After Neoconservatism
*By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA (NYT) 4646 words*
Published: February 19, 2006

As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it
seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention
itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush
administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced
Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for
jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The
United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-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, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the
Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and
perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is
very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood
and treasure that the United States 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 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 rouge 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. It is not surprising that in its second term, the
administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in
the process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document.

But it is the idealistic effort to use American power to promote
democracy and human rights abroad that may suffer the greatest setback.
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 na�ve Wilsonianism and
attacking the notion of trying to democratize the world. The
administration's second-term efforts to push for greater Middle Eastern
democracy, introduced with the soaring rhetoric of Bush's second
Inaugural Address, have borne very problematic fruits. The Islamist
Muslim Brotherhood made a strong showing in Egypt's parliamentary
elections in November and December. While the holding of elections in
Iraq this past December was an achievement in itself, the vote led to
the ascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran (following on
the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of
Iran in June). But the clincher was the decisive Hamas victory in the
Palestinian election last month, which brought to power a movement
overtly 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 made with increasing frequency that
the Bush administration made a big mistake when it stirred the pot, and
that the United States would have done better to stick by its
traditional authoritarian friends in the Middle East. Indeed, the effort
to promote democracy around the world has been attacked as an
illegitimate activity both by people on the left like Jeffrey Sachs and
by traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan.

The reaction against democracy promotion and an activist foreign policy
may not end there. Those whom Walter Russell Mead labels Jacksonian
conservatives -- red-state Americans whose sons and daughters are
fighting and dying in the Middle East -- supported the Iraq war because
they believed that their children were fighting to defend the United
States against nuclear terrorism, not to promote democracy. They don't
want to abandon the president in the middle of a vicious war, but down
the road the perceived failure of the Iraq intervention may push them to
favor a more isolationist foreign policy, which is a more natural
political position for them. A recent Pew poll indicates a swing in
public opinion toward isolationism; the percentage of Americans saying
that the United States ''should mind its own business'' has never been
higher since the end of the Vietnam War.

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. Were the United States to retreat from the world
stage, following a drawdown in Iraq, it would in my view be a huge
tragedy, because American power and influence have been critical to the
maintenance of an open and increasingly democratic order around the
world. The problem 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 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.

The Neoconservative Legacy

How did the neoconservatives end up overreaching to such an extent that
they risk undermining their own goals? The Bush administration's
first-term foreign policy did not flow ineluctably from the views of
earlier generations of people who considered themselves
neoconservatives, since those views were themselves complex and subject
to differing interpretations. Four common principles or threads ran
through much of this thought up through the end of the cold war: a
concern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the internal
politics of states; a belief that American power can be used for moral
purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and
institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view
that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences
and thereby undermines its own ends.

The problem was that two of these principles were in potential
collision. The skeptical stance toward ambitious social engineering --
which in earlier years had been applied mostly to domestic policies like
affirmative action, busing and welfare -- suggested a cautious approach
toward remaking the world and an awareness that ambitious initiatives
always have unanticipated consequences. 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 of
the Iraq war, the belief in the transformational uses of power had
prevailed over the doubts about social engineering.

In retrospect, things did not have to develop this way. The roots of
neoconservatism lie in a remarkable 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 of this group has been told in a
number of places, most notably in a documentary film by Joseph Dorman
called ''Arguing the World.'' The most important inheritance from the
C.C.N.Y. group was an idealistic belief in social progress and the
universality of rights, coupled with intense anti-Communism.

It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as
Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky was, of course, himself a Communist, but his
supporters came to understand better than most people the utter cynicism
and brutality of the Stalinist regime. The anti-Communist left, in
contrast to the traditional American right, sympathized with the social
and economic aims of Communism, but in the course of the 1930's and
1940's came to realize that ''real existing socialism'' had become a
monstrosity of unintended consequences that completely undermined the
idealistic 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 work of many members
of this group.

If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy
critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The
Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer 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 left societies worse off than before
because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted
pre-existing social relations (for example, forced busing) or else
produced unanticipated 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 that you could not
lower crime rates by trying to solve deep underlying problems like
poverty and racism; effective policies needed to focus on shorter-term
measures that went after symptoms of social 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 terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy,
that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability 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 war ended.

Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left
and in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an ''evil
empire'' and for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his
system but also to ''tear down this wall.'' His assistant secretary of
defense for international security policy, Richard Perle, was denounced
as the ''prince of darkness'' for this uncompromising, hard-line
position; his proposal for a double-zero in the intermediate-range
nuclear arms negotiations (that is, the complete elimination of
medium-range missiles) was attacked as hopelessly out of touch by the
bien-pensant centrist foreign-policy experts at places like the Council
on Foreign Relations and the State Department. That community felt that
the Reaganites were dangerously utopian in their hopes 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 accepted not only the double zero but also deep cuts
in conventional forces, and then failed to stop the Polish, Hungarian
and East German defections from the empire. Communism collapsed within a
couple of years because of its internal moral weaknesses and
contradictions, and with regime change in Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact threat to the West evaporated.

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.''

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. While they now assert that they knew
all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and
hard, they were clearly taken by surprise. According to George Packer's
recent book on Iraq, ''The Assassins' Gate,'' the Pentagon planned a
drawdown of American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of the
summer following the invasion.

By the 1990's, neoconservatism had been fed by several other
intellectual streams. One came from the students of the German Jewish
political theorist Leo Strauss, who, contrary to much of the nonsense
written about him by people like Anne Norton and Shadia Drury, was a
serious reader of philosophical 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 of Nietzsche
and Heidegger, as well as the fact that neither the claims of religion
nor deeply-held opinions about the nature of the good life could be
banished from politics, as the thinkers of the European Enlightenment
had hoped. Another stream came from Albert Wohlstetter, a Rand
Corporation strategist who was the teacher of Richard Perle, Zalmay
Khalilzad (the current American ambassador to Iraq) and Paul Wolfowitz
(the former deputy secretary of defense), among other people.
Wohlstetter was intensely concerned with the problem of nuclear
proliferation and the 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 a student of Strauss's prot�g� Allan
Bloom, who wrote the bestseller ''The Closing of the American Mind'';
worked at Rand and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked
also on two occasions for Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted
my book ''The End of History and the Last Man'' (1992) as a
neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there
is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably
lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of
an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal
democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. ''The End of History''
is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially
universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire
to live in a modern -- that is, technologically advanced and prosperous
-- society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political
participation. 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 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.

The Failure of Benevolent Hegemony

The Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters did not
simply underestimate the difficulty of bringing about congenial
political outcomes in places like Iraq; they also misunderstood the way
the world would react to the use of American power. Of course, the cold
war was replete with instances of what the foreign policy analyst
Stephen Sestanovich calls American maximalism, wherein Washington acted
first and sought legitimacy and support from its allies only after the
fact. But in the post-cold-war period, the structural situation of world
politics changed in ways that made this kind of exercise of power much
more problematic in the eyes of even close allies. After the fall of the
Soviet Union, various neoconservative authors like Charles Krauthammer,
William Kristol and Robert Kagan suggested that the United States would
use its margin of power to exert a kind of ''benevolent hegemony'' over
the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D.,
human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came up. Writing
before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posture
would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, ''It
is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an
unusually high degree of morality that other nations find 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 the United States is a
hegemon more benevolent than most is not an absurd one, but there were
warning signs that things had changed in America's relationship to the
world long before the start of the Iraq war. The structural imbalance in
global power had grown enormous. America surpassed the rest of the world
in every dimension of power by an unprecedented margin, with its defense
spending nearly equal to that of the rest of the world combined. Already
during the Clinton years, American economic hegemony had generated
enormous hostility to an American-dominated process of globalization,
frequently on the part of close democratic allies who 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. In the first place, it was premised on American
exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances
where others could not because it was more virtuous than other
countries. The doctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats
contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy was one that could not
safely be generalized through the international system; America would be
the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a
similar right of unilateral action. The United States was seeking to
pass judgment on others while being unwilling 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 American people's attention to foreign affairs and
willingness to finance projects overseas that do not have 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 defense spending. But the durability of the support is
uncertain: although most Americans want to do what is necessary to make
the project of rebuilding Iraq succeed, the aftermath of the invasion
did not increase the public appetite for further costly interventions.
Americans are not, at heart, an imperial people. Even benevolent
hegemons sometimes have to act ruthlessly, and they need a staying power
that does not come easily to people who are reasonably content with
their own lives and society.

Finally, benevolent hegemony presumed that the hegemon was not only well
intentioned but competent as well. Much of the criticism of the Iraq
intervention from Europeans and others was not based on a normative case
that the United States was not getting authorization from the United
Nations Security Council, but rather on the belief that it had not made
an adequate case for invading Iraq in the first place and didn't know
what it was doing in trying to democratize Iraq. In this, the critics
were unfortunately quite prescient.

The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing
the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous
possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass
destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly
conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue
state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in
part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to
correctly assess the state of Iraq's W.M.D. programs before the war. But
the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the
terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war's supporters did. Overestimation of
this threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to
the centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of
measures 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 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. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement,
wars in which we need to prevail. But ''war'' is the wrong metaphor for
the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have
clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of
a ''long, twilight struggle'' whose core is not a military campaign but
a political contest for the hearts and minds 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'' to legitimate its dealings with other
countries. The world today lacks effective international institutions
that can confer legitimacy on collective action; creating new
organizations that will better balance the dual requirements of
legitimacy and effectiveness will be the primary task for the coming
generation. As a result of more than 200 years of political evolution,
we have 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 have are adequate mechanisms of
horizontal accountability among states.

The conservative critique of the United Nations is all too cogent: while
useful for certain peacekeeping and nation-building operations, the
United Nations lacks both democratic legitimacy and effectiveness in
dealing with serious security issues. The solution is not to strengthen
a single global body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in
any event, a ''multi-multilateral world'' of overlapping and
occasionally competing international institutions 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 NATO allies 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 coming months and years, is the place of democracy
promotion in American foreign policy. 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. Good governance, which
involves not just democracy but also the rule of law and economic
development, is critical to a host of outcomes we desire, from
alleviating poverty to dealing with pandemics to controlling violent
conflicts. A Wilsonian policy that pays attention to how rulers treat
their citizens is therefore right, but it needs to be informed by a
certain realism that was missing from the thinking of the Bush
administration in its first term and of its neoconservative allies.

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. It is no accident that so
many recent terrorists, from Sept. 11's Mohamed Atta to the murderer of
the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to the London subway bombers, were
radicalized in democratic Europe and intimately familiar with all of
democracy's blessings. More democracy will mean more alienation,
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 way through the body politic of
Muslim communities around the world. The age is long since gone when
friendly authoritarians could rule over passive populations and produce
stability indefinitely. New social actors are mobilizing everywhere,
from Bolivia and Venezuela to South Africa and the Persian 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. Peace might emerge, sometime down the road, from a
Palestine run by a formerly radical terrorist group that 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 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. The United States 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 and Hungary in 1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in
2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the overarching lesson that emerges
from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when
and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can't
''impose'' democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for
democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore
a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual
ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.

The Bush administration has been walking -- indeed, sprinting -- away
from the legacy of its first term, as evidenced by the cautious
multilateral approach it has taken toward the nuclear programs 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 the foreign-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 its
neoconservative supporters has been so polarizing that it is going to be
hard to have a reasoned debate about how to appropriately balance
American ideals and interests in the coming years. The reaction against
a flawed policy can be as damaging as the policy itself, and such a
reaction is an 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 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 -- ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the
universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the
efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about.

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- posted by DD @ 11:30 PM Perma Link/Print