AFTER THE NEOCON, AMERICA AT THE CROSSROAD

Francis fukumaya, After the Neocon, America at the Crossroad

Francis fukumaya, After the Neocon, America at the Crossroad

Francis Fukuyama has often been more poised and clinical than his neoconservative contemporaries (including William Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz). Perhaps this makes his backflip away from mainline neocon thought understandable, but it doesn't make it any more forgivable. Many reviewers censure the Johns Hopkins University professor for not providing a personal defense of his defection. All the political lather threatens to obscure the actual book, which contains a concise history of neoconservative thought and a thoughtful, if not totally new, proposal for more peaceful (or "soft power") means of nation building. That might give heart to liberals, but his colleagues feel he has abandoned the convictions of his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, and committed the ultimate political sin: swapping horses at midterm.

Reading this text I got the impression that Francis Fukuyama is a very serious man. I cannot imagine him laughing. Perhaps I'm wrong, and Mr. Fukuyama is fun to be around, but in this book at least he comes across as someone who sees some serious problems and has not time for humor or irony. Well, he does employ irony from time to time, but it's with the flair of a mortician, or perhaps a copy editor.

In this book Francis Fukuyama repudiates the label of neo-conservative, though not a lot of the elements of it. Basically what he's trying to do is simultaneously say that realism is misguided, since the internal dynamics of states matters a lot in how they conduct their external relations, while denigrating liberalism as weak (implicitly, anyway) and the current crop of neoconservatives as naive and over-simplifying.

Their idea that a democracy could be installed in Iraq thus magically making a dictatorship into a liberal democracy was flawed, because what Strauss and others believe by the word "regime" is far deeper to society than simply the cast of characters in power; it's a societal mindset, and as such, it's very difficult to change regimes.

He nonetheless advocates trying to do so, in a activist, muscular foreign policy with Wilsonian ideals, proposing that the UN is flawed and should be abandoned in favor of a world policy club limited to democracies, and that the development of political institutions should take its place alongside military and economic assistance to struggling and failed states.

I'm not sure he's not just taking the over-simplistic neo-con line and adding an asterisk, thus trying to invest it with depth. He also takes a lot of administrative and political decisions at face value, and doesn't think much about the complex motives of those in charge. But it's still an interesting thought, and I'd prefer this guy to Wolfowitz any day

The first part of the book which is basically a history of neoconservatism by someone who knows what he's talking about (as opposed to 80% of the people who drop the term in ...