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Neoconservatism has evolved into something I can no longer
support
The US needs to reframe its foreign policy not as a military
campaign but as a political contest for hearts and minds
By
Francis Fukuyama
02/22/06 "The
Guardian" --- -- As we approach the third
anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems unlikely that
history will judge the intervention or the ideas animating it
kindly. More than any other group, it was the neoconservatives
inside and outside the Bush administration who pushed for democratising Iraq and the 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 US to retreat from the world stage, following a
drawdown in Iraq, it would 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, but
in the overmilitarised means by which it has sought to
accomplish them. What US 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.
How did the neoconservatives end up overreaching to such an
extent that they risk undermining their own goals? How 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 US had 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 the cold war ended.
The way it ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq
war in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation
that all totalitarian regimes were hollow and would crumble with
a small push from outside. This helps explain the Bush
administration's failure to plan adequately for the insurgency
that emerged. The war's supporters seemed to think that
democracy was a default condition to which societies reverted
once coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term
process of institution-building and reform. Neoconservatism, as
a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into
something I can no longer support.
The administration and its neoconservative supporters also
misunderstood the way the world would react to the use of
American power. Of course, the cold war was replete with
instances wherein Washington acted first and sought legitimacy
and support from its allies only after the fact. But in the
post-cold-war period, world politics changed in ways that made
this kind of exercise of power much more problematic in the eyes
of allies. After the fall of the Soviet Union, various
neoconservative authors suggested that the US would use its
margin of power to exert a kind of "benevolent hegemony" over
the rest of the world, fixing problems such as rogue states with
WMD as they came up.
The idea that the US is a hegemon more benevolent than most
isn't absurd, 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 imbalance in global power had grown
enormous. The US surpassed the rest of the world in every
dimension of power by an unprecedented margin.
There were other reasons why the world did not accept American
benevolent hegemony. In the first place, it was premised on the
idea that America could use its power in instances where others
could not because it was more virtuous than other countries.
Another problem with benevolent hegemony was domestic. Although
most Americans want to do what is necessary to make the
rebuilding of 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.
Finally, benevolent hegemony presumed the hegemon was not only
well intentioned but competent. Much of the criticism of the
Iraq intervention from Europeans and others was not based on a
normative case that the US was not getting authorisation from
the UN security council, but on the belief that it had not made
an adequate case for invading and didn't know what it was doing
in trying to democratise Iraq. The critics were, unfortunately,
quite prescient.
The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat
facing the US from radical Islamism. Although the ominous
possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with WMD did
present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with
the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue
state/proliferation problem.
Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the
US needs to reconceptualise its foreign policy. First, we need
to demilitarise what we have been calling the global war on
terrorism and shift to other policy instruments. We are fighting
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. Meeting the jihadist challenge needs 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.
The US needs to come up with something better than "coalitions
of the willing" to legitimate its dealings with other countries.
The world lacks effective international institutions to confer
legitimacy on collective action. The conservative critique of
the UN is all too cogent: while useful for some peacekeeping and
nation-building operations, it lacks democratic legitimacy and
effectiveness in dealing with serious security issues. The
solution is to promote a "multi-multilateral world" of
overlapping and occasionally competing international
institutions organised on regional or functional lines.
The final area that needs rethinking is the place of democracy
promotion in American foreign policy. The worst legacy from the
Iraq war would be an anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled
a sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy
aligning the US with friendly authoritarians. 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.
Promoting democracy and modernisation in the Middle East is not
a solution to jihadist terrorism. Radical Islamism arises from
the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a
modern, pluralist society. More democracy will mean more
alienation, radicalisation and terrorism. But greater political
participation by Islamist groups is likely to occur whatever we
do, and it will be the only way that the poison of radical
Islamism can work its way through the body politic of Muslim
communities. The age is long gone when friendly authoritarians
could rule over passive populations.
The Bush administration has been walking away from the legacy of
its first term, as evidenced by the cautious multilateral
approach it has taken toward the nuclear programmes of Iran and
North Korea. But the legacy of the first-term foreign policy and
its neoconservative supporters has been so polarising that it is
going to be hard to have a reasoned debate about how to
appropriately balance US ideals and interests. What we need are
new ideas for how America is to relate to the world - ideas that
retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human
rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of US power
and hegemony to bring these ends about.
· This is an edited excerpt from After the Neocons: America at
the Crossroads, published next month by Profile Books. To order
a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p (rrp £12.99) go to
guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.
Francis Fukuyama will be appearing in conversation with the
Guardian's Jonathan Freedland on March 23 (details to be
advertised).
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
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