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The National Interest
The Two Fukuyamas
Anatol Lieven
Full Text
06.01.2006
Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 226 pp., $25.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992, 2006), 432 pp., $15.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1996), 456 pp., $16.
NEOCONSERVATISM, AT least as a powerful movement bearing that name, now looks moribund. The mortal blow may well be seen in the future to have been delivered by the defection of neoconservatism's last truly distinguished intellectual, Francis Fukuyama, and the shattering critique of neoconservatism delivered in his new book, America at the Crossroads. Fukuyama declares:
"Whatever its complex roots, neoconservatism has now become inevitably linked to concepts like preemption, regime change, unilateralism, and benevolent hegemony as put into practice by the Bush administration. Rather than attempting the feckless task of reclaiming the meaning of the term, it seems to me better to abandon the label and articulate an altogether distinct foreign policy position."
Until 2002, Fukuyama was closely identified with the neoconservative movement and in particular the related Project for a New American Century (PNAC). He was a signatory to several PNAC public statements, including one from 1998 accusing President Clinton of having "capitulated" to Saddam Hussein and calling on the United States to do everything necessary to remove him from power in Iraq. In America at the Crossroads, Fukuyama suggests regret for that signature but says that "an American invasion of Iraq was not then in the cards, however, and would not be until the events of September 11, 2001."
Nonetheless, on September 20, 2001, Fukuyama signed another public PNAC letter declaring, "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq." This statement also called for the War on Terror to target Hizballah, and for U.S. "retaliation" against Iran and Syria if they failed to break off support for that organization. In other words, this document was an early introduction to all the key strategic errors later committed by the Bush Administration in the War on Terror.
In the course of 2002, however, Fukuyama took part in a study on long-term U.S. strategy in the War on Terror: "It was at this point that I finally decided the war [with Iraq] didn't make any sense", he writes in America at the Crossroads. He also began to think through his wider differences with the neoconservative movement. As a result of this analysis, Fukuyama takes issue in his new book with the now-widespread excuse of neoconservatives and liberal hawks that the disasters in Iraq have been the result of unpredictably incompetent execution by the Bush Administration, rather than of the ideas that led to war:
"[These] abstract ideas were interpreted in certain characteristic ways that might better be described as mindsets or worldviews rather than principled positions. The prudential choices that flowed from these mindsets were biased in certain consistent directions that made them, when they proved to be wrong, something more than individual errors of judgment."
In the book he also accurately identifies three main areas of biased judgment with regard to Iraq on the part of the administration and its supporters: exaggerated threat assessment; indifference to international public opinion, leading to underestimation of the damage that the global backlash against the war would do to American interests; and "wild over-optimism" concerning America's ability to pacify, reconstruct and reshape Iraq after the initial conquest. It was above all these errors of judgment, Fukuyama says, that led to his break with the neoconservatives.
With regard to that overoptimism, Fukuyama writes, "If there is a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques carried out by those who wrote for the Public Interest, it is the limits of social engineering." Too many of those who took this line at home, he says, forgot it utterly when it came to advocating vastly more radical reshaping in vastly less propitious places than the slums of the United States.
Even before Fukuyama's recantation, the neoconservatives as such were in very serious trouble. Their leading representatives in the Bush Administration have been removed or marginalized. According to recent polls, their leading ideas have been rejected by large majorities of Americans. Intellectually and publicly, they are very much on the defensive. While extremely welcome, America at the Crossroads is therefore not quite the radical work it would have been three years ago and is also of course a great deal less helpful to the United States than it would have been if it had been published and debated before, not after, the launch of the Iraq War.
After Neoconservatism, Then What?
IN LEAVING the ranks of the neoconservatives, Fukuyama is following a pattern that has existed almost since the beginning of this movement in the 1960s, by which certain figures have left while others have joined. The ones who have left over time have been the deepest and most truly original thinkers, from Daniel Bell and Daniel Patrick Moynihan through Samuel Huntington to Fukuyama himself.
The remaining neoconservatives are by no means so intellectually distinguished. Having heard so much about them as controversial but genuinely interesting intellectuals, it was with a certain astonishment that on coming to the United States six years ago and reading their books, I found most to be little more than strings of topical newspaper op-eds laid end to end.
That characterization could never be made of the complex and profound man sometimes identified as the father of this school, Leo Strauss, or of his student and Fukuyama's teacher, Allan Bloom. Nor can it be said of Fukuyama himself. He is in some ways a wildly undisciplined thinker, but he is also a genuinely brilliant, imaginative and provocative one. Even when you disagree profoundly with parts of them, his books, including his latest, are a joy to read.
Over the years, some leading intellectuals have broken publicly with the movement, like Fukuyama. Others have just gradually drifted away, leading to perceptions among the uninformed that the movement remains much larger than it actually is. Thus Huntington is occasionally still identified by some writer or other as a "neoconservative", although most of his key ideas on foreign policy are by now diametrically opposed to theirs.
Of course, the neoconservatives retain well-known figures like Charles Krauthammer, who comes under particular attack in the book and authored a fierce counterattack in a Washington Post column. But while they make very good targets, when it comes to true depth or originality of thought, Krauthammer and other neoconservatives like Richard Perle might also be described as straw hyenas--prominent and strikingly vicious features of the American foreign policy ecology, but hardly intellectual lions.
The remaining true neoconservatives are best described not as a school of thought, but rather as a kind of para-bureaucratic grouping, which (as Jacob Weisberg has pointed out in the New Yorker) also somewhat resembles an extended lineage or clan. This kind of grouping is made possible by the American system's blurring of the lines between government, pseudo-academia, the media and business. As leading neoconservatives have left, their numbers have been made up by new adherents, motivated chiefly in recent years by a mixture of nationalism (both American and Israeli) and political ambition.
Fukuyama makes the case in America at the Crossroads that the neoconservatives will be, in perpetuity, identified with the Iraq War, and despite some disingenuous and discreditable attempts to attach all blame for the resulting debacle to the unforeseeable incompetence of the Bush Administration, they are now stuck with it.
From the End of History to the Crossroads
UNLIKE THE bulk of contemporary neoconservative thought, Fukuyama's work was never intellectually monolithic or even internally consistent. On the contrary, it is full of fascinating contradictions: between his American and Japanese roots; between the intellectual inheritance of his father, a distinguished sociologist of religion, and Fukuyama's own complex and changing attitudes to this subject; between his belief in the superiority of the American political and economic system and his doubts about that system; between his identities as a scholar and as a foreign policy advisor; between Fukuyama as the apostle of capitalism and Fukuyama as what can only be called in certain respects a Gramscian Marxist; and between the herald of a satisfied, complacent, consensual and peaceful human order and a kind of revolutionary manqué who finds this prospect frankly rather boring.
Thus Fukuyama has spent a good part of his subsequent career trying to escape from the reputation of his first major work, The End of History and the Last Man--an interesting, but also rather naive and exaggerated version of American post-Cold War triumphalism. In that book, based on a famous essay in the Summer 1989 issue of this journal, he declared in neo-Hegelian terms the impending universal and ultimate triumph of liberal capitalist democracy: not just the dawn of a world "where struggle over all of the large issues has been largely settled", but "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
Long before 9/11 convincingly showed that as far as radical Islamists are concerned that is certainly not the case, a great deal of mockery had been directed at this claim. And indeed, taken simply as written, it was evidently absurd. On the assumption that the human race continues to exist in some form for thousands of years to come, we are bound sooner or later to encounter radical challenges that will require radical changes in our whole way of conducting human affairs. Fukuyama himself has sketched the possible future challenges of genetic engineering to human society in his book Our Post-Human Future (2002).
Although The End of History brought Fukuyama fame and fortune, he has since been embarrassed by its more radically teleological claims and worried by the political uses to which the Bush Administration has put them. Both of the Bush Administration's National Security Strategy documents (of 2002 and 2006) and many of Bush's speeches on foreign policy are permeated with statements about liberal democracy being the universal and inevitable goal for all mankind, very reminiscent of The End of History.
In defense against the charge that he himself helped initiate the Bush Administration's revolutionary attitude to spreading democracy, Fukuyama stresses in his latest book that The End of History described a democratic capitalist version of an anti-Leninist Marxian approach--stressing slow cultural, social and economic change, not sudden revolution. He maintains that he is a Gramscian, emphasizing the intellectual and cultural hegemony of capitalist democracy, not claiming that it would inevitably work well everywhere or solve all problems. By contrast, he describes the Bush Administration as having become "Leninist" in its belief that history can be subjected to violent pushes.
Fukuyama's strongest claim to have pursued for many years a trajectory quite different from the neoconservatives is provided by his best book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, published in 1996. This work is distinguished not just by its scholarship and sophistication, but by the breadth of its sympathy and understanding for a range of very different cultural, social and economic traditions.
A more different approach to the world than that of the neoconservatives can hardly be imagined--so much so, indeed, that re-reading this book made me wonder why Fukuyama ever numbered himself in their ranks. His acceptance of the importance of culture, the difficulty of quickly and radically changing cultural patterns, and the radically varying paths to economic progress would naturally set him at odds not just with the neoconservatives but with the entire approach of the Bush Administration to democratization. In view of this, what is surprising is not so much that he eventually broke with the neoconservatives, but that he remained in their company for so long.
As a thinker on history, culture and society, Fukuyama is distinguished not only by acuteness and profundity, but often also--as Paul Berman wrote in a review for the New York Times--by playfulness. He just loves tossing contradictory ideas and schools of thought up in the air and trying to juggle with them. If the result is quite often a terrible mess, the process is exhilarating to watch and a real stimulus to the imagination.
Venturing Only So Far
AMERICA AT the Crossroads is also a very interesting and stimulating read, though as what is basically an extended policy essay, it lacks both the depth and the élan of the End of History and Trust. It is full of highly intelligent arguments and perceptions, as for example when Fukuyama warns against universalizing the East European post-communist experience--combining democratization, economic reform and pro-American feeling--to the world as a whole.
This book is certainly a very valuable contribution to the U.S. debate and provides important pointers to what ought to be radically new U.S. policies. Unfortunately, however, it does not actually say what those policies should be--and as such, it falls short of its promise to "articulate an altogether distinct foreign policy position" and suggest "a different way for America to relate to the world."
Some of the bases for a really new approach are present in this book. Thus in what is perhaps the single most radical passage of America at the Crossroads, Fukuyama lets fly at the bipartisan tendency towards American exceptionalism, a belief that is at the heart of both the neoconservative and liberal-hawk approaches to foreign policy:
"Benevolent hegemony rests on a belief in American exceptionalism that most non-Americans simply find not credible. The idea that the United States behaves disinterestedly on the world stage is not widely believed because it is for the most part not true and, indeed, could not be true if American leaders fulfill their responsibilities to the American people."
It is important to recall that the most famous statement of American exceptionalism in recent times was made not by a neoconservative but by a Democrat, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (America as the "indispensable nation"). And since 9/11, leading members of the so-called "liberal hawk" wing of the Democratic Party have been moving closer and closer to the neoconservatives on key foreign policy issues, and they are indeed by now sometimes practically indistinguishable from them. In recent weeks I have heard or read speeches by Democratic leaders Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Evan Bayh, all of which were permeated by exceptionalist nationalism.
Belief in American exceptionalism therefore permeates American political culture and life in general. Neoconservatives and the Bush Administration have only given it a particularly radical twist. And this belief has very positive sides. It is intimately entwined with valuable and indeed essential elements of the American tradition: American civic nationalism and the American Creed. These are the essential binding forces of the American polity, and foundations of American national greatness and America's example to the world.
However, as we have seen in recent years, this great tradition also embodies some extremely dangerous tendencies to messianism, arrogance and aggression; and were America--God forbid--to suffer another attack on the scale of 9/11, those deeper tendencies in American political culture could well burst forth in actions even more dangerous than the invasion of Iraq. And it won't matter much if groups that support these actions call themselves neoconservatives or something else.
It is therefore extremely important that American intellectuals conduct a truly searching debate on the nature of American nationalism, and the character and implications of fundamental American national myths. This is something that should have taken place as a result of Vietnam--but sensible tendencies in this direction were first compromised by the acidic anti-Americanism of the Left, and then drowned in the infinitely more successful nationalist syrup of the Reagan era.
Given both his intellectual distinction and his distinct tendency to radicalism, Fukuyama could play a central role in a post-Iraq rethinking of the American nationalist tradition. This is a role that would also suit his ambition, for he has always wanted--entirely honorably--to be not only a deep and serious thinker, but also a major influence on actual policy.
As things stand in Washington, however, these two roles are unfortunately often incompatible. It was not always so, as George Kennan and Henry Kissinger both demonstrated in their different ways. Today, however, there are very great tensions between them, which Fukuyama to date seems quite far from overcoming. As a student of Tocqueville, Fukuyama would doubtless recognize the following passage from Democracy in America: "The majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion: Within these barriers an author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever step beyond them."
Truly deep and radical thought in the foreign-policy-oriented sections of U.S. academia and think tanks is deadened both by the hegemony of American civic-nationalist ideology and by the interlacing of these institutions with the organs of government. As a result, too many formally independent American experts in fact tailor their every statement so that it can never be held against them by a possible political patron or at a Senate confirmation hearing. As a retired U.S. ambassador put it to me recently, "in terms of free debate and moral courage, there is nothing worse than a permanent campaign for unelected office."
If Fukuyama wants to emerge as the great public figure that his intellect and learning qualify him to be, he needs to gamble: to risk short-term unpopularity and abuse in the belief that events will eventually vindicate his stance. And indeed, this is the duty of all of us in the foreign policy ecology, given the combination of the Bush Administration's failures and the bankruptcy of the Democratic opposition when it comes to seriously rethinking U.S. strategy.
For example, Fukuyama's Trust contains some remarkably acute observations on the importance of culture and, in certain circumstances, radical state intervention in promoting various forms of capitalist economic development--like that of South Korea in the 1960s. Although this book says little about post-Soviet Russia, its interpretation of the economic successes of the East Asian tigers, and the role of elite identities and ethics in making these successes possible, provide the basis for a sympathy towards the kind of state Vladimir Putin is trying to create in Russia (though, paradoxically, Fukuyama's emphasis on the central importance of historically derived cultures of trust and cooperation also help explain why Putin is likely to fail).
If Fukuyama were publicly to apply the lessons outlined in Trust to the present U.S. discourse on policy towards Russia, it would greatly raise both the quality and the utility of that discourse. However, this would also require a dissent from the opinion of most of the administration, the two party establishments and the overwhelming majority of the think tanks (from Carnegie to AEI), all of which now portray the Putin Administration, and Russia in general, in terms that are as blankly hostile as they are intellectually vacuous and historically illiterate. Breaking with the neoconservatives is controversial but "safe"; challenging the basic assumptions of the U.S. foreign policy elite on Russia and other key issues is not safe at all.
Wilsonianism and Realism
IN AMERICA at the Crossroads, Fukuyama himself seeks to counter neoconservatism with a new intellectual approach and strategy that he has labeled "realistic Wilsonianism"--and has issued a challenge to critics to come up with a better phrase. I have tried to formulate a concept (rather than an alternative label) that expresses parts of the same idea in a form which is less liable to abuse by neoconservatives and liberal hawks present and future. In my essay on Pakistan published in the last issue of The National Interest, I first discussed "developmental realism", which is to be developed further in a book that I have coauthored with John Hulsman of the Heritage Foundation, to appear this fall.1
This approach, returning to the best traditions of the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations, advocates generous aid for the development of key allies--and not only development but equitable development. Those administrations applied this model, for example, in the implementation or promotion of radical land reform in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan (though it was forgotten, alas, by the Eisenhower Administration when it came to Guatemala). Such development needs to be geared both to the reduction in mass misery and to the creation of modern middle classes with a capacity to build and maintain democracy.
The need for visibly equitable development--what Benjamin Friedman has called "moral growth"--is necessary not merely for the War on Terror (as it once was for the struggle with communism) but also for the gradual building of the foundations of stable democracy. A tradition stretching back to Aristotle, Burke and Jefferson holds that if a constitutional state is to flourish, its active participants must possess the essentials for a dignified life for themselves and their children, in order to guarantee their attachment to the state and political stability, and their independence from political overlords.
While "developmental realism" does cover some of the same ground as "realistic Wilsonianism", the latter remains in the end teleological, assuming one fixed path of progress towards a fixed, free-market, democratic goal. There will always therefore be a temptation to try to hurry countries along that path, rather than waiting in Fukuyama's Marxian spirit for the economic, social and cultural substructure to develop sufficiently to support democracy.
The hegemony of liberal democratic thought among modern intellectuals across the world--so brilliantly delineated by Fukuyama in The End of History--too often predisposes them to radically false and wildly optimistic assessments of the readiness of their countries for democracy, and the wishes of their populations in this regard. In turn, Western intellectuals and journalists instinctively turn to such liberal intellectuals, rather than either officials or ordinary people, for analysis of their societies. At best, this produces a copulation of illusions, with Westerners and their local interlocutors passionately misconceiving together. At worst, it lays us open to deliberate misinformation and manipulation by a range of would-be Chalabis.
American zeal for hegemony through democracy in wake of victory in the Cold War has prompted the United States to re-launch an ideological struggle between the great powers, with U.S. administrations combining a preaching of democracy to Russia, China and Iran with attempts to bludgeon them into submission to U.S. views and interests--despite the fact that Moscow and Beijing no longer try to export their own ideology to the United States or its key allies. This U.S. approach has become officially institutionalized in bodies like Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy, whose pronouncements are accorded an almost religious force by much of the media and the political classes.
As a result of all these pressures, once you have accepted the teleological assumptions implicit even in the realistic version of Wilsonianism, it is very difficult in practice to stick with Fukuyama's gradualist approach, even with regard to countries where it is universally recognized in principle that building real democracy will be a very long process. The U.S. public debate therefore mainly focuses not on deeper issues of economic, social and cultural change, but on whether the next elections will be "free 'n' fair", by which is too often meant whether the pro-American side will win. The United States is therefore constantly being dragged away from Fukuyama's Marxian concentration on the need to create the substructures of democracy, and towards exactly the obsession with the superficial expressions of democracy that Fukuyama himself increasingly criticizes.
It is to be hoped that Francis Fukuyama's break with neoconservatives will be only the beginning of his journey to new and uncharted shores, and that this journey will be of great benefit to United States thinking and strategy.
For Fukuyama is one of the most interesting public intellectuals in America today and has produced very valuable work on an extraordinary range of subjects. He has the ability to toss the cherished shibboleths of the Washington political classes up in the air and juggle playfully with them--should he be willing to break some windows in the process.
1. Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, Ethical Realism and American Foreign Policy (Random House).
Anatol Lieven is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. His last book was America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (2004).