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Has Neoconservatism Failed or Succeeded? Part One

Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg for Think Tank. In 1989, political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that the end of the Cold War also brought a certain kind of end to human history. Free markets and peaceful democracy would be the final form human government. Since then, al-Qaeda has attacked America, London, Madrid, and Indonesia, to begin a long list. In response, President George W. Bush has declared a “War on Terrorism.” But Francis Fukuyama, a self-proclaimed former neoconservative, is doubtful that America’s use of force against Islamic jihadism will succeed. But what are the alternatives?

Francis Fukuyama is the Bernard L. Schwartz professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of “America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy.”

The Topic Before the House: Has Neoconservatism Failed or Succeeded? Part One. This week on Think Tank.

WATTENBERG: Frank Fukuyama, welcome back to Think Tank. I wish to just point out to our viewers you are one of very, very few people who had their name in the title of our program. We did a program when your history book came out called Fukuyama 101. So, let’s begin as we normally do. Give us a little bit of your biography and history where you were born, ancestry, where you went to school, what you are up to, keep it brief, and then we’ll get into discussion and argument.
FUKUYAMA: On my father’s side, I am a third generation Japanese-American, grew up in New York City. I went to Cornell, studied classics with among other people, Alan Bloom, a Straussian political theorist. I got a PhD in Political Science from Harvard, worked at the State Department a couple of times; think tanks, and now I’m a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
WATTENBERG: And in the course of that hegira you were closely associated with a number of these sort of famous neocons -- Elliot Abrams and Walter Burns, do they -- I mean, you might just mention some of the names.
FUKUYAMA: I worked for Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy secretary of defense on two occasions. I worked with his mentor Albert Wohlstetter at the RAND Corporation.
WATTENBERG: St. Albert as we call him here. Okay. So, you’ve been around the track.
FUKUYAMA: Um-hm.
WATTENBERG: Okay. Tell us about your new book and I will try to be patient because we are good friends but are going in somewhat different directions, but go ahead.
FUKUYAMA: Well, my basic argument was that there were several, I think consistent themes in neo-conservative writing. If you go back 50 years over the whole period, the public interest and, you know, even before that, one of these important themes was that ambitious social engineering that sought progressive goals, universal justice and the like, oftentimes ended people up in a lot of trouble. This was true in the great society, it was true about communism; and many neo-conservatives for that reason were very, very cautious about getting into big social engineering projects. So that was one theme.
There was another theme, which was the moral uses of American power, especially military power, which I think a lot of Americans believe was part of their national experience. That led to a more ambitious effort to actually use that power to do things like topple tyrannies and promote democracy. And I think in the period after the Cold War, those two principles coexisted, but I think they were actually in conflict with one another, because that same power that we could use to right wrongs could also get you into a lot of trouble...
WATTENBERG: Alright, let me make a couple of points and I will try to keep them brief, because you are the guest and the guest allegedly gets at least 51 percent of the time. About this idea of social engineering -- it gets a bad rap from neo-conservatives, conservatives a lot of Americans, but we have to remember during this same timeframe, it was liberal social engineering that did away with segregation. I mean, it’s a vast improvement. That created the environmental movement, 96 percent of which is good, the other 4 percent of which went crazy; revived real feminism, 97 percent of which is good, 3 percent of which went ditzy, had some -- and the list can go on as you well know.
And on the idea of purveying democracy, with all our failures and we can talk about them. I mean, Vietnam is a very, I think misinterpreted war. But the Freedom House indicators -- and these were started by Eleanor Roosevelt and I know you sort of downplay it a little bit, but it was a pretty good index. But the number of functioning democracies with a civil society has just gone way up, and President Bush maintains and the data says that it is not only going up, but accelerating.
Now, he says, we all say, you say, it’s not something you can impose, it has to be asked for, but we have created all these institutions -- one that comes most obviously to mind, I know you’ve been involved in -- the National Endowment for Democracy and many others so, what about that?
FUKUYAMA: Okay. From the general point about social engineering, of course social engineering works if done right. I was a professor of public policy and we all think about how we can make things better using the government. But the real question is, you know, when we get really ambitious. I think the idea of creating a working democracy in a part of the world that really has never seen it, that is, the Middle East and then hoping that this will lead to a very broad transformation in the politics of a really culturally different area is about as ambitious project as you can undertake. So, I think it was not just like getting environmental standards enacted; I think it was something much more ambitious.
WATTENBERG: It is said by some Arab observers that the effort in Iraq has already reverberated, and you‘ve had some movement in the Palestinian situation, you’ve had some movement in Egypt, you have serious movement in Dubai. You’ve had a major development in Lebanon, with the withdrawal of the Syrian troops; and the most profound in my judgment, a clear cut example is Libya. Now, Libya was a country that bombed American troops in Munich, that shot down our airliners, that we bombed, and killed some of Moammar Qaddafi’s children, and they just said, “We are out of the nuclear business”, period. Now that’s big step forwarded isn’t it?
FUKUYAMA: You know, I think Libya probably would have happened, even without the invasion of Iraq, and you know in general, I think Bush did shake up the Middle East in many ways and there’s more discussion in Egypt now than there would have been otherwise, but the people, by and large, that are winning that discussion are Islamist. The liberals, you know the few liberals in the Arab world, I think are on the defensive. There is so much anti-Americanism in that region, a lot of it stirred by the war itself, that I think in general if I had to say, is liberal democracy is going to break out around that region in general, I would say no, it’s actually on the run and most of the all in the country that we wanted it most, in Iraq itself, where I think our Shiite friends are really not liberal at all.
WATTENBERG: The latest surveys not taken by American firms that I have seen showed that 70 percent of the Iraqis approve of a democratic form of governance. No one that I know of except the extreme Jihadist radicals is asking for America to leave. So, that would, I mean, particularly the 70 percent figure, I mean having seen it and that incredible image of the early 21st century -- the purple finger, women voting in the Arab world, I think its had great reverberations.
FUKUYAMA: Well, look, Ben. We’ll have to see it -- you know, the final results aren’t in. I think of that 70 percent a lot of them are voting that way because their Ayatollah or their Imam told them to vote because they want Shiite power. If you look at what’s going on the ground in the Shiite areas in Basra, it’s not liberal democracy. I mean, it is really a pretty narrow form of theocratic power. The other thing about the liberal democracy is that if you have even 5 percent of the population that is not just voting in favor of your candidate, but is violently opposed to the system as a whole, that’s not going to be a successful democracy. I mean, you got to have pretty close to 100 percent basically agreeing on the democratic rules of the game to the point that they don’t take up arms against the government. And I think you got, you know, the fact that you’ve got 30 percent that don’t like the democracy is actually not a good sign.
WATTENBERG: But again, I mean, you can use historical analogies in a lot of different ways, but you take the country we are sitting in, the United States of America. Things got so bad 60 years after we wrote this wonderful document, that we went to war with each other in, up until that time, the most genocidal conflict ever seen in human history. Ulysses Grant who was, some people say, a genocidal maniac. He ended up being President and wrote great memoirs. Sherman’s march to the sea, just burned out, the march to Atlanta burned out the South. Nobody in the world to my knowledge has a good record; we are a part of a nasty species.
FUKUYAMA: It may be that, you know, in 60 years you’ll actually have democracy in Iraq. But I guess the larger critic in my book is that the democratization is actually a part of larger package and a larger strategy meant to deal with September 11th and radical Islamism and I just think that the major components of the Bush doctrine got things wrong. I mean, it was based on the idea that you have to preemptively go and get terrorists, which is fine, if you are dealing with Osama Bin Laden, but that wasn’t Iraq. Iraq was not a terrorist organization and I think the idea that America would be able to use its margin of superiority, its hegemony, and see that legitimated by the rest of the world was also a mistake.
And then finally on this issue about whether you could turn Iraq itself into a democracy, they obviously were not prepared for this. I mean, they really were assuming the best, that this would be Polish or a Romanian style transition and they may basically were I think taken by surprise by what happened.
WATTENBERG: Let’s just deal with a couple of points. You indicate that Iraq was not a terrorist player, but they funded and gave bonuses to Palestinian suicide bombers. They tried to assassinate an American President, the first George Bush. There is some admittedly tenuous evidence that they had some relationships with al-Qaeda. The idea that we shouldn’t have acted preemptively and that goes along with the idea that only when there’s an imminent threat, I mean these are bad guys; they are not going to say “next Thursday we’re gonna hit the World Trade Center.” You know suddenly you’re going to have -- I mean, so preemptivity, if that’s the word, makes some sense and the idea -- I don’t if you mentioned it or it is normally associated, that we were not -- that mission accomplish sign, that represented as I recall it, the mission accomplished was the military victory -- that rapid two- or three-week military victory going into Baghdad.
FUKUYAMA: First of all, just to go back on the preemption; the thing that got the American people to really support the war is not that there was an assassination attempt by the Iraqi intelligence against an American ambassador or contacts. The idea was that Saddam Hussein would build a nuclear weapon and turn it over to Osama Bin Laden and it would blow up New York City. That was really the fear and it was pretty explicit and I just think that was a, you know, I do not know whether it was deliberately dishonest but I think that was an extremely low probability thing to happen.
WATTENBERG: Well...go ahead.
FUKUYAMA: On the mission accomplished, you know George Packer, and a number of people that who have done very good reporting on what the Pentagon’s actual plans were, and this is really, you know, Don Rumsfeld, I think is really the guy that was responsible for this, you know, they were planning to go down at 25,000 troops by the end of the first summer, summer of 2003. There’s no phase IV plan, not even a plan for whether you declare curfew in Baghdad once our troops took the city and, you know, they’re trying to pull money out of the reconstruction budget through the first summer of our occupation. So I think, clearly, whatever the significance of mission accomplished, they really were taken completely by surprise by the insurgency, by the -- well, certainly the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction, all of chaos that ensued which then indicates, you know, they simply were not anticipating the right things.
WATTENBERG: Alright. One of the classic things in World War II was American bombers destroyed the Cruiser Indianapolis -- 900 -- in South Pacific. I think 900 American sailors were killed. If we had the kind of media coverage that we have now, the war would have been -- or we would have pulled up stakes and left.
FUKUYAMA: Well, the media coverage is just going to be a permanent fact of life from now on, so there’s no point I think, in crying about this. I guess the question is, is the upside from this war likely to balance the known costs and that is something at this point I think -- and the failure to find the WMDs, you know, I was one that believed they would actually restart a nuclear program and I thought we could still live with that because I think we can deter a state. Iraq is not a terrorist organization. I believe that you can deter countries that have real equities. But I think that, you know, in the end the situation actually turned out to be much worse than that because it turned out that this country was so incompetent and so compartmentalized that I doubt even that scenario of them building a weapon after sanctions were lifted in retrospect was probably not going to materialize. And again, you know, I never said that it was a negligible danger, that there wasn’t some real risk involved here. It’s really a matter of whether they calculated the probabilities right when they rolled the dice and I just think that they dramatically underestimated the cost and the cost is not just American soldiers killed in Iraq, Iraqis killed; it’s also the cost to our international political position; our reputation around the world; what we stand for; ability to project, you know, our kinds of values, all of which I think have taken an enormous hit as a result of the way we went in to the war and the war itself.
WATTENBERG: But Frank, you have served in the State Department policy planning. I mean you, as well as anyone in the country, know that you can plan all you want, but you don’t know what’s going to happen. There are just too many moving parts. I just read this lead story in the Atlantic Magazine about Desert One, the rescue of the Iranian hostages. There are about 100 moving parts and something was bound to go wrong and it sure did. So, we cannot expect probability calculations. Say, “Well there’s only a 5 percent chance of this, and there’s...” I mean, you can do that in position paper. You can guess, you can guesstimate, you can suggest, but we don’t know what happens next, do we?
FUKUYAMA: Well, okay, but that see is a reason to me for caution because, you know, one of the things that it seems to be is a wisdom of past wars is yeah, you’re absolutely right; you don’t know what is going to happen and usually something goes completely awry and this war was planned so that we had exactly the number of troops to carry it out well if all of the good assumptions came true.
They really did not have backup for all the usual stuff happening that I think, you know, happens when you launch a war. So, I think, you know, the real balance of the argument ought to be, or the burden of proof ought to be on the people that wanted the war, saying I “Yes we actually we did anticipate,” and this was really quite honestly, I mean, even the war -- I said to myself, okay if we are going to do this, it’s going to mean that we are going to be in this country 10 to 15 years if we’re going to really do this right based on past experience.
The President has minimized to the American people the cost of this war, and if he had prepared the American people for that kind of a long, hard slog, I would be much more supportive of it. But I think what’s going to happen is in four or five years, the American people having not been prepared are going to say, “What are we doing there?” and you know, “Let’s get out.”
WATTENBERG: Alright. I’m married with children. Our cinematographer or cameraman here Bruce Kissal is married with a child, you’re married with children, right?
FUKUYAMA: Right.
WATTENBERG: You live where?
FUKUYAMA: McLean, Virginia
WATTENBERG: McLean, Virginia. Right across the river here. Suppose I had said to you “Frank, well that’s all well and good, but you know who’s at threat? My kids, Bruce Kissal’s kids and your kids.” Should we be safe or be sorry? That’s the real equation in my judgment.
FUKUYAMA: Well sure, sure, but there are lots of ways to make them unsafe. I mean, I think look, in general we’ve got this big proliferation problem. This is a over 50-year-old technology. There’s a lot of bad actors that are getting that technology and I think in general the question that comes up not just with Iraq, but now with Iran and with North Korea is can we, you know, is the way we are going to deal with this threat to our children going to be by military preempting those countries that get this technology? And I just cannot think of a world in which that is going to be a long-term feasible strategy for dealing with the problem. I don’t want to minimize the problem.
WATTENBERG: No, I understand. I mean, just as a side bar, the idea that for 60 years a second nuclear or third nuclear weapon has never been shot off in anger. Talk about probabilities. No one in his right mind in 1945 after Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have said that somebody is not going to use these, and it hadn’t happened. It’s a real modern miracle in my judgment, I mean, when you consider, as you say the crazy cast of characters.
FUKUYAMA: And we certainly, you know, don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying I like living in a world in which you’ve got lots of nuclear powers, some of which are not responsible and so forth, but you know, we are moving in that direction. I think the spread of the technology -- it’s extremely hard to keep back, and I just don’t think that military preemption is going to be the way that we are going to stop this.
WATTENBERG: Alright. There has never been a power in human history as far flung, as far ahead of everybody else. The UN is next to a worthless organization in many respects -– they do some very good work. But the only peacekeeper in the world mostly benevolent, I believe, has been the United States. You know, we’ve only really been in 60 years in four major conflicts. We’ve been in Korea, which was under a UN flag against an invasion. We‘ve been in Vietnam, which our allies lost after we disengaged and the war of which that was a battle we won in miraculous fashion, the Cold War. We’ve been in the first Iraq war, which led to the second Iraq war, because Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf and Bush the elder decided that we would not go all the way to Baghdad and knock out the bad guy, Saddam Hussein; and now, we are in this one.
As you know because you are the professional, at any given moment there are about 50 wars going on in the world, and we’ve been involved over the years, in 60 years in four of them. That’s not such a -- is that a bad record?
FUKUYAMA: No it’s not a bad record. You know, in general I think American military power has been really important for maintaining this whole free, democratic world, but that doesn’t mean that the last war on the margin, you know, just because the average is good doesn’t mean that the last marginal war, you know, really made sense. And I think, you know, we’ve got this real problem. There is structural anti-Americanism built into the world system. This was true long before George Bush came on to the scene, you could see it in the anti-globalization protest in the Clinton administration. I think it is inevitable when you’ve got half of the world’s military power under you control -- and not to mention economic and the cultural and other dimensions of power, that people are simply going to resent that lack of reciprocity in the way that the United States deals with the world.
My view is, we’ve got this, we cannot get rid of that power, but we have to somehow minimize the blow back from it.
WATTENBERG: Well, I don’t want to use nasty words, but you sound like a liberal, Frank! I mean they have this case that there is something, this amorphous thing called the court of world public opinion -- and in some of the articles I read about when you were promoting this book, you were terribly upset that some of the conservatives in Great Britain were against us. I mean, I don’t want to sound heartless, but what on earth that they are going to do to us? Are they going to stop hoarding our dollars; are they going to stop selling to us; are they going to stop, I mean -- we had to pull their fish out of the fire in Serbia and Bosnia and Croatia. What are the preconditions for America occasionally using its one paralleled force?
FUKUYAMA: No, occasionally using it under the right circumstances, if it politically makes sense, of course you know that’s something that I would certainly support. Look, I’ll give you just an example. I believe that we promote democracy in the developing world a lot. We mostly do it through soft power instruments, but we mostly do it through...
WATTENBERG: Soft power. That concept of ideology...
FUKUYAMA: It is an example, I mean it’s you know, the people find the American way of life and, you know, American institutions appealing; they want more...
WATTENBERG: Or democratic way of life rather than the American way of life.
FUKUYAMA: That’s right, that’s right. We’ve got a huge credibility problem right now. You’ve got Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, a whole new generation of leaders in Latin America who have made George Bush such an easy target for anti-Americanism. If you compare that to the 1990s, when you know, in a sense you had a much more positive view of the United States, our friends were on a roll at that point.
WATTENBERG: On that note, we will have to end it. Than you very much for joining us. And thank you. Remember to join us for a future episode, where we will continue our discussion with Frank Fukuyama. Be sure, also, to send us your comments via email. We think it makes our program better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg.

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