More on Fukuyama.
Krauthammer argues that it’s Fukuyama’s secular sensibility that blinds him to the appeal of radical Islam. “It has 1 billion potential adherents, which means that [Osama] bin Laden’s ideology has the potential to appeal to infinitely more people than the Aryan ideas of Nazism ever did,” he told me. “Frank has a stake in denying the obvious nature of the threat, but the fact is that history returned after 9-11 … . There are people running around trying to acquire anthrax with which to wipe out an entire city. If that doesn’t qualify as an existential threat, I don’t know what does.”
Fukuyama replies that these are the kinds of sentiments America should resist. “For the U.S. to treat every Muslim as a potential suicide bomber is precisely what fanatics like bin Laden want,” he says. “Iraq before the U.S. invasion was certainly not an existential threat. It posed an existential threat to Kuwait, Iran, and Israel, but it had no means of threatening the continuity of our regime. Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups aspire to be existential threats to American civilization but do not currently have anything like the capacity to actualize their vision. They are extremely dangerous totalitarians, but post threats primarily to regimes in the Middle East.”
Fascinating, must-read article on Fukuyama and neoconservatism by Robert Boynton in The American Prospect (via Tapped). Whether you believe the claim or not, it's a very good, very signficant thing that a prominent thinker like Fukuyama is willing to argue the position that the threat of fundamentalist Islamic is drastically overblown in the West.
And it turns out that Fukuyama did, in fact, vote for Kerry!
Fukuyama replies that these are the kinds of sentiments America should resist. “For the U.S. to treat every Muslim as a potential suicide bomber is precisely what fanatics like bin Laden want,” he says. “Iraq before the U.S. invasion was certainly not an existential threat. It posed an existential threat to Kuwait, Iran, and Israel, but it had no means of threatening the continuity of our regime. Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups aspire to be existential threats to American civilization but do not currently have anything like the capacity to actualize their vision. They are extremely dangerous totalitarians, but post threats primarily to regimes in the Middle East.”
Fascinating, must-read article on Fukuyama and neoconservatism by Robert Boynton in The American Prospect (via Tapped). Whether you believe the claim or not, it's a very good, very signficant thing that a prominent thinker like Fukuyama is willing to argue the position that the threat of fundamentalist Islamic is drastically overblown in the West.
And it turns out that Fukuyama did, in fact, vote for Kerry!
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