t he?

[SteveG1]

I’d love to see the end of paleo/neoconservatism, and see the return of the true conservatives (as the definition originally meant). I don’t see it happening very soon though. As long as “Joe Public” keeps buying their line and their constant pandering to fear and barely disguised imperialism, it just won’t happen.

[Northern_Piper]

This point seems to me to be just plain wrong:

@Fukuyama

Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society.

I think it’s much more logical to attribute Radical Islamism to the oppression of authoritarian regimes which squelched all forms of liberal opposition and left the mosques alone, because mosques weren’t seen as political. That frustrated opposition to authoritarian, non-democratic, corrupt regimes only had one place to go.

In any event, I’ve not had much respect for Fukuyama since his “End of History” prediction. We’ve had an awful lot of history since the fall of the Berlin Wall, none of which he successfully predicted.

[JRDelirious]

@Gladstone

Why is moderation and reasonableness always a revelation to policy wonks and political theorists?

Maybe because they are just too human after all, and the idea that somewhere there must be an ideological Grand Unified Theory that will explain everything and deliver a “silver bullet” that will fix it, without having to accept compromises or settle for “a good enough for now”, is irresistible. Ideologues all the way across the spectrum are guilty of this, and not just in politics but in religion, enterprise management, you name it.

Fascinating article by FF – interesting how he says that neocons have the problem of “fighting the last war”. Interestingly, the Cold war was won by keeping the pressure on without actually directly engaging the adversary, until the adversary could no longer sustain itself. And yes, there is the observation, that “liberal democracy” (e.g. US or W. Europe style) evolves as a result of cultures evolving in the direction of valuing a better life for the individual, it’s not something you can ramrod.

[Caius_Preposterus]

@Fukuyama

The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside. The model for this was Romania under the Ceausescus: once the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation. As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000 book “Present Dangers”: “To many the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades.”

I’m really having trouble buying this part of his analysis. First of all, a good chunk of the former Soviet Union is in a headlong race towards totalitarianism. Why anyone would look to this event as some model for democracy is beyond me.

Secondly, even when the communists were swept out of power, the mechanism of the state didn’t cease to exist. The security apparatus, the legislature, the courts–those things that make a country run–all remained intact. And even in the shockiest of shock economic conversions, the state run economies were dismantled over a period of time. In Iraq, the Bush administration completely dissolved the underlying of structure of the Baath government and instituted an overnight shock transition to capitalism. I don’t know what the neocons were using as their model, but it wasn’t the Soviet Union.

Because the neocons seem to have no plan as to how to establish a democracy and ignored all advice from intelligence and the State Department as to all the problems they were going to run into, I simply don’t believe that the goal was to build democracy. I don’t believe that the neocons had idealistic blinders on. They had another agenda. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to figure out what that is, because all the other agendas I can think of sound like looney tunes conspiracy theories.

[Zoe]

Gladstone: Why is moderation and reasonableness always a revelation to policy wonks and political theorists?

I’ll invest in your flying machine, Orville!

Welcome to SDMB…

[Kimstu]

@Caius P.

Because the neocons seem to have no plan as to how to establish a democracy and ignored all advice from intelligence and the State Department as to all the problems they were going to run into, I simply don’t believe that the goal was to build democracy. I don’t believe that the neocons had idealistic blinders on. They had another agenda.

Welcome to the SDMB, Caius. I’m inclined to think that the neocons did have some ideology goggles on, but the ideology wasn’t solely about democracy. Rather, it seems to have been a combination of pro-democracy idealism and “free-market fundamentalism”, a belief that market forces will automatically maximize prosperity and freedom if you just give them room to operate.

Naomi Klein’s Sept. 2004 article Baghdad Year Zero argued for this diagnosis:

The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war’s ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush’s Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.

Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. […] Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. […]

The tone of Bremer’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was “open for business.” […] Overnight, Iraq went from being the most isolated country in the world to being, on paper, its widest-open market. […]

Bremer’s reforms unleashed forces that the neocons neither predicted nor could hope to control, from armed insurrections inside factories to tens of thousands of unemployed young men arming themselves. These forces have transformed Year Zero in Iraq into the mirror opposite of what the neocons envisioned: not a corporate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia, where going to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned alive, or beheaded. These dangers are so great that in Iraq global capitalism has retreated, at least for now. For the neocons, this must be a shocking development: their ideological belief in greed turns out to be stronger than greed itself. […]

One would think that the bloody results of this experiment would inspire a crisis of faith: in the country where they had absolute free reign, where there was no local government to blame, where economic reforms were introduced at their most shocking and most perfect, they created, instead of a model free market, a failed state no right-thinking investor would touch.

Looks to me as though this “crisis of faith” is basically what’s now being expressed by Fukuyama.

@David G.F.

Fukayama was against the war wasn’t he?

He was part of the “New American Century Project” that listed regime change in Iraq among its goals, but he opposed the 2003 invasion on the grounds that it was ill-judged and dangerous.

[BrainGlutton]

@SteveG1

I’d love to see the end of paleo/neoconservatism, and see the return of the true conservatives (as the definition originally meant).

Hmmm?

[JRDelirious]

@Northern Piper

This point seems to me to be just plain wrong:
(Radical Islamism as reaction to anomie of modernity)
I think it’s much more logical to attribute Radical Islamism to the oppression of authoritarian regimes which squelched all forms of liberal opposition and left the mosques alone, because mosques weren’t seen as political. That frustrated opposition to authoritarian, non-democratic, corrupt regimes only had one place to go.

What you are describing is what strengthened radical islamism and made it grow into a political power. But I’m willing to accept that in its beginning, much like fundamentalism in the West, it may have started with a “our world is going to hell in a handbasket; it must be because we’re not sticking to core values” revival movement.

In any event, I’ve not had much respect for Fukuyama since his “End of History” prediction. We’ve had an awful lot of history since the fall of the Berlin Wall, none of which he successfully predicted.

Fukuyama himself in the full article mentions that and reiterates that he did not mean what people on all sides of the political spectrum took him to mean. Well, live and learn, eh, Francis?

[BrainGlutton]

From Fukuyama’s article:

But it is the idealistic effort to use American power to promote democracy and human rights abroad that may suffer the greatest setback.

Jeez. Is Fukuyama being disingenuous? Or can this Harvard Ph.D. really be stupid enough to believe that was ever part of the neocon agenda?!

[Captain_Amazing]

@BrainGlutton

From Fukuyama’s article:

Jeez. Is Fukuyama being disingenuous? Or can this Harvard Ph.D. really be stupid enough to believe that was ever part of the neocon agenda?!

That is and was part of the neo-con agenda. It might not have been part of the Bush administration agenda, but the neo-cons are all about democracy, human rights, and free markets. Remember, Fukuyama was a neo-con…he knows of what he speaks.

[BrainGlutton]

@Captain Amazing

That is and was part of the neo-con agenda. It might not have been part of the Bush administration agenda, but the neo-cons are all about democracy, human rights, and free markets.

Free markets, yes. The rest is neocon propaganda.

[The_Flying_Dutchman]

@SteveG1

I’d love to see the end of paleo/neoconservatism, and see the return of the true conservatives

Hmmm

That would be mesoconservatism ?

[Captain_Amazing]

@BrainGlutton

Free markets, yes. The rest is neocon propaganda.

According to you, maybe. But if it’s propaganda, it’s been pretty consistant propaganda. Neoconservatives have been beating the drum for more democracy and human rights around the world since the 70s, and their primary criticism of the Soviet Union wasn’t that it wasn’t a free market (although, of course, they did criticize it for that), but that it was a totalitarian dictatorship that didn’t respect the rights of its people.

[BrainGlutton]

@Captain Amazing

According to you, maybe. But if it’s propaganda, it’s been pretty consistant propaganda. Neoconservatives have been beating the drum for more democracy and human rights around the world since the 70s, and their primary criticism of the Soviet Union wasn’t that it wasn’t a free market (although, of course, they did criticize it for that), but that it was a totalitarian dictatorship that didn’t respect the rights of its people.

I am familiar with the PNAC website, and I have never read anything there, nor in this forum, to convince me that the ideological neocons give a rat’s ass about democracy as such, if it produces results in any way incompatible with free-market capitalism.