In 1997, a leading conservative academic, Francis Fukuyama together with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Jeb Bush, signed a declaration entitled 'The New American Century Project'. That declaration set the groundwork for the neo-conservative movement. In some ways, Fukuyama was the leading light of the "movement", since the group based its policy on Fukuyama's book 'The End of History and the Last Man' where Fukuyama argued that history is directional and that its endpoint is capitalist liberal democracy. The showcase "project" of PNAC was, of course, the fateful invasion of Iraq. Now, in the New York Times Magazine, Fukuyama turns his back on the movement he helped to launch:
"Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments. 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. As recent events in France and Denmark suggest, Europe will be a central battleground in this fight."
"If we are serious about the good governance agenda, we have to shift our focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those institutions of the United States government that actually promote democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations like the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like. The United States has played an often decisive role in helping along many recent democratic transitions, including in the Philippines in 1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland and Hungary in 1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can't "impose" democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective."
"Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American hegemony. What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world — ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about."
Everything Professor Fukuyama says here is true - read the entire article. But where was his voice in late 2002 when many of us were warning about what would happen with a unilateral US invasion of Iraq? We were all smeared by the Bush adminstration and the compliant "free press" as "terrorist sympathizers", appeasers, "friends of Saddam", etc. We see the same dynamic taking place now with respect to a military strike on Iran. Professor Fukuyama needs to speak out loudly and specifically about the where we are headed with Iran. His erstwhile neocon colleagues (Krauthammer, Rumsfeld, Kristol, et al ) are again urging war, and calling their ideological opponents appeasers.
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