After Neoconservatism

After Neoconservatism
By
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA (NYT) 4646 words Published: February 19, 2006As
We approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely thathistory will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invadingIraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replacedAfghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, withplenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating aShiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come;the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq's neighbors, includingIran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein'sdictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is veryhard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the UnitedStates has spent on the project to this point. The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now inshambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategyof the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have tolaunch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rouge states and terrorists withweapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would workto democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. Butsuccessful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on goodintelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated itas never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has beendistancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the National SecurityStrategy document. But it is the idealistic effort to use American power to promote democracy and human rightsabroad that may suffer the greatest setback. Perceived failure in Iraq has restored theauthority of foreign policy ''realists'' in the tradition of Henry Kissinger. Already there is ahost of books and articles decrying America's naïve Wilsonianism and attacking the notion oftrying to democratize the world. The administration's second-term efforts to push for greaterMiddle Eastern democracy, introduced with the soaring rhetoric of Bush's second InauguralAddress, have borne very problematic fruits. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood made a strongshowing in Egypt's parliamentary elections in November and December. While the holding ofelections in Iraq this past December was an achievement in itself, the vote led to theascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran (following on the election of theconservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June). But the clincher was thedecisive Hamas victory in the Palestinian election last month, which brought to power a movementovertly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In his second inaugural, Bush said that''America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one,'' but the charge will be madewith increasing frequency that the Bush administration made a big mistake when it stirred thepot, and that the United States would have done better to stick by its traditional authoritarianfriends in the Middle East. Indeed, the effort to promote democracy around the world has beenattacked as an illegitimate activity both by people on the left like Jeffrey Sachs and bytraditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan. The reaction against democracy promotion and an activist foreign policy may not end there. Thosewhom Walter Russell Mead labels Jacksonian conservatives -- red-state Americans whose sons anddaughters are fighting and dying in the Middle East -- supported the Iraq war because theybelieved that their children were fighting to defend the United States against nuclearterrorism, not to promote democracy. They don't want to abandon the president in the middle of avicious war, but down the road the perceived failure of the Iraq intervention may push them tofavor a more isolationist foreign policy, which is a more natural political position for them. Arecent Pew poll indicates a swing in public opinion toward isolationism; the percentage ofAmericans saying that the United States ''should mind its own business'' has never been highersince the end of the Vietnam War. More than any other group, it was the neoconservatives both inside and outside the Bushadministration who pushed for democratizing Iraq and the broader Middle East. They are widelycredited (or blamed) for being the decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq, and yet itis their idealistic agenda that in the coming months and years will be the most directlythreatened. Were the United States to retreat from the world stage, following a drawdown inIraq, it would in my view be a huge tragedy, because American power and influence have beencritical to the maintenance of an open and increasingly democratic order around the world. Theproblem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie,but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. What Americanforeign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulationof a ''realistic Wilsonianism'' that better matches means to ends. The Neoconservative Legacy How did the neoconservatives end up overreaching to such an extent that they risk underminingtheir own goals? The Bush administration's first-term foreign policy did not flow ineluctablyfrom the views of earlier generations of people who considered themselves neoconservatives,since those views were themselves complex and subject to differing interpretations. Four commonprinciples or threads ran through much of this thought up through the end of the cold war: aconcern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the internal politics of states; abelief that American power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability ofinternational law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view thatambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines itsown ends. The problem was that two of these principles were in potential collision. The skeptical stancetoward ambitious social engineering -- which in earlier years had been applied mostly todomestic policies like affirmative action, busing and welfare -- suggested a cautious approachtoward remaking the world and an awareness that ambitious initiatives always have unanticipatedconsequences. The belief in the potential moral uses of American power, on the other hand,implied that American activism could reshape the structure of global politics. By the time ofthe Iraq war, the belief in the transformational uses of power had prevailed over the doubtsabout social engineering. In retrospect, things did not have to develop this way. The roots of neoconservatism lie in aremarkable group of largely Jewish intellectuals who attended City College of New York(C.C.N.Y.) in the mid- to late 1930's and early 1940's, a group that included Irving Kristol,Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The story ofthis group has been told in a number of places, most notably in a documentary film by JosephDorman called ''Arguing the World.'' The most important inheritance from the C.C.N.Y. group wasan idealistic belief in social progress and the universality of rights, coupled with intenseanti-Communism. It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as Trotskyites. Leon Trotskywas, of course, himself a Communist, but his supporters came to understand better than mostpeople the utter cynicism and brutality of the Stalinist regime. The anti-Communist left, incontrast to the traditional American right, sympathized with the social and economic aims ofCommunism, but in the course of the 1930's and 1940's came to realize that ''real existingsocialism'' had become a monstrosity of unintended consequences that completely undermined theidealistic goals it espoused. While not all of the C.C.N.Y. thinkers became neoconservatives,the danger of good intentions carried to extremes was a theme that would underlie the life workof many members of this group. If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by thosewho wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, NathanGlazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer,Moynihan and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often leftsocieties worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention thatdisrupted pre-existing social relations (for example, forced busing) or else producedunanticipated consequences (like an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare).A major theme running through James Q. Wilson's extensive writings on crime was the idea thatyou could not lower crime rates by trying to solve deep underlying problems like poverty andracism; effective policies needed to focus on shorter-term measures that went after symptoms ofsocial distress (like subway graffiti or panhandling) rather than root causes. How, then, did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the ''root cause'' of terrorismlay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and theability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq?Neoconservatives would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold warended. Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and in Europe forlabeling the Soviet Union and its allies an ''evil empire'' and for challenging MikhailGorbachev not just to reform his system but also to ''tear down this wall.'' His assistantsecretary of defense for international security policy, Richard Perle, was denounced as the''prince of darkness'' for this uncompromising, hard-line position; his proposal for adouble-zero in the intermediate-range nuclear arms negotiations (that is, the completeelimination of medium-range missiles) was attacked as hopelessly out of touch by thebien-pensant centrist foreign-policy experts at places like the Council on Foreign Relations andthe State Department. That community felt that the Reaganites were dangerously utopian in theirhopes for actually winning, as opposed to managing, the cold war. And yet total victory in the cold war is exactly what happened in 1989-91. Gorbachev acceptednot only the double zero but also deep cuts in conventional forces, and then failed to stop thePolish, Hungarian and East German defections from the empire. Communism collapsed within acouple of years because of its internal moral weaknesses and contradictions, and with regimechange in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact threat to the Westevaporated. The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including youngerneoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to havecreated an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumblewith a small push from outside. The model for this was Romania under the Ceausescus: once thewicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about theirliberation. As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000 book ''Present Dangers'': ''To many theidea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators ringsof utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaringthe impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past threedecades.'' This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration'sincomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged inIraq. The war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition towhich societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather thana long-term process of institution-building and reform. While they now assert that they knew allalong that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard, they were clearly takenby surprise. According to George Packer's recent book on Iraq, ''The Assassins' Gate,'' thePentagon planned a drawdown of American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of the summerfollowing the invasion. By the 1990's, neoconservatism had been fed by several other intellectual streams. One came fromthe students of the German Jewish political theorist Leo Strauss, who, contrary to much of thenonsense written about him by people like Anne Norton and Shadia Drury, was a serious reader ofphilosophical texts who did not express opinions on contemporary politics or policy issues.Rather, he was concerned with the ''crisis of modernity'' brought on by the relativism ofNietzsche and Heidegger, as well as the fact that neither the claims of religion nor deeply-heldopinions about the nature of the good life could be banished from politics, as the thinkers ofthe European Enlightenment had hoped. Another stream came from Albert Wohlstetter, a RandCorporation strategist who was the teacher of Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad (the currentAmerican ambassador to Iraq) and Paul Wolfowitz (the former deputy secretary of defense), amongother people. Wohlstetter was intensely concerned with the problem of nuclear proliferation andthe way that the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty left loopholes, in its support for ''peaceful''nuclear energy, large enough for countries like Iraq and Iran to walk through. I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the neoconservative movement. I was astudent of Strauss's protégé Allan Bloom, who wrote the bestseller ''The Closing of the AmericanMind''; worked at Rand and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked also on twooccasions for Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted my book ''The End of History and theLast Man'' (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there isa universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberaldemocracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement infavor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. ''The End of History'' isin the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire forliberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern -- that is, technologically advancedand prosperous -- society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for politicalparticipation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process,something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time. ''The End of History,'' in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existenceof a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy ratherthan communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative positionarticulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed thathistory can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedyin 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 Ican no longer support. The Failure of Benevolent Hegemony The Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters did not simply underestimate thedifficulty of bringing about congenial political outcomes in places like Iraq; they alsomisunderstood the way the world would react to the use of American power. Of course, the coldwar was replete with instances of what the foreign policy analyst Stephen Sestanovich callsAmerican maximalism, wherein Washington acted first and sought legitimacy and support from itsallies only after the fact. But in the post-cold-war period, the structural situation of worldpolitics changed in ways that made this kind of exercise of power much more problematic in theeyes of even close allies. After the fall of the Soviet Union, various neoconservative authorslike Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan suggested that the United Stateswould use its margin of power to exert a kind of ''benevolent hegemony'' over the rest of theworld, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threatsas they came up. Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posturewould provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, ''It is precisely becauseAmerican foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nationsfind they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power.'' (Italics added.) It is hard to read these lines without irony in the wake of the global reaction to the Iraq war,which succeeded in uniting much of the world in a frenzy of anti-Americanism. The idea that theUnited States is a hegemon more benevolent than most is not an absurd one, but there werewarning signs that things had changed in America's relationship to the world long before thestart of the Iraq war. The structural imbalance in global power had grown enormous. Americasurpassed the rest of the world in every dimension of power by an unprecedented margin, with itsdefense spending nearly equal to that of the rest of the world combined. Already during theClinton years, American economic hegemony had generated enormous hostility to anAmerican-dominated process of globalization, frequently on the part of close democratic allieswho thought the United States was seeking to impose its antistatist social model on them. There were other reasons as well why the world did not accept American benevolent hegemony. Inthe first place, it was premised on American exceptionalism, the idea that America could use itspower in instances where others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. Thedoctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002 National SecurityStrategy was one that could not safely be generalized through the international system; Americawould be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar rightof unilateral action. The United States was seeking to pass judgment on others while beingunwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like the International Criminal Court. Another problem with benevolent hegemony was domestic. There are sharp limits to the Americanpeople's attention to foreign affairs and willingness to finance projects overseas that do nothave clear benefits to American interests. Sept. 11 changed that calculus in many ways,providing popular support for two wars in the Middle East and large increases in defensespending. But the durability of the support is uncertain: although most Americans want to dowhat is necessary to make the project of rebuilding Iraq succeed, the aftermath of the invasiondid not increase the public appetite for further costly interventions. Americans are not, atheart, an imperial people. Even benevolent hegemons sometimes have to act ruthlessly, and theyneed a staying power that does not come easily to people who are reasonably content with theirown lives and society. Finally, benevolent hegemony presumed that the hegemon was not only well intentioned butcompetent as well. Much of the criticism of the Iraq intervention from Europeans and others wasnot based on a normative case that the United States was not getting authorization from theUnited Nations Security Council, but rather on the belief that it had not made an adequate casefor invading Iraq in the first place and didn't know what it was doing in trying to democratizeIraq. In this, the critics were unfortunately quite prescient. The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States fromradical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed withweapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflatedthis with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem moregenerally. The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligencecommunity to correctly assess the state of Iraq's W.M.D. programs before the war. But theintelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat asthe war's supporters did. Overestimation of this threat was then used to justify the elevationof preventive war to the centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series ofmeasures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to domestic eavesdropping. What to Do Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United States needs toreconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental ways. In the first instance, we needto demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other typesof policy instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq andagainst the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But ''war'' isthe wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and haveclear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a ''long, twilightstruggle'' whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts andminds of ordinary Muslims around the world. As recent events in France and Denmark suggest,Europe will be a central battleground in this fight. The United States needs to come up with something better than ''coalitions of the willing'' tolegitimate its dealings with other countries. The world today lacks effective internationalinstitutions that can confer legitimacy on collective action; creating new organizations thatwill better balance the dual requirements of legitimacy and effectiveness will be the primarytask for the coming generation. As a result of more than 200 years of political evolution, wehave a relatively good understanding of how to create institutions that are rulebound,accountable and reasonably effective in the vertical silos we call states. What we do not haveare adequate mechanisms of horizontal accountability among states. The conservative critique of the United Nations is all too cogent: while useful for certainpeacekeeping and nation-building operations, the United Nations lacks both democratic legitimacyand effectiveness in dealing with serious security issues. The solution is not to strengthen asingle global body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in any event, a''multi-multilateral world'' of overlapping and occasionally competing internationalinstitutions that are organized on regional or functional lines. Kosovo in 1999 was a model:when the Russian veto prevented the Security Council from acting, the United States and its NATOallies simply shifted the venue to NATO, where the Russians could not block action. The final area that needs rethinking, and the one that will be the most contested in the comingmonths and years, is the place of democracy promotion in American foreign policy. The worstlegacy that could come from the Iraq war would be an anti-neoconservative backlash that coupleda sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United States withfriendly authoritarians. Good governance, which involves not just democracy but also the rule oflaw and economic development, is critical to a host of outcomes we desire, from alleviatingpoverty to dealing with pandemics to controlling violent conflicts. A Wilsonian policy that paysattention to how rulers treat their citizens is therefore right, but it needs to be informed bya certain realism that was missing from the thinking of the Bush administration in its firstterm and of its neoconservative allies. We need in the first instance to understand that promoting democracy and modernization in theMiddle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it willmake the short-term problem worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian electionbringing Hamas to power. Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself, arising fromthe loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society. It is noaccident that so many recent terrorists, from Sept. 11's Mohamed Atta to the murderer of theDutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to the London subway bombers, were radicalized in democraticEurope and intimately familiar with all of democracy's blessings. More democracy will mean morealienation, radicalization and -- yes, unfortunately -- terrorism. But greater political participation by Islamist groups is very likely to occur whatever we do,and it will be the only way that the poison of radical Islamism can ultimately work its waythrough the body politic of Muslim communities around the world. The age is long since gone whenfriendly authoritarians could rule over passive populations and produce stability indefinitely.New social actors are mobilizing everywhere, from Bolivia and Venezuela to South Africa and thePersian Gulf. A durable Israeli-Palestinian peace could not be built upon a corrupt,illegitimate Fatah that constantly had to worry about Hamas challenging its authority. Peacemight emerge, sometime down the road, from a Palestine run by a formerly radical terrorist groupthat had been forced to deal with the realities of governing. 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 thatactually promote democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations likethe State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like. The UnitedStates has played an often decisive role in helping along many recent democratic transitions,including in the Philippines in 1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland andHungary in 1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the overarchinglesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when andwhere democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can't ''impose'' democracy on a countrythat doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion istherefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening ofpolitical and economic conditions to be effective. The Bush administration has been walking -- indeed, sprinting -- away from the legacy of itsfirst term, as evidenced by the cautious multilateral approach it has taken toward the nuclearprograms of Iran and North Korea. Condoleezza Rice gave a serious speech in January about''transformational diplomacy'' and has begun an effort to reorganize the nonmilitary side of theforeign-policy establishment, and the National Security Strategy document is being rewritten.All of these are welcome changes, but the legacy of the Bush first-term foreign policy and itsneoconservative supporters has been so polarizing that it is going to be hard to have a reasoneddebate about how to appropriately balance American ideals and interests in the coming years. Thereaction against a flawed policy can be as damaging as the policy itself, and such a reaction isan indulgence we cannot afford, given the critical moment we have arrived at in global politics. Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts likecoercive 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 --ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but withoutits illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about.