Neo no more

Although Francis Fukuyama's latest book rejects the school he came from, it does not do it sufficiently. He is too kind to former friends. Failing to reconcile their ambitious desire to combat despotism with their cautious aversion to social engineering, he falls victim of the modernisation theory. Review by Paul Berman

America at the Crossroads by Francis Fukuyama. Yale University Press, €20

In February 2004, Francis Fukuyama attended a neoconservative think-tank dinner in Washington and listened aghast as the featured speaker, the columnist Charles Krauthammer, attributed "a virtually unqualified success" to America's efforts in Iraq, and the audience enthusiastically applauded. Fukuyama was aghast partly for the obvious reason, but partly for another reason, which, as he explains in the opening pages of his new book, America at the Crossroads, was entirely personal. In years gone by, Fukuyama would have felt at home among those applauding neoconservatives. He and Krauthammer used to share many a political instinct. It was Krauthammer who wrote the ecstatic blurb ("bold, lucid, scandalously brilliant") for the back jacket of Fukuyama's 1992 masterpiece, The End of History and the Last Man.

But that was then. Today Fukuyama has resigned from the neoconservative movement – though for reasons that may seem ambiguous. In his estimation, neocon principles in their pristine version remain valid. But his ex-fellow thinkers have lately given those old ideas a regrettable twist, and dreadful errors have followed. Under these circumstances, Fukuyama figures he has no alternative but to publish his complaint. And he has founded a new political journal to assert his post-neocon independence – The American Interest.

His resignation seems a fairly notable event because, among the neocon intellectuals, Fukuyama has surely been the most imaginative, the most playful in his thinking and the most ambitious. Then again, something about his departure may express a larger mood among the political intellectuals just now, not only on the right. For, in the zones of liberalism and the left, any number of people have, post-9/11, accused their oldest comrades of letting down the cause. Nowadays, if you are any kind of political thinker and you haven't issued a sweeping denunciation of your dearest friends, or been hanged by them from a lamppost, the spirit of the age has passed you by.

Fukuyama offers a thumbnail sketch of neoconservatism and its origins, back to the anti-Communist left at City College in the 1930s and 1940s and to the conservative philosophers at the University of Chicago in later years. From these disparate origins, the neocons eventually generated "a set of coherent principles", which defined their impulse in foreign affairs over the last 25 years. They upheld a belief that democratic states are, by their nature, friendly and unthreatening, and therefore America ought to go around the world promoting democracy and human rights. They believed that American power could serve moral purposes. They doubted the usefulness of international law and institutions. And they were sceptical about "social engineering" – about big government and its ability to generate positive social change.

Such is Fukuyama's summary. It seems too kind. For how did the neocons propose to reconcile their ambitious desire to combat despotism around the world with their cautious aversion to social engineering? Fukuyama notes that during the 1990s the neocons veered in militarist directions, which strikes him as a mistake. A less sympathetic observer might recall that neocon foreign-policy thinking has all along indulged a romance of the ruthless – an expectation that small numbers of people might be able to play a decisive role in world events, if only their ferocity could be unleashed. It was a romance of the ruthless that led some of the early generation of 1970s neocons to champion the grisliest of anti-Communist guerrillas in Angola; and, during the next decade, led the neocons to champion some not very attractive anti-Communist guerrillas in Central America, too; and led the Reagan administration's neocons into the swamps of the Iran-contra scandal in order to go on championing their guerrillas. Doesn't this same impulse shed a light on the baffling question of how the Bush administration could have yoked together a stirring democratic oratory with a series of grotesque scandals involving American torture – this very weird and self-defeating combination of idealism and brass knuckles? But Fukuyama must not agree.

The criticisms he proposes are pretty scathing. In 2002, Fukuyama came to the conclusion that invading Iraq was a gamble with unacceptably long odds. Then he watched as the administration adopted one strange policy after another, making the odds still longer. The White House ignored any useful lessons the Clinton administration might have learned in Bosnia and Kosovo, on the grounds that whatever Clinton did Bush wanted to do the opposite. All of which leads Fukuyama, scratching his head, to propose a psychological explanation.

The neocons, he suggests, are people who, having witnessed the collapse of Communism long ago, ought to look back on those gigantic events as a one-in-a-zillion lucky break. Instead, the neocons, victims of their own success, came to believe that Communism's implosion reflected the deepest laws of history, which were operating in their own and America's favour – a formula for hubris. This is a shrewd observation, and might seem peculiar only because Fukuyama's own End of History articulated the world's most eloquent argument for detecting within the collapse of Communism the deepest laws of history. He insists in his new book that The End of History ought never to have led anyone to adopt such a view, but this can only imply that Fukuyama is an utterly unreliable interpreter of his own writings.

He wonders why Bush never proposed a more convincing justification for invading Iraq – based not just on a fear of Saddam Hussein's weapons. A genuinely cogent argument, as Fukuyama sees it, would have drawn attention to the problems that arose from America's pre-war standoff with Hussein. The American-led sanctions against Iraq were the only factor that kept him from building his weapons. The sanctions were crumbling, though. Meanwhile, they were arousing anti-American furies across the Middle East on the (entirely correct) grounds that America was helping to inflict horrible damage on the Iraqi people. American troops took up positions in the region to help contain Hussein – and the presence of those troops succeeded in infuriating Osama bin Laden. The pre-war standoff with Hussein was untenable, morally and even politically. But there was no way to end the standoff apart from ending Hussein's dictatorship.

In stressing this argument, together with the humanitarian and human rights issue, and in pointing out lessons from the Balkans, Fukuyama has willy-nilly outlined some main elements of the liberal interventionist position of three years ago, at least in one of its versions. In the Iraq war, liberal interventionism was the road not taken. Nor was liberal interventionism his own position. However, it is not entirely clear what position he adopted, apart from wisely admonishing everyone to tread carefully. He does make plain that, having launched wars hither and yon, the US had better ensure that, in Afghanistan and Iraq alike, stable anti-terrorist governments finally emerge.

He proposes a post-Bush foreign policy, which he styles "realistic Wilsonianism" – in place of neoconservatism. He worries that Bush's blunders will see Americans on the right and the left retreat into a Kissinger-style reluctance to promote democratic values around the world. Fukuyama wants to promote democratic values, though he would like to be cautious about it, and even multilateral about it. The UN seems to him largely salvageable, given the role of nondemocratic countries there. But he thinks a variety of other institutions, consisting strictly of democracies, might be able to establish, and even enforce, a new and superior version of international legitimacy. He also encourages economic development in poor countries.

Fukuyama offers firm recommendations about the struggle against terrorism. He says: "The rhetoric about World War IV and the global war on terrorism should cease." Rhetoric of this sort, in his view, overstates our present problem, and dangerously so, by "suggesting that we are taking on a large part of the Arab and Muslim worlds". He may be right. Then again, his language may shrink our predicament into something smaller than it ever was.

He pictures the present struggle as a "counterinsurgency" campaign – a struggle in which, before the Iraq war, "no more than a few thousand people around the world" threatened the US. He must have in mind an elite among the 10,000 to 20,000 people who are said to have trained at bin Laden's Afghan camps, plus other people who may never have got out of the immigrant districts of western Europe. And there is the pesky problem that the elite few thousand appear to have the endless ability to renew themselves. Here is where a rhetoric pointing to something larger than a typical counterinsurgency campaign may have a virtue. A more grandiose rhetoric draws our attention, at least, to the danger of gigantic massacres, and might lead us to think about ideological questions.

Fukuyama acknowledges that the terrorist ideology of today "owes a great deal to Western ideas in addition to Islam" and appeals to the same kind of people who might have been drawn to Communism or fascism. Even so, he has little to say about this ideology and the war of ideas. Maybe this is because, when he wrote The End of History, he was a Hegelian, and he remains one even now. Hegel's doctrine is a philosophy of history in which every new phase of human development is thought to be an improvement over whatever came before. In America at the Crossroads, Fukuyama describes the Hegelianism of The End of History as a version of "modernisation" theory, bringing his optimistic vision of progress into the world of modern social science. But the problem with modernisation theory was always a tendency to concentrate most of its attention on the steadily progressing phases of history and to relegate the free play of unpredictable ideas and ideologies to the margins of world events. But neither his old arguments nor his new ones offer much insight into the most important problem of all – the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them.

© The New York Times