Bookplanet: Fukuyama's new book

Supporter's Voice Now Turns on Bush -- by MICHIKO KAKUTANI

"America at the Crossroads" serves up a powerful indictment of the Bush administration's war in Iraq and the role that neoconservative ideas — concerning preventive war, benevolent hegemony and unilateral action — played in shaping the decision to go to war, its implementation and its aftermath. These arguments are made all the more devastating by the fact that the author, Francis Fukuyama, was once a star neoconservative theorist himself, who studied with or was associated with leading neoconservative luminaries like Paul D. Wolfowitz , William Kristol, Albert Wohlstetter and Allan Bloom, and whose best-selling 1992 book, "The End of History and the Last Man," was celebrated (and denounced) as a classic neoconservative text on the end of the cold war and the global march of liberal democracy.

Indeed, "America at the Crossroads" represents the latest and most detailed criticism of the Bush administration's war in Iraq — delivered from a conservative point of view. With it, Mr. Fukuyama, who teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, joins a growing number of conservatives, including William F. Buckley Jr. , George F. Will, Bruce Bartlett and Andrew Sullivan , who have voiced doubts about the war.

In Mr. Fukuyama's case, the criticisms suggest a marked evolution in perspective. In 1998, Mr. Fukuyama signed a letter sponsored by Project for the New American Century urging the Clinton administration to take a harder line against Iraq, and in the days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 he signed another from the group, which asserted that "any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power."

In the wake of the Bush administration's enunciation of a doctrine of pre-emption and its big-shouldered, go-it-alone approach to foreign policy, however, Mr. Fukuyama began to voice concerns. In an op-ed article in The Washington Post published on the second anniversary of 9/11, he warned that "overreaction to Sept. 11 will lead to a world in which the United States and its policies remain the chief focus of global concern," also saying that "the tremendous margin of power exercised by the United States in the security realm brings with it special responsibilities to use that power prudently."

A February 2004 dinner at the American Enterprise Institute made Mr. Fukuyama even more aware of the gulf between himself and neoconservative supporters of the war. Listening to the columnist Charles Krauthammer's speech — which embraced the doctrine of pre-emption and asserted that the toppling of Saddam Hussein had made America safer — he says he "could not understand why everyone around me was applauding the speech enthusiastically, given that the United States had found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, was bogged down in a vicious insurgency, and had almost totally isolated itself from the rest of the world by following the kind of unipolar strategy advocated by Krauthammer."

In response, Mr. Fukuyama wrote a blistering critique of the neoconservative push for war that was published in the quarterly The National Interest in the summer of 2004 — an essay, along with a series of lectures delivered at Yale last year, that provides a kind of armature for the arguments in this astute and shrewdly reasoned book.

In "America at the Crossroads," Mr. Fukuyama questions the assertion made by the prominent neoconservatives Mr. Kristol and Robert Kagan in their 2000 book "Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy" that other nations "find they have less to fear" from the daunting power of the United States because "American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality." The problem with this doctrine of "benevolent hegemony," Mr. Fukuyama points out, is that "it is not sufficient that Americans believe in their own good intentions; non-Americans must be convinced of them as well."

"Before other countries accepted U.S. leadership," he adds, "they would have to be convinced not just that America was good but that it was also wise in its application of power, and, through that wisdom, successful in achieving the ends it set for itself." Already in question before the Iraq war, these assumptions now lie in tatters.

Mr. Fukuyama also contends that many neoconservatives — particularly those belonging to the "expansive, interventionist, democracy-promoting" school, defined by Mr. Kristol and Mr. Kagan — misinterpreted the collapse of Communism and the end of the cold war. By putting too much emphasis on the American military buildup under Ronald Reagan "as the cause of the USSR's collapse, when political and economic factors were at least as important," he contends, forward-leaning neocons came to the conclusion that "history could be accelerated through American agency."

In other words, neoconservatives leaped from the premise that democracy is likely to expand universally in the long run (a view Mr. Fukuyama has promoted himself) to the notion that this historical process could be hastened by United States efforts to implement regime changes in places like Iraq. At the same time, Mr. Fukuyama says, these theorists seem to have assumed that the rapid and relatively peaceful transition to democracy and free markets made by countries like Poland could be replicated in other parts of the world — never mind the state of local institutions, traditions and infrastructure.

These errors were worsened in the walk-up to the war in Iraq, Mr. Fukuyama adds, by an us-versus-them mentality on the part of many neoconservatives, who felt they were looked down upon by the foreign policy establishment. "After their return to power in 2001," he writes, "proponents of the war in the Pentagon and vice president's office became excessively distrustful of anyone who did not share their views, a distrust that extended to Secretary of State Colin Powell and much of the intelligence community. Bureaucratic tribalism exists in all administrations, but it rose to poisonous levels in Bush's first term. Team loyalty trumped open-minded discussion, and was directly responsible for the administration's failure to plan adequately for the period after the end of active combat."

A second factor that contributed to postwar chaos in Iraq was a lack of sufficient troops: "Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who wanted to go into Iraq with light forces and get out quickly," Mr. Fukuyama says, "has as a result of this strategy bogged the U.S. military down in a long-term guerrilla war." A third factor involved the failure of neoconservatives to heed what Mr. Fukuyama identifies as one of their own core beliefs: the view that "ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and often undermines its own ends," a view that grew out of many neocons' anti-Stalinism and distrust of programs like welfare at home.

The Bush administration, Mr. Fukuyama writes, "vastly underestimated the cost and difficulty of reconstructing Iraq and guiding it toward a democratic transition." It ignored the critical fact that institutions "must be in place before a society can move from an amorphous longing for freedom to a well-functioning, consolidated democratic political system with a modern economy," and it spurned the help of domestic and international agencies that might have contributed expertise on post-conflict reconstruction.

Mr. Fukuyama predicts that "one of the consequences of a perceived failure in Iraq will be the discrediting of the entire neoconservative agenda and a restoration of the authority of foreign policy realists." He writes that "neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something that I can no longer support." In its place, he calls for a "realistic Wilsonianism" that would involve "a dramatic demilitarization of American foreign policy and re-emphasis on other types of policy instruments," the jettisoning of incendiary rhetoric about a global war on terrorism and the promotion of political and economic development abroad through "soft power" ("our ability to set an example, to train and educate, to support with advice and often money").

The ability of the current Bush administration "to fix the problems it created for itself in its first four years will be limited," Mr. Fukuyama writes near the end of this tough-minded and edifying book. "Repairing American credibility will not be a matter of better public relations; it will require a new team and new policies."