Fukuyama/Krauthammer Fallout

Danny Postel writes in openDemocracy about the fallout from the debate between Francis Fukuyama and Charles Krauthammer in the National Interest.

The most interesting part of Postel's piece come about half way where, after discussing the particulars of the disagreement between Fukuyama and Krauthammer, he gets the opinion of others in the foreign policy community to comment. He spoke with John Mearsheimer, who believes, with Krauthamer, that Fukuyama's beliefs place him outside the neoconservative fold, despite Fukuyama's own statement to the contrary:

“Fukuyama understands, quite correctly, that the Bush doctrine has washed up on the rocks,” the University of Chicago political scientist and author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics tells openDemocracy. Fukuyama’s essay provides a “great service,” he says, in making plain that the neo-conservative strategy for dealing with Iraq has “crashed and burned.” Fukuyama is “to be admired for his honesty here. He is confronting reality.”

The significance of Fukuyama’s intervention, says Mearsheimer, goes beyond its being the first in–house, intra–neocon dispute over Iraq. “It’s not only that he’s a member of the [neoconservative] tribe going after another member of the tribe; [Fukuyama] is one of the tribe’s most important members.” Indeed, he says, Fukuyama and Krauthammer are without a doubt “the two heavyweights” of the neoconservative intelligentsia, and their debate is about “terribly important issues, issues of central importance to American foreign policy.”

Mearsheimer agrees with Krauthammer that Fukuyama’s critique threatens to dismantle the neo-conservative project. First, he says, Fukuyama is challenging “the unilateralist impulse that’s hard wired into the neoconservative worldview.” Second, Fukuyama disputes the argument that the Iraq war would create a democratic domino effect in the Arab–Islamic world. These, says Mearsheimer, are “two of the most important planks” in the Bush doctrine and in the neo-conservative Weltanschauung.

Fukuyama also possesses what Mearsheimer calls a “very healthy respect for the limits of military force.” “I think you cannot bring about democracy through the use of military force,” he told the Cairo–based weekly Al–Ahram. Then there is Fukuyama’s point about the limits of social engineering and his argument regarding the neocon tendency to conflate Israel’s security threats with those of the United States.

Taken together, says Mearsheimer, this band of criticisms makes Fukuyama’s case nothing less than devastating. “This is not just a minor spat within the camp. This is consequential.”

The essence of this debate is the definition of neoconservatism: is it synonymous with the Bush Doctrine, with the unilateralism and over-emphasis on military strength at the cost of state-building? Or can it be multilateral and imperialistic, recognising that democracy has to be taught and not imposed?

Or is there room for both definitions? Fukuyama thinks so, and I agree.