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Still blaming
the Iraq war on incompetence, not the wrong-headed Manifest Destiny imperialism
that drove it, one of the godfathers of the current movement expresses his
regrets and retrospectives, denounces militarism and endorses multi multilateral
diplomatic coalitions. kwc Second half After Neoconservatism By Francis Fukuyama, New York Times, Feb. 21, 2006 Francis Fukuyama teaches at the School of Advanced
International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. This essay is adapted from
his book "America at the Crossroads,"
which will be published this month by Yale University Press. 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. Francis Fukuyama teaches at the School of Advanced
International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. This essay is adapted from
his book "America at the Crossroads,"
which will be published this month by Yale University Press. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/neo.html?incamp=article_popular_4 |
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