NeoConflagration: Confessions of a Disgruntled PNAC Signatory

This New York Times essay isn't necessarily interesting for what it says, but for who is saying it. It was written by Francis Fukuyama, a leading neocon with connections to the Project For The New American Century (PNAC), and is titled "After Neoconservatism."

After stating that "[t]he so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles," Fukuyama remarkably declares -- several pages into his essay -- that the neoconservative position articulated by people like William Kristol and Robert Kagan is a "Leninist" position in that "they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will." Fukuyama continues:

Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.

Fukuyama then goes after the PNAC people currently running or otherwise influencing the actions of our Executive Branch, noting that after the end of the Cold War, neoconservatives such as Kristol and Kagan suggested that the United States would "use its margin of power to exert a kind of 'benevolent hegemony' over the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came up." But things went terribly wrong when BushCo began implementing the PNAC strategy:

[American benevolent hegemony] was premised on American exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances where others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. The doctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy was one that could not safely be generalized through the international system; America would be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action. The United States was seeking to pass judgment on others while being unwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like the International Criminal Court.

Another problem with benevolent hegemony was domestic. There are sharp limits to the American people's attention to foreign affairs and willingness to finance projects overseas that do not have clear benefits to American interests. Sept. 11 changed that calculus in many ways, providing popular support for two wars in the Middle East and large increases in defense spending. But the durability of the support is uncertain: although most Americans want to do what is necessary to make the project of rebuilding Iraq succeed, the aftermath of the invasion did not increase the public appetite for further costly interventions. Americans are not, at heart, an imperial people. Even benevolent hegemons sometimes have to act ruthlessly, and they need a staying power that does not come easily to people who are reasonably content with their own lives and society.

Fukuyama closes out the analysis portion of his essay by stating that in order for a benevolent hegemony to work, there also must be some competency in its execution. Unfortunately for America and the rest of the world, this much-needed competency was sorely lacking:

The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq's W.M.D. programs before the war. But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war's supporters did. Overestimation of this threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of measures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to domestic eavesdropping.

Finally, Fukuyama makes some suggestions with regard to what the U.S. should do "[n]ow that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed." He suggests, for example, that the U.S. needs to "demilitarize" the War on Terror and try another approach:

We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world.

I think Fukuyama is right. Indeed, it was refreshing to see this much candor from someone who was so extensively hooked into the neoconservative movement. Unfortunately, the necessary changes will have to wait for Bush to leave office, given that he is undoubtedly the wrong person to usher in the post-neocon era.

The real bummer, of course, is that America's great experiment in nonconservativism has caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, opened up the Mother of All Terrorist Training Grounds in Iraq, pissed off just about every other country in the world, and has needlessly cost the American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, money that could have been spent improving the U.S. infrastructure as well as improving the lives and health of Americans generally. It is a mistake from which it will take us decades to recover.