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Let’s see,
this was posted just before lunch, so I will blame low blood sugar…I can only
claim to have had an episode of ‘brain freeze’ to explain why I described Fukuyama
as the representative for the conservatives pulling away from the war hawks,
when it’s the so-called ‘realists’ affiliated with the Nixon Center/ National
Interest while Fukuyama, Cohen et al
cling to the hardline neocon position. Nevertheless,
Fukuyama does not mince words about the Bush Troika performance. The only
question is whether he is subtly endorsing a road map for troop withdrawal or simply
wants to register his professorial disdain for a protégé poor grasp of the
concept. kwc Late last year,
Prof. Fukuyama, the author of The End of
History, joined a core group (including Brzezinski)
separating from the neoconservative alliance at The National Interest, a
publication of The Nixon Center. The
American Interest is their response to the war hawk dominance in the
Republican party. I’ll paste a link to that story below this. As I just
mentioned, Prof. Fukuyama seems to be continuing to distance himself from any
paternity to the Bush’s administration’s application of conservative
philosophy. He appears to endorse a time table for staged withdrawal. Don’t
miss the final sentence. What is it they
say, success has many mothers but failure no fathers? kwc Invasion
of the Isolationists
Commentary by Francis Fukuyama, NYT, August
31, 2005 Francis
Fukuyama, a professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies, is editorial board chairman of a new
magazine, The American Interest.
Washington
- As we mark four years since Sept. 11, 2001, one way to organize a review of
what has happened in American foreign policy since that terrible day is with a
question: To
what extent has that policy flowed from the wellspring of American politics and
culture, and to what extent has it flowed from the particularities of this
president and this administration? It
is tempting to see continuity with the American character and foreign policy
tradition in the Bush administration's response to 9/11, and many have done so.
We have tended toward the forcefully unilateral when we have felt ourselves
under duress; and we have spoken in highly idealistic cadences in such times,
as well. Nevertheless, neither American political culture nor any underlying
domestic pressures or constraints have determined the key decisions in American
foreign policy since Sept. 11. In
the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Americans would have allowed
President Bush to lead them in any of several directions, and the nation was
prepared to accept substantial risks and sacrifices. The Bush administration
asked for no sacrifices from the average American, but after the quick fall of
the Taliban it rolled the dice in a big way by moving to solve a longstanding
problem only tangentially related to the threat from Al Qaeda - Iraq. In the
process, it squandered the overwhelming public mandate it had received after
Sept. 11. At the same time, it alienated most of its close allies, many of whom
have since engaged in "soft balancing" against American influence,
and stirred up anti-Americanism in the Middle East. The
Bush administration could instead have chosen to create a true alliance of
democracies to fight the illiberal currents coming out of the Middle East. It
could also have tightened economic sanctions and secured the return of arms
inspectors to Iraq without going to war. It could have made a go at a new
international regime to battle proliferation. All of these paths would have
been in keeping with American foreign policy traditions. But Mr. Bush and his
administration freely chose to do otherwise. The
administration's policy choices have not been restrained by domestic political
concerns any more than by American foreign policy culture. Much has been made
of the emergence of "red state" America, which supposedly constitutes
the political base for President Bush's unilateralist foreign policy, and of
the increased number of conservative Christians who supposedly shape the
president's international agenda. But the extent and significance of these
phenomena have been much exaggerated. So
much attention has been paid to these false determinants of administration
policy that a different political dynamic has been underappreciated. Within the
Republican Party, the Bush administration got support for the Iraq war from the
neoconservatives (who lack a political base of their own but who provide
considerable intellectual firepower) and from what Walter Russell Mead calls
"Jacksonian
America" - American nationalists whose instincts lead them toward a
pugnacious isolationism. Happenstance
then magnified this unlikely alliance. Failure to find weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq and the inability to prove relevant connections between
Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda left the president, by the time of his second
inaugural address, justifying the war exclusively in neoconservative terms:
that is, as part of an idealistic policy of political transformation of the
broader Middle East. The
president's Jacksonian base, which provides the bulk of the troops serving and
dying in Iraq, has no natural affinity for such a policy but would not abandon
the commander in chief in the middle of a war, particularly if there is clear
hope of success. This
war coalition is fragile, however, and vulnerable to mishap. If Jacksonians
begin to perceive the war as unwinnable or a failure, there will be little
future support for an expansive foreign policy that focuses on promoting
democracy. That in turn could drive the 2008 Republican presidential primaries
in ways likely to affect the future of American foreign policy as a whole. Are
we failing in Iraq? That's still unclear. The United States can control the
situation militarily as long as it chooses to remain there in force, but our
willingness to maintain the personnel levels necessary to stay the course is
limited. The all-volunteer Army was never intended to fight a prolonged
insurgency, and both the Army and Marine Corps face manpower and morale
problems. While public support for staying in Iraq remains stable, powerful
operational reasons are likely to drive the administration to lower force
levels within the next year. With
the failure to secure Sunni support for the constitution and splits within the
Shiite community, it seems increasingly unlikely that a strong and cohesive
Iraqi government will be in place anytime soon. Indeed, the problem now will be
to prevent Iraq's constituent groups from looking to their own militias rather
than to the government for protection. If the United States withdraws
prematurely, Iraq will slide into greater chaos. That
would set off a chain of unfortunate events that will further damage American
credibility around the world and ensure that the United States remains
preoccupied with the Middle East to the detriment of other important regions -
Asia, for example - for years to come. We
do not know what outcome we will face in Iraq. We do know that four years after
9/11, our whole foreign policy seems destined to rise or fall on the outcome of
a war only marginally related to the source of what befell us on that day. There was nothing
inevitable about this. There is everything to be regretted about it. Francis Fukuyama, a professor of international political
economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is
editorial board chairman of a new magazine, The American Interest. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/opinion/31fukuyama.html For details on the breakup of a
neoconservative power-team, see Milbank’s May 2005 item, No Lack of Interest http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/06/AR2005050601448.html |
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