Fukuyama's "After Neoconservatism"

Please accept my apologies for my deliquency in the upkeep of this blog. I can assure you that it has been nothing more than laziness and ennui that have kept me from updating.

One recent article has snapped me out of my idleness and inspired me to write again. I refer to a piece from the New York Times Magazine from a couple of weekend's back by Francis Fukuyama.

"After Neoconservatism" is Fukuyama's more public pronoucement on his thoughts about the current state of neoconservatism in the United States. He has written elsewhere, in particular in The National Interest, but the NYT article is a more blunt exposition of his thoughts and in a more widely read forum. "After Neoconservatism" is an extract from his forthcoming book America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, reviewed in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.

Fukuyama's position regarding neoconservatism is confusing. While ostensibly distancing himself from the movement (or ideology or whatver one prefers to call it), Fukuyama nonetheless does acknowledge the legitimacy and worth of many of neoconservatism's ideals, albeit in a roundabout way. In fact, in many ways it seems to be a capitulation to the likes of Charles Krauthammer, whom Fukuyama engaged in a heated debate in the pages of the National Interest over the content of neoconservatism and the right to use the term "neoconservatism". While Fukuyama seems to continue to believe much the same as he has over the years, he now seems willing to give up on the word "neoconservatism", abandoning it to a faction of the right that is more correctly called democratic nationalists. Thus his "After Neoconservatism" is a curious document. It makes much the same arguments as real neoconservatives have been making for some time, yet refuses to call itself neoconservative.

Fukuyama begins by outlining the fundamentals of the so-called Bush Doctrine, which many believe to be an orthodox neoconservative statement:

In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists withweapons 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.

These are, and Fukuyama admits this, noble and worthy goals. They are the heart of the neoconservative vision. The problem, and this is what Fukuyama emphasises, that to be able to carry out this vision requires reliable intelligence and honest and diligent men and women to carry out the necessary arrangements to see out the goals until their end. This is where the Bush Administration has failed. It is a failure to successfully meet the ends sought. This does not, however, invalidate the theory. It is a theory that will require a lot of work, time and patience to implement, and failures to put the theory into practice should not discredit the theory itself.

One of the dangers in the Bush Administration's inability to be able to effectively realise the aspirations of a neoconservative foreign policy is that it has created a backlash against any interventionalist policy. It has led to widespread popularity to a strain of conservative foreign policy thought that was somewhat on the wane. Isolationalism is a regressive response that plays to people's fears and does nobody any good. Fukuyama knows this, and agrees that neoconservatism does have its merits:

The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, whichare as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. 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.

If a political theory is both goals and methods, then Fukuyama is arguing that goals of neoconservatism are valid, and that is merely the methods that are used to bring about those goals about that need to be revised.

The failure in the method comes done to what Fukuyama has called an "overoptimism" in the ability of the United States to use military power to initiate spontaneous democratic change in Iraq and the greater Middle East.

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.

I would quibble here with Fukuyama's portrait. Certainly many of the war's supporters within the adminstration, and in particular within the civilian positions of the Department of Defence, may have been overoptimistic, however this is not the case for the war's supporters at large. Many, especially those from without the United States, and especially from those Commonwealth countries that have had relatively benign and beneficial experiences from colonialism and imperialism, argued that any occupation would be by necessity long; that building a stable democracy within the Middle East would take decades of institutional change and cultural transformation; that liberal ideals would take a generation or more to become widely accepted, and that democracy is more than the holding of elections.

All this is not, I would argue, inconsistent with the neoconservative programme. Nonetheless, Francis Fukuyama, who had the potential to be a high-profile advocate of a school of neoconservatism that is line with his idea of "realistic Wilsonianism", a neoconservativism that would be supportable by a bipartisan coalitition of centrist Democrats and Republicans. Unfortunately, Fukuyama, while not abandoning the ideals, has abandoned the label and declared that:

Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.