[ CORRECTIONS ]
"I think people aren’t nearly as cool as they pretend to be at naked parties, but whatever, I’m a pessimist."
-- Birk Oxholm, The Naked Truth
The Neo-Neoconservatism
Dena Roth
America at the Crossroads:
Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy
by Francis Fukuyama
Yale University Press, 226 pgs.
Longtime neoconservative Francis Fukuyama, like Kristol, Kagan, and others, has been a staple in the neoconservative literature for nearly thirty years. His recent addition to this literature, however, holds a peculiar place on the neoconservative bookshelf: instead of advancing the neoconservative agenda, Fukuyama abandons it. Fukuyama suggests to the reader (most obviously in his title) that the neoconservative moment is (or should be) over, and that America should adopt a new policy that better addresses today's needs. The premise of Fukuyama's argument is that "neoconservatism has now become irreversibly identified with the policies of the administration of George W. Bush in its first term, and any effort to reclaim that label is likely to be futile." Fukuyama seeks to advance an alternative model that will repair the mistakes made by the current policies, mistakes that he believes the old neoconservatism cannot make right. Fukuyama's project invites the question: Is America really at a crossroads that requires a new mode of thinking, and is the heyday of neoconservatism really over? If anything, Fukuyama's book affirms that we get no closer to a solution to today's problems by abandoning neoconservatism. Instead, we should delve deeper into its history and literature to find a policy that advances U.S. interests and that accounts for shifting real-world conditions.
That said, America at the Crossroads is an extraordinary contribution to the neconservative debate in two fundamental ways. First, it captures the substance of the Bush Doctrine and how it relates to four basic camps in U.S. foreign policy: the neocons, who advocate prudent intervention for the sake of democracy; Kissingerian realists, who downplay the internal nature of other regimes and human rights concerns; Liberal internationalists, who want to move toward an international order; and Jacksonian American nationalists, who tend toward nativism and deeply distrust multilateralism. In describing these different approaches, Fukuyama draws important distinctions between the Bush Doctrine and the neoconservative agenda. Fukuyama uses four actions to define the Bush doctrine: the creation of the Department Homeland Security and the Patriot Act; the invasion of Afghanistan; the adoption of a new strategy of preemptive action; and the invasion of Iraq. He then poses the question: Do these actions constitute a neoconservative policy? The Bush Doctrine clearly mirrors several fundamental principles of neoconservatism: a concern with the internal politics of states, a belief that U.S. power can be used for moral purposes, and skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve security problems. However, the Bush Doctrine ultimately departs from it on a single critical point that neoconservatives have always held dear, "a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and often undermines its own ends." In other words, if our administration wants to engineer another society, then it better know what it is getting itself into.
If Fukuyama is repetitive about anything, it is this point. Most failures of the Bush administration have hinged on its inability to appreciate the dangers of social engineering. This materialized in several ways that included failing to correctly assess threat, failing "to anticipate the virulently negative global reaction to its exercise of benevolent hegemony, and failing to "anticipate the requirements for pacifying and reconstructing Iraq." While these mistakes are not the fault of neoconservatisim, they are not altogether disassociated from it. Fukuyama argues that following the Cold War, neoconservatives misinterpreted the fall of the Soviet Union by attributing its fall largely to the success of their policies, and in doing so, put in a motion of new mode of thinking that would greatly influence officials in the Bush administration and ultimately pave the way to our current debacle in Iraq. This new mode of thinking "tended to overestimate the level of threat facing the United States," gave a lack of consideration for the use of soft power in achieving foreign policy goals, was biased in favor of high-tech military power, and essentially closed the doors to multilateral organizations as a means for crisis resolution.
America at the Crossroads' second major contribution, which is greatly intertwined with its first, is the way in which Fukuyama buttresses his analysis with a contextualization and rigorous history of the neoconservative legacy. It is here that Fukuyama's argument really shines. He helps the reader understand how and from where neconservatives emerged and incorporated themselves into the framework of the American political debate. By establishing the foundations of the neoconservative legacy, Fukuyama is able to show the reader where the Bush administration has made its most critical errors and offers his alternative, a policy that he has termed "realistic Wilsonianism." According to Fukuyama, "realistic Wilsonianism" starts with neoconservative premises, namely that the U.S. should be concerned with the internal behavior of other countries (thereby diverging from classic realistic thinking), that U.S. power is "often necessary to bring about moral purposes" (i.e. the promotion of democracy and human rights), and that "ambitious social engineering is very difficult and ought always to be approached with care and humility." Where this theory departs from neoconservatism, however, is in how seriously it takes international institutions. While Fukuyama is sure to underscore the essential functions of the state "that cannot be replaced by any transnational actor," he urges for the formation of a world order in which "a higher degree of institutionalization across nations" legitimates each state's exercise of power.
Fukuyama proposes that his new doctrine, essentially a hybrid of existing strands of foreign policy, combines the best of all approaches and is the only doctrine that deals with the new set of problems following 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq—a world that is increasingly suspect of (think of Europe) and hostile to (think of the Arab states) notions of American hegemony or superiority. Fukuyama draws on his extensive knowledge of Cold War history and the transformation of Eastern Europe, Central America, and parts of Africa in the 1990's to describe which policies and which international organizations and treaties have been most effective in promoting democracy. Most, if not all, of these effective policies relied on the use of soft power—economic incentives, heavy investments, pressures from international organizations—often coupled with the threat of force.
In the chapter titled "Social Engineering and Development," Fukuyama uses these examples from the late twentieth century to underscore the disconnect between classic neoconservative thought and the Bush Doctrine. Both neoconservatives and the Bush administration agree that certain political problems can be solved only by regime change because regimes affect the internal and external behavior of a society—a notion introduced by Leo Strauss, whom Fukuyama considers to be a proto-neoconservative. But, precisely because of this, it is difficult to effect regime change unless there is substantial evidence that the native population actually desires change. Ignoring the desires, or readiness, of indigenous populations, coupled with the very problematic notion of "American exceptionalism" (to which Fukuyama devotes another chapter), lay at the heart of this administration's failures and Fukuyama's case that we need to rethink our foreign policy.
Fukuyama should certainly be commended for trying a hand at the ambitious task of offering an alternative to current foreign policy. After all, one of Fukuyama's biggest frustrations is that "the Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters have been very critical of existing international initiatives…but have offered up no alternatives in their place that would legitimate and enhance the effectiveness of American action in the world." But critical readers should not shy away from critically analyzing his suggestion. Some, like Aaron L. Friedberg in Commentary, have already noted that, "whether Fukuyama has succeeded in devising a distinctive new doctrine is open to question." Friedberg goes on to suggest that realistic Wilsonianism "seems virtually indistinguishable from the mainstream liberal internationalism common in academic circles and among the foreign-policy gurus of the Democratic party." While Friedberg is right to question the doctrine's originality, he strays too far in accusing Fukuyama of simply rehashing liberal internationalism.
Instead, the reader need only look as far as the time and place that served as the intellectual home of neoconservatives: Commentary magazine during the Cold War—the neoconservative equivalent of Shakespeare in the Elizabethan era. In an article titled "A New Soviet Strategy" published in October 1979, a young Harvard graduate student observed an alarming new trend of growing Soviet influence in the third world. The article described four cases in the third world in which the Soviets had attempted, whether successfully or not, to replace existing regimes with "slavishly pro-Soviet governments." This was a clear departure from the Khrushchev's policy that downgraded support for local communist parties and instead supported nationalist regimes that, despite being vulnerable and dependent, "would serve Moscow's interests more loyally than an independent communist one." The cases were (ironically) Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and South Yemen, where the coups were successful, and (even more ironically) Iraq, where a young Saddam Hussein succeeded in quelling the communist threat.
The author's aim in this article was to articulate a new pattern in Soviet behavior that enhanced its global influence in unexpected ways (most notably not by military action, but by more soft-handed tactics) and was also being encouraged by an American retreat from confrontation. The author charged that America was in a "slow process of self-Finlandization, whereby our expectations as to what constitutes normal or acceptable Soviet behavior in the world have steadily risen, while our view of our own sphere of legitimate action has continuously shrunk." During the Carter administration, it was the neoconservative line of the day to warn people of the dangers of America's so-called "self-Finlandization" and urge the government to take up a policy that was more active than the containment policy heralded by Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, or the policy of détente heralded by Nixon. A few months later, in March 1980, Norman Podhoretz warned readers of the same dangers of America's Findalization more extensively in an article titled, "The Present Danger."
By now, it may be obvious that the author of "A New Soviet Strategy" was a young contributor named Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama had been knee-deep in the neoconservative camp since the 1970s, which he outlines in the preface of America at the Crossroads. For that reason, Fukuyama's position in the 1979 article should not be surprising. Still, there is a level of irony in Fukuyama's transformation nearly thirty years later. In 1979, he complained that America was not exerting itself enough. In 2006, America exerts itself too much. Consequently, Fukuyama's new model suggests that the American folly in Iraq was accomplished by rashly applying a good policy of democracy promotion without due consideration of its appropriateness. America should temper its involvement by being "not just well-intentioned but also prudent and smart in its exercise of power."
But this also sounds eerily familiar. In "The Present Danger," Podhoretz made almost the exact observation about the American debacle in Vietnam. As he reviewed the history of the Cold War up until that point and he wrote, "there was nothing wrong with trying to save South Vietnam from Communism, let alone with the strategy of containment in general; what was wrong was the tactical judgment, the attempt to apply a sound policy in an inappropriate and unfavorable situation." While Fukuyama's redundancy twenty-six years later need not invalidate his perfectly sound suggestions in America at the Crossroads, it should serve as a caution to its readers. The caution is that when it comes to developing foreign policy, there will always be the crucial question of how and when to apply that policy in real-life situations. Too often, ideologues forget that blindly applying one policy to all circumstances can have disastrous consequences in reality. Too often, politicians and pragmatists try to conduct affairs without the help of any guiding principles that will help to advance the world towards peace.
The goal then is to develop a foreign policy that serves as a framework to achieve desired ends, while allowing a degree of flexibility in where and how that policy is applied. It is far too easy to point out the mistakes of any policy after the fact. While Fukuyama boldly promotes a new, creatively titled policy to replace existing ones, he would have been better off to stay true to his neoconservative roots and take on an even more difficult challenge: advocating a return to a prudent and smart exercise of power that even he concedes neoconservatism already promoted.