Francis Fukuyama - No longer neocon

MC: Our guest this afternoon is one of the leading political philosophers at work today. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the Rand Corporation throughout the '80s and '90s, and has been a member of the Policy Planning staff of the US Department of State, first as a regular member specialising in Middle Eastern affairs, and then as a Deputy Director for European Political Military affairs.

Today he joins us to discuss the origin, meaning and dissemination of the neo-conservative philosophy, and the Bush Administration's misapplication of neo-conservative principles with regard to their war on Iraq.

Kirsten Garrett: In a way, Fukuyama has come to typify the subtleties of modern political thinking. Beyond left and right. Fukuyama is a conservative, but not an ideologue. And recently he has been critical of the Bush Administration.

Francis Fukuyama published a famous book in the early '90s, The End of History and the Last Man. A book that was called 'bold, lucid and scandalously brilliant' by conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer. And as you'll hear, it was Krauthammer who in later years started Fukuyama thinking again.

And Francis Fukuyama has now written another bold book called America at the Crossroads.

Francis Fukuyama: This is probably the most personal book I've written, because my own involvement with neo-conservatism goes back a long way, as I worked for Paul Wolfowitz, the former Deputy Secretary of Defense on a couple of occasions in the Arms Control Agency and then in the Policy Planning staff of the State Department, I had worked with his teacher, Albert Walstedder, who was a famous strategist at the Rand Corporation, and I also studied with Alan Bloom, the Straussian political philosopher. And so I'm in a sense intertwined with many of the different intellectual streams that led into neo-conservatism. And yet as we approached the Iraq war, although I had started out fairly hawkish on that subject, I became more and more concerned that the Bush Administration was getting set to roll the dice in that they really had not calculated the odds on this war terribly well, that they were taking tremendous risks that didn't seem to be really justified by the ends that they were seeking.

And this in a sense came home to me... I mean the war happened, and then the lack of connection with reality in some sense, really hit me about a year after the war, when in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, I was listening to the columnist, Charles Krauthammer. He was giving a theoretical defence of all of the ideas of unilateralism and American unipolarity in the Bush Administration, and seemed to me not to recognise any of the problems that had emerged; the missing weapons of mass destruction, the insurgency, the anti-Americanism that the whole war had generated. And that was really the origin of this present book.

I want to begin by talking about neo-conservatism as an intellectual movement. The word 'neocon', especially in Europe, but also I think in many parts of the United States, has become a little bit of a swear-word. I mean it means American fascist, or American militarist to many people, and one of the things I actually wanted to do in the book was to indicate that this body - first of all, it's not a movement that you sign up to, like the Communist party, it's really a group of intellectuals that had a lot of different ideas, and no necessary unity. But I wanted to explain what the origins were, how diverse the views of the people that rode in this tradition were, and how in some sense the actual advocacy of the Iraq war departed in certain important ways from many of those ideas that neo-conservatives in earlier generations had actually espoused.

As you may or may not know, the first neo-conservatives were people like Irving Crystal, that is William Crystal's father, Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynahan, Nathan Glaser, Irving Howell, they all were second-generation children of immigrants, grew up in New York City. They attended City College of New York in the 1930s and early '40s, because schools like Harvard and Columbia weren't taking that kind of student back in those years. And it was actually a remarkably vibrant, intellectual atmosphere, and all of them started out on the left. I think that that's important in understanding the world view of many neo-conservatives. In fact there's a famous story about the cafeteria at CCNY that had an Alcove 1 and Alcove 2; Alcove 1 was Trotskyite, and Alcove 2 was Stalinist, and like a lot of leftists in those days, they had a lot of these obscure internecine fights.

But neo-conservatives came to conservatism via the left, they came as a result of their disillusionment with Stalinism, and one of the most basic and enduring themes was really the idea that just goals and ambitious social projects to bring about a more just world can often lead to terrible consequences because you cannot control the use of social power and State power. That was exactly the monstrosity that Stalinism had turned the former Soviet Union into.

I think as a result of World War II, they also learned a lesson about the application of American power: That in fact American power could be used to defeat tyranny, that it could be used to liberate people from oppression, and then more generally, to build in the period after 1945, an open and reasonably democratic world order that was then defended against communism for the succeeding couple of generations...

Now the question that I have been pondering, and I try to answer in the book, is how a group of intellectuals with this kind of pedigree, starting with this critique of communism, and how going through this belief that you cannot address the deep root causes of social problems, ends up supporting a policy that says the deep root cause of Middle East terrorism is the lack of democracy in the Middle East. And that the United States had the wisdom and the ability to engineer a transformation not just of this small country, Iraq, of 24-million people, but of the broader Middle East as a whole, and guide it to democracy. And I think you can see there that there is a real problem that was invented in some of the larger ideas in New York conservative thought.

I identify four principles. So we've talked about two already. One was distrust of ambitious social engineering; the second was the potentially moral uses of American power. By the way, I do not think that this is a uniquely neo-conservative idea. I think that most Americans looking back at their national history, would probably agree with this. Beginning with the Revolution against British monarchy, the American Civil War that killed 600,000 Americans but yet led to the abolition of slavery. The involvement in the Second World War and the Cold War, I think all were seen as ultimately benevolent exercises of military power. So those are the first two principles.

I think there is also scepticism about the ability of international organisations like the United Nations to deal with serious security problems, and finally I believe there was a - and this is what is really the heritage of the left-wing origins of neo-conservatism - a belief in the universality of human rights; the belief that they don't just apply to certain Northern European cultural groups, but they're really things that belong to human beings as a whole, and therefore democracy and the whole structure of rights and democratic institutions that we enjoy in the West, are things that are potentially of universal significance ...

Preventive war was an idea that is embedded in the National Security Strategy document that the White House published initially in September of 2002. It's now been actually updated in a more recent version that came out about a month ago. And in it, they are contemplating the American strategic situation in the wake of September 11th, and like many Americans they came to a perfectly reasonable conclusion: September 11th was perpetrated by nihilistic terrorists that simply wanted to do as much damage as possible. You could not use the tools of the Cold War, that is to say deterrence and containment, against Osama Bin Laden. If he had been able to kill 30,000 or 300,000 instead of 3,000 he would have been perfectly happy to do it, and he didn't have a return address, unlike the case of the Soviet Union. And so you needed a pre-emptive strategy to actively go after them.

Now applied al-Qa'eda, I think that this is a perfectly reasonable strategic conclusion. The problem was that the Administration then applied this to the wrong case. They applied it to Iraq which was a matter of a rogue state that was seeking weapons of mass destruction. That is a perfectly serious problem, but it is a different order of magnitude problem than the problem posed by al-Qa'eda getting a nuclear weapon. And I think one of the most dishonest things that the Administration did was to simply mix the two of them up. You know in these repeated statements by Condy Rice and by the President saying that the smoking gun may be a mushroom cloud; the idea that Saddam Hussein would build a nuclear weapon, turn it over to al-Qa'eda and it would blow up in New York City, it vastly overstated the actual threat from Iraq, and it also drove the justification for what is really not a pre-emption strategy, but a preventive war strategy. Pre-emption is when you break up an imminent attack. If we had seen the Japanese Navy massing outside of Pearl Harbour in December of '41, and attacked it, that would have been pre-emption. Preventive war is when you see a threat that will emerge only months or years down the road, and that was the kind of threat that we were facing from Iraq.

The great German statesman, Bismarck, once said that preventive war in the sense, that is to say, trying to head off events that are years in the future, is like committing suicide because you're afraid of dying. And the reason that there's been a traditional prudential caution against preventive war, is precisely because it requires that you accurately predict the future. You have to have good intelligence and you have to be able to judge the political motives of other political leaders, and you simply do not know that. And I think the intelligence failure, the missing weapons of mass destruction, indicates how iffy, or how weak our ability to really understand even what's going on in the present world, really are. To base a preventive war strategy on that kind of incomplete information I think shows that the traditional prudential strictures against it are probably ones that still apply even in this post September 11th world.

Now the second key misjudgment really had to do with this question of benevolent hegemony. The United States is a really powerful country. We spend something like as much as the rest of the world collectively spends on defence. It used to be that the British Navy was sized so it would be at least as large as the second and third largest navies in the world, and so we now have as much military capacity as the whole rest of the world combined. And I think that that situation of hegemony, since the end of the Cold War, created a situation of a kind of structural anti-Americanism that was the backdrop against which the Iraq war unfolded ...

There's good news in the sense that if my interpretation is true, the phenomenon of Islamist terrorism that we're witnessing is not completely unfamiliar; that in a sense we've seen that modernity spins off these violent millenarian ideologies. In the late 19th century they would have been anarchists, in the early 20th century, they would have been Bolsheviks or Fascists; later on members of the Bader Meinhof gang. It all appeals to that same kind of alienated situation with regard to complex multiple identity, pluralist societies on the part of people who demand more tightly-bonded communities.

Now just because it's familiar doesn't mean that it's not dangerous. Fascists and Bolsheviks gave us a lot of trouble in the 20th century, but in a certain sense my view of what's going on is it's now the turn of alienated Muslims to occupy that same kind of social space in the contemporary world.

It also means that the basic theory by which the Bush Administration has been operating, that the root cause of terrorism is the lack of democracy actually may be exactly wrong; that it's actually modernisation and democracy themselves that create the alienation, that creates the social conditions that foster terrorism, and that therefore more democracy and more modernisation may actually lead to more of this kind of violence. Now we can perhaps talk about this in the question and answer period. I happen to think despite that, that in a sense both the democratisation and the modernisation are desirable things in themselves, and if we have to go through a rough stretch in order to get there, we're going to have to simply do that. And so in a sense I don't disagree with the end of promoting this kind of development, but I think that it should be pretty clear (if this analysis is right), we are going to have a terrorism problem that's going to be separate from the whole question of whether the Middle East is democratic or not, and needs to be dealt with in a different way. Through something that's going to look much more like a political struggle to win hearts and minds that will be fought out through intelligence and police agencies and through a lot of trying to grab the moral high ground, and it will not look anything like an extended war.
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Tagged: usa, military, foreign+policy, iraq, war+on+terror, islam, fukuyama, neo-con, neo-cons