Fukuyama disowns neoconservatism.

Snark aside, I really enjoyed Francis Fukuyama's lucid deconstruction of neoconservatism and its fatal flaws in the latest New York Times Magazine. The whole thing is good, but the really striking parts are these:

Four common principles or threads ran through much of [neonconservative] thought up through the end of the cold war: a concern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the internal politics of states; a belief that American power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its own ends.

The problem was that two of these principles were in potential collision. The skeptical stance toward ambitious social engineering — which in earlier years had been applied mostly to domestic policies like affirmative action, busing and welfare — suggested a cautious approach toward remaking the world and an awareness that ambitious initiatives always have unanticipated consequences. The belief in the potential moral uses of American power, on the other hand, implied that American activism could reshape the structure of global politics...

...Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an "evil empire" and for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but also to "tear down this wall."...And yet total victory in the cold war is exactly what happened in 1989-91... The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside... As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000 book "Present Dangers": "To many the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades."

This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform.


I was shocked at how appealing I found Fukuyama's arguments, both against Kagan-Kristol-type neoconservatism and -- more surprisingly -- for what kind of policy should replace it. Maybe that's because the ideal foreign policy he lays out in the second half of the essay reads pretty much like the standard Democratic liberal internationalism of the Biden-Holbrooke-(dare I say it?)-Kerry variety. Fukuyama advocates a robust internationalism built on regional arrangements and crowned at least symbolically by the UN. He espouses a quiet version of American exceptionalism, confident enough to subject itself to international accountability, informally by courting and respecting international public opinion, and formally by becoming subject to institutions like the International Criminal Court. His ideal American foreign policy "pays attention to how rulers treat their citizens" but "does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about". He believes the Free West should encourage and empathize with the universal human desire for prosperity and autonomy, but at the same time should acknowledge that "promoting democracy and modernization in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism".

The "ideas" Fukuyama calls for -- to "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" -- are fine; they're just mainstream Democratic ideas. In fact, it's better than that. What Fukuyama sees as neconservatism's two essential failures -- the unacknowledged contradition between aversion to social engineering and institutional change by force, and the over-indoctination of the Reagan experience in "ending" Soviet totalitarianism -- are exactly the two problems that don't apply to liberal internationalists. In the first case, that's because most liberals are already open to micromanaging domestic policy for the public good or on behalf of vulnerable members of their own society. Therefore, I'd argue, our leaders are fundamentally less susceptible to the sort of half-assed follow-through that has marred US post-war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the second case, liberals generally reject all that crap about how Reagan's foreign-policy brilliance, idealism and toughness stopped communism in its tracks. (Hendrick Hertzberg's brilliant 1991 essay on Reagan is the essential read here.) The Clinton Administration mapped out its own post-Cold War foreign policy, one that, however hapharzard in the first few years, represented a fairly fundamental break with 80s-style Republican doctrine.

Democratic spinelessness over Iraq notwithstanding, that chasm between the parties still exists today and Fukuyama seems to have found himself on the other side of it. I guess if James Webb and Author Laffer could become Democrats, why not Francis Fukuyama?


Update: Whoops, it looks like Matthew Yglesias already made the exact same point (but shorter).