...The Soviet Union collapsed because of ‘its internal moral weaknesses and
contradictions’, Fukuyama tells us. But the neo-cons credited President
Reagan with ending the evil empire by forcing the Russians into an
economically unsustainable arms race. As we know from the case of bin Laden
and the Afghan Arabs, the illusion of having brought down the USSR can
reinforce latent psychological tendencies to megalomania. Fukuyama does not
highlight this parallel. But his account suggests that many neo-cons, like
many of the jihadists, experienced a high when the Soviet Union came
crashing down in 1991, for somewhat analogous reasons and with distressingly
analogous results....
...Excessively pleased with themselves, the neo-cons drew two lessons from
the collapse of Communism. First, threats should be eliminated, not managed.
Second, American security is invariably enhanced by the transformation of
autocracies into democracies. That the democratic transformation of Eastern
Europe was triggered not by an invasion but by the withdrawal of a foreign
army apparently made little impression on them. All they knew was that the
threat to the US from the Communist bloc had been eliminated by the more or
less successful transformation of its former members into democracies or, at
the very least, democracies in the making....
LRB | Vol. 28 No. 19 dated 5 October 2006
Neo-Con Futurology
Stephen Holmes
After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads by Francis Fukuyama · Profile,
226 pp, £12.99
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Francis Fukuyama signed an open letter
arguing that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was essential to ‘the
eradication of terrorism’, even if Saddam were revealed to have had no
connection to al-Qaida and no hand in the attack. At that time, in other
words, and alongside neo-con celebrities such as Charles Krauthammer and
William Kristol, Fukuyama was beating the drum for a ‘shift in focus from
al-Qaida to Iraq’. He now expresses qualms about the killing of ‘tens of
thousands’ of innocent Iraqis who had done nothing to harm America or its
inhabitants: ‘These casualties in a country we were seeking to help
represent an enormous human cost.’ Such guarded words of regret will strike
most readers as welcome and overdue. To unrepentant apologists of the war,
by contrast, they have the feel of apostasy and betrayal.
The question is: does Fukuyama tell us anything that we don’t already know?
Can he explain how ‘the irresponsible exercise of American power’ became
‘one of the chief problems in contemporary politics’? Can he help us
understand how ‘so experienced a foreign policy team’ could make ‘such
elementary blunders’? Can he indeed tell us why the administration decided
to do what he and his former allies had encouraged them to do: namely, to
transform Saddam’s isolated dictatorship into a central battlefront in the
global war on terror? This is the essential issue because, as Fukuyama now
admits, the Iraq war has ‘unleashed a maelstrom’, inflaming the
anti-American extremism it was ostensibly launched to quell.
As it turns out, Fukuyama’s book sheds considerable light on the cognitive
biases and intellectual incoherence behind America’s catastrophic response
to 9/11. Above all, it deepens our understanding of the administration’s
twisted interpretation of the terrorist threat. From Fukuyama’s analysis of
Bush’s foreign policy, we can distil five debatable but stimulating
propositions. First, the fatal decision to invade Iraq was based on a
genuine, not merely contrived, ‘conflation’ of the threat posed by rogue
states with the threat posed by nuclear terrorists. Second, Cold War habits
of mind and a misunderstanding of the causes of the collapse of the Soviet
Union contributed to the administration’s blurred reading of the new enemy
and therefore to its decision to launch an ineffectual, misdirected and
self-defeating counterattack. Third, the neo-con democratisation project,
having become a widely publicised justification for the invasion after the
fact, makes assumptions about the nature of the threat that clash with the
basic theoretical framework of the administration’s war on terror. Fourth,
non-military counterterrorism policies in Europe (multilateral police
operations and proposed social programmes designed to aid the integration of
Europe’s alienated Islamic youth), reflect a much clearer understanding of
the terrorist threat than unilateral military intervention in the Middle
East. And finally, the administration’s visceral hostility to
multilateralism has led it to play down threats to US national security that
can be managed only co-operatively.
I will limit myself here to discussing the two propositions that seem to
have attracted rather less informed comment than the others: first, that
Cold War habits of mind are alive and well in the Bush administration; and
second, that the neo-con ‘democratisation’ project clashes with the
assumptions those same neo-cons make about the terrorist threat and what to
do about it.
Although he is fiercely critical of contemporary neo-cons such as Kristol
and Krauthammer, Fukuyama has little negative to say about neo-conservatism
during the Cold War. After the break-up of the USSR, however, the neo-cons,
and especially the younger generation, proved unable, intellectually and
emotionally, to adapt to the radically altered security environment. Having
created a formidable war machine to oppose Soviet power, the US suddenly
found itself dominating the globe, its military power not merely unrivalled
but seemingly irresistible. Nevertheless, ‘many neo-conservatives continued
to see the world as populated by dangerous and underappreciated threats.’
They simply could not dial down their inherited alarmism. The context had
shifted radically, but their reflexes remained the same. This failure to
adapt may have been to some extent self-serving. So long as America appeared
seriously endangered, the neo-cons could continue to inflate their own
importance, admiring and advertising themselves as the only Americans
capable of understanding the formidable dimensions of the threat. Whatever
their motives, they tended ‘to overestimate the level of threat facing the
United States’. They also resorted impulsively to old tropes, excoriating
liberals for a spineless unwillingness to confront the enemy, and even for
being soft on terrorism, just as an earlier generation had accused its
liberal cohort of being soft on Communism.
The Soviet Union collapsed because of ‘its internal moral weaknesses and
contradictions’, Fukuyama tells us. But the neo-cons credited President
Reagan with ending the evil empire by forcing the Russians into an
economically unsustainable arms race. As we know from the case of bin Laden
and the Afghan Arabs, the illusion of having brought down the USSR can
reinforce latent psychological tendencies to megalomania. Fukuyama does not
highlight this parallel. But his account suggests that many neo-cons, like
many of the jihadists, experienced a high when the Soviet Union came
crashing down in 1991, for somewhat analogous reasons and with distressingly
analogous results.
It is also important to remember that during the Cold War neo-cons had
adamantly opposed détente. They didn’t believe that the US should learn to
coexist with the Soviet Union, insisting instead that it could win an
uncontested victory. Coexistence, they argued, implied accommodation, which
would turn into appeasement, which would soon dissolve into capitulation.
After the Soviet Union unexpectedly fell apart, they did not revisit, or
apologise for, their overestimation of the Communist system’s resilience and
strength. On the contrary, they felt totally vindicated. Although they had
been spectacularly blind-sided, they concluded that they had been
brilliantly prescient. As a result, according to Fukuyama, they were
unwilling to admit that their eccentric intuitions of impending danger might
ever prove to be false alarms. This is why ‘so experienced a foreign policy
team’ came to make ‘such elementary blunders’. They committed fundamental
errors because their guiding principles, distilled from the Cold War
stand-off, had become obsolete.
Excessively pleased with themselves, the neo-cons drew two lessons from the
collapse of Communism. First, threats should be eliminated, not managed.
Second, American security is invariably enhanced by the transformation of
autocracies into democracies. That the democratic transformation of Eastern
Europe was triggered not by an invasion but by the withdrawal of a foreign
army apparently made little impression on them. All they knew was that the
threat to the US from the Communist bloc had been eliminated by the more or
less successful transformation of its former members into democracies or, at
the very least, democracies in the making.
That an anxious electorate would prefer to eliminate a lethal threat, rather
than live under its ominous shadow, goes without saying. But when applied to
the current terrorist threat, this impetuous desire ‘to end evil’, as
Richard Perle defines the neo-con project, has deeply pathological
consequences. The danger posed by radical Islamic anti-Western terrorists
armed with weapons of unimaginable destructiveness cannot be dismantled
overnight. The conditions that make Islamic radicalism dangerous to the West
are ineradicable features of the modern world. They include global systems
of transportation, communication and banking, rivers of petrodollars
coursing through politically unstable Muslim countries, and the gradual
spread of nuclear know-how. Under such conditions, a counterterrorism policy
that aims at extirpating the terrorist threat is bound to be delusional.
Promoted by an unsound analogy with the end of the Soviet Union, such
utopian impatience can also be profoundly self-defeating, especially if it
prompts policy-makers to focus irrationally on the wrong part of the threat
– for example, on a minor danger that happens to lend itself to definitive
obliteration. Saddam Hussein comes to mind.
As for the neo-con democratisation project, Fukuyama writes that the
disgraceful failure of the war party around Cheney and Rumsfeld ‘to think
through the requirements of post-conflict security and nation-building’
reveals the emptiness of their feigned interest in the fate of post-Saddam
Iraq. For the vice-president and secretary of defense, the suggestion that
the invasion would bring about ‘Iraqi democracy’ was merely an ‘ex-post
effort to justify a preventive war in idealistic terms’. Their cavalier
attitude to the sovereignty of other nations was the flip-side of their
unapologetic commitment to America’s globally unlimited freedom of action.
True, they agreed that it would periodically be ‘necessary to reach inside
states’ to create conditions favourable to US interests. But this doesn’t
mean that Cheney or Rumsfeld shared the democratising hopes of those
self-described idealists in and around the administration who stress ‘the
importance to world order of what goes on inside states’. For a start, the
willingness of Cheney and Rumsfeld to intervene in the internal affairs of
other nations was not and is not humanitarian. And they haven’t extrapolated
from American efforts in postwar Germany and Japan to suggest that
democratisation serves US security interests everywhere and always. They
understand perfectly well the tactical benefits of cloaking narrow American
interests, as they define them, in the language of do-gooder morality. But
this doesn’t make them eager to spread electoral democracy, with all its
unpredictable consequences, into politically unstable and strategically
vital regions of the world.
In other words, the desire to demonstrate America’s unrivalled military
power, after the country’s vulnerability was exposed on 9/11, played a much
more important role in the decision to invade Iraq than the desire to
establish a model democracy there. But the illusion of democratisation
nevertheless deserves special examination. Why did Paul Wolfowitz and a few
others argue, with reported sincerity, that a democratic Iraq was vital to
America’s national security interests? True, they did not anticipate the
exorbitant costs of the war, in lives and money. But they did assert that
Iraqi democracy had become especially important to America after 9/11. Why?
The neo-con argument goes roughly as follows. The US had to deploy its
military might because American national security was (and is) threatened by
the lack of democracy in the Arab Middle East. The premise behind this
allegation is not the much debated notion that democracies seldom go to war
with one another and, therefore, that democratisation makes an important
contribution to the pacification of the globe. The neo-con argument is
concerned not with relations among potentially warring states, but with
class or group dynamics within a single state that may spill over and affect
other countries adversely.
The thesis is that democracy is the most effective antidote to the kind of
Islamic radicalism that hit the US on 9/11. Its exponents begin with the
premise that tyranny cannot tolerate the public expression of social
resentment that its abuses naturally produce. To preserve its grip, tyranny
must therefore crush even modest stirrings of opposition, repressing
dissidents and critics, with unstinting ferocity if need be. In the age of
globalisation, however, repressed rebellions do not simply die out. They
splash uncontrollably across international borders and have violent
repercussions abroad. Middle Eastern rebellions have been so savagely and
effectively repressed that rebels have been driven to experiment with an
indirect strategy to overthrow local tyrannies and seize power. They have
travelled abroad and targeted those they see as the global sponsors of their
local autocrats.
On 9/11, this argument implies, the US woke up in the middle of someone
else’s savage civil war. The World Trade Center was destroyed by foreign
insurgents whose original targets lay in the Middle East. The explosive
energy behind the attack came from Saudi and Egyptian rebels unable to oust
local autocrats and lashing out in anger at those autocrats’ global
protectors. Thus, the rationale for reaching ‘inside states’ is not the
traditional need to replace hostile or unco-operative rulers with more
compliant successors (of the type Ahmed Chalabi was apparently slated to
become), but rather to ‘create political conditions that would prevent
terrorism’. The political condition most likely to prevent anti-American
terrorism from arising, so the neo-cons allege, is democracy.
Their reasoning at this point becomes exasperatingly obscure and confused,
but their guiding assumption is clear enough: democratic government channels
social frustrations inside the system instead of allowing discontent and
anger to fester outside. Autocratic governments in the Arab world have shown
themselves capable of retaining power by sheer coercive force, but their
counter-revolutionary efforts, under contemporary conditions, have serious
‘externalities’, especially the export of murderous jihad to the West.
America’s security challenge is to shut down this export industry. To do so,
the US must find a way to democratise the Middle East.
This convoluted and debatable argument played only a marginal role in the
administration’s decision to invade Iraq. It plays a more substantial role
in the current presentation of its ‘mission’ in Iraq, however. It is also a
central focus of Fukuyama’s book. So how should we evaluate the idea? Is a
democratic deficit in the Middle East the principal cause of anti-Western
jihadism? And is democratisation a plausible strategy for preventing the
export of political violence?
The first thing to say is that fighting terror by promoting democracy makes
little sense as a justification of the American invasion and occupation of
Iraq. Although the lack of democracy in Saudi Arabia and Egypt may
indirectly fuel anti-Western jihad, in Iraq it has never done so. In
non-democratic countries with which the US is allied (such as Saudi Arabia
and Egypt), anti-regime violence naturally escalates or swerves into
anti-American violence. The idea that a lack of democracy in countries
overtly hostile to the US (such as Saddam’s Iraq or contemporary Iran) will
have such an effect is logically implausible and unsupported by historical
evidence.
To argue that creating democracy in Iraq will help defeat Islamic terrorism
is to bank on a multi-stage process by which democracy, once established in
Iraq, will spread to Egypt, Saudi Arabia etc by force of its inspiring
example. Only then, after neighbouring dominoes (including governments
allied with the US) begin to fall, would the democratisation of Iraq
contribute seriously to draining the terrorists’ proverbial recruitment
pool. Of course, such political revolutions, in the unlikely event that they
actually erupted, would be wholly impossible to control or steer. That is
reason enough to doubt that Cheney or Rumsfeld, for example, ever took
seriously this frivolous bit of neo-con futurology.
The idea of a democratic cure for terrorism assumes that there are two
separate causes of anti-American jihad: Middle Eastern autocracy, and
unprincipled or opportunistic American backing for it. Anti-American jihad
would subside, the theory implies, if either condition could be eliminated.
Thus, the neo-con rationale for regime change in the Middle East seemingly
justifies something much less radical, and presumably less difficult, than
creating stable multiparty democracy in Mesopotamia: the gradual withdrawal
of American support from the region’s corrupt oligarchies and oppressive
autocracies. Putting daylight between the US and abusive Middle Eastern
regimes should be enough to insulate America from the violent backlash such
tyrannies produce.
Unfortunately, this pathway is blocked. The US cannot simply disengage from
a region in which so many of its vital interests, including the steady flow
of oil and the tracking down of terrorists, are at stake. Yet the paradox
remains. From the impossibility of disengaging and the perils of engaging
with autocrats, the neo-cons conclude that American interests require
engagement with a democratic Middle East. The logic sounds impeccable at
first. But it is based on the unfounded assumption that periodically elected
governments in the region will necessarily be stable, moderate and
legitimate, not to mention pro-American.
An even more fundamental argument against fighting terrorism by promoting
democracy, however, is that no one in the US government has any idea how to
promote democracy. Fukuyama accuses the neo-cons of chatting offhandedly
about democratisation while failing to study or even leaf through the ‘huge
academic and practitioner-based literature on democratic transitions’. Their
lack of serious attention to the subject had an astonishing justification:
‘There was a tendency among promoters of the war to believe that democracy
was a default condition to which societies would revert once liberated from
dictators.’ Democracy obviously has many social, economic, cultural and
psychological preconditions, but those who thought America had a mission to
democratise Iraq gave no thought to them, much less to helping create them.
For their delicate task of social engineering, the only instrument they
thought to bring along was a wrecking ball.
One might have thought that this ‘remove the lid and out leaps democracy’
approach was too preposterous ever to have been taken seriously. But it is
the position that Fukuyama, with some evidence, attributes to neo-cons in
and around the administration. They assumed, he writes, that the only
necessary precondition for the emergence and consolidation of democracy is
the ‘amorphous longing for freedom’ which President Bush, that penetrating
student of human nature, detects in ‘every mind and every soul’. Their
sociology of democracy boils down to the universal and eternal human desire
not to be oppressed. If this were democracy’s only precondition, then Iraq
would have no trouble making a speedy transition from clan-based savagery
and untrammelled despotism to civilised self-restraint and collective
self-rule: sceptics who harped on the difficulty of creating a government
that would be both coherent and representative in a multi-ethnic,
multi-sectarian and tribally fragmented country, simply failed to appreciate
the love of freedom in every human heart.
Cavalierly designed by mid-level bureaucrats who were both historically and
theoretically illiterate, the administration’s half-baked plans backfired
badly. This should have come as no surprise. And prospects for reform in the
Middle East have not been improved by the perception that democratisation in
the region, at least when promoted by the West, spells violent
destabilisation, criminalisation and a collapse of minimally acceptable
standards of living.
Neo-cons, Fukuyama implies, seldom do the hard work required to learn about
the evolving political and social dynamics of specific societies. Instead,
they over-personalise any ‘regime’ that they dream of destabilising,
identifying it with a single reprehensible ruler who can, in principle, be
taken out with a single airstrike. But here again they walk into a serious
self-contradiction. One of their principal claims is that a bad regime will
have long-lasting negative effects on the society it abuses. A cruel
autocracy puts down ‘social roots’ and reshapes ‘informal habits’. Thus,
‘Saddam Hussein’s tyranny bred passivity and fatalism – not to mention vices
of cruelty and violence.’ It is very likely, in other words, that Saddam
unfitted the Iraqi people for democracy, for a time at least. This is a
logical implication of the neo-cons’ theory of ‘regimes’, but not one they
considered, presumably because it would have knocked the legs from under
their idealistic case for war.
These fallacies and contradictions are not even the most egregious of those
associated with the democratisation rationale; not when you consider that
the basic justification for helping spread democracy in the Middle East
flatly contradicts the claim that Islamic radicals are apocalyptic nihilists
who love death and hate freedom. Al-Qaida is obviously not at war with the
House of Saud and Mubarak because those regimes are democratic. Indeed, the
observation that Islamic radicals hate tyranny, not freedom, is the central
premise of the argument for promoting democracy.
In administration rhetoric, terrorism (a method for waging asymmetrical war)
is routinely opposed to liberty (a principle for organising a modern
society). The antithesis of liberty, however, is not terrorism but tyranny.
So when the administration tries to place jihadism in the space vacated by
Communism, turning it into the new global enemy of liberty, it confuses both
itself and others.
Tacitly, the neo-con advocates of Middle Eastern democracy are siding with
the young men who might be tempted to join terrorist conspiracies against
their clientalistic, kleptocratic and non-democratic governments, which are
officially allied with the US. Al-Qaida is less like the KGB than the KGB’s
implacable foe, the Afghan mujahidin, ‘freedom fighters’ supported by Ronald
Reagan, among others. Today’s neo-cons no longer want to imitate Reagan by
helping resentful young Muslim men regain their dignity through violent
insurgency. Instead, they want to give them an alternative path to dignity:
namely, liberal democracy. But the basic reason for supporting frustrated
Muslim youth, that they deserve American support in their noble search for
liberation, is the same.
It is worth dwelling for a moment on this massive contradiction. Although
obvious in a way, it is seldom discussed; Fukuyama doesn’t seem to notice
it. The neo-cons defend two diametrically opposed propositions: that the
jihadists hate freedom at the same time as hating their own lack of it. On
the one hand, neo-cons assert that Islamic radicals hate American values,
not American policies, and deny that America’s past behaviour has in any way
provoked anti-American violence. On the other hand, they imply that the 9/11
plot was inspired and implemented by terrorists radicalised by Arab
autocracies allied with or sponsored by the US. This suggests that
9/11-style terrorists hate American policies, not American values. They hate
not the principles of American liberty but, rather, America’s unprincipled
support for tyranny. To promote democracy in the Middle East is to imply
that such hatred is in part justified.
The proposal to increase American security by such means logically
presupposes that America’s problem is not terrorism but Islamic radicalism,
initially turned militant and subsequently turned outward. Terrorism is not
the enemy: it is a tactic that Islamic radicals have found exceptionally
effective. To recognise that America’s fundamental problem is Islamic
radicalism, and terrorism only a symptom, is to invite a political solution.
Promoting democracy is just such a political solution. Although publicly
invoked to support a military invasion, the goal of a democratic Middle East
implies that terrorism must be stripped of its appeal by political reform
precisely because it cannot be crushed by overwhelming military force. The
radical incompatibility of this perspective with Bush’s overall
counterterrorism policy should be self-evident.
And that is not all. Fukuyama himself stresses a completely different
contradiction afflicting the neo-cons. The proposal to pull Mesopotamia into
the modern world, he says, is based on a facile optimism reminiscent of
1960s liberalism and publicly rebutted by the original neo-cons. Progressive
dreams are bound to be dashed on the hard realities of social habit. One of
the fundamental goals of neo-conservatism, in its formative period, was to
show that ‘efforts to seek social justice’ invariably leave societies ‘worse
off than before’. They were especially ‘focused on the corroding effects of
welfare on the character of the poor’. All distribution from the rich to the
poor and from whites to blacks is inevitably counterproductive. Progressive
attempts to reduce poverty and inequality, although well-intentioned, have
‘disrupted organic social relations’, such as residential segregation,
triggering a violent backlash and failing to lift up the downtrodden.
According to the neo-cons, it is wiser to concentrate on the symptoms, using
police power and incarceration to discourage violent behaviour and protect
civilised values.
The neo-cons, according to Fukuyama, never explored the relevance of such
warnings to US foreign policy. Proponents of the Iraq war, very much like
old-style liberal advocates of welfare, ‘sought worthy ends but undermined
themselves by failing to recognise the limits of political voluntarism’.
Their failure in Iraq was just as predictable as the failure of American
liberals to improve the lives of poor American blacks. In short, the plans
of today’s idealistic hawks for creating Iraqi democracy show how utterly
they have betrayed the neo-con legacy. Perhaps the deepest irony is that
their enthusiasm for destroying the status quo and overthrowing the powers
that be (without giving much thought to how to replace them) recalls the
institution-bashing antics of 1960s student radicals more than the
counter-revolutionary posture of the founding fathers of neo-conservatism.
Addressing the possibility that the US can still play a positive role in
bringing democracy to the Middle East, Fukuyama is surprisingly optimistic.
He continues to endorse what he calls ‘the perfectly fine agenda of
democracy promotion’. Going beyond the bland liberal assumption that, on
balance, less autocracy is better than more, he argues that ‘there is an
imperative to liberate people from tyranny and promote democracy around the
world by reaching inside states and shaping their basic institutions.’
Without wincing, he still advocates ‘a revolutionary American foreign policy
agenda’. One of his principal reasons for sticking with this agenda is that
it allegedly has history on its side: ‘There is a broad, centuries-long
trend towards the spread of liberal democracy.’ Sweeping generalisations of
this sort are meant to remind the reader of Fukuyama’s first book, The End
of History and the Last Man (1992). For good or ill, he has never fully
repudiated the ostentatious idea, which made him world famous as a young
man, that human history is moving inevitably towards a ‘culmination’ that
closely resembles Americanisation.
Fortunately, Fukuyama’s reluctance to disagree with himself does not extend
to other neo-cons. He argues, for example, that the US should promote
democracy abroad only for its own sake, not for its imagined usefulness in
combating terrorism. He also dissents from present neo-cons on the proper
methods for promoting democracy and ‘the time frame’ within which democratic
change can be expected. America can accelerate its inevitable arrival by
training, advice, funding and election monitoring, not to mention by good
example. But it can’t do so by military invasion and conquest. This is why
Fukuyama pleads for ‘a dramatic demilitarisation of American foreign policy
and re-emphasis on other types of policy instruments’. The Pentagon,
alongside its other deficiencies, is poorly positioned and incorrectly
staffed for fostering democratic transitions. American ‘experts’ who write
laws and design institutions for countries making the transition to
democracy must be ‘immersed in the habits, mores and traditions of the
people for whom they are legislating’. Such culturally informed Americans
may or may not exist, but they don’t work for the Department of Defense.
Promoting democracy requires a sophisticated understanding not only of
specific cultures but also of the relation between institutions and
organised interests. Institutional reform frequently fails, Fukuyama says,
because it ‘threatens entrenched interests’. Institutional reform is ‘almost
always more of a political than a technocratic problem’, because ‘certain
powerful actors have a strong self-interest in the status quo.’ As a result,
‘strong, unified indigenous groups willing to resist the former regime’ must
exist within a society in order to overcome the resistance of entrenched
spoiler elites. The amorphous love of liberty in every human heart is
neither here nor there. The key is to strengthen pro-reform forces and
weaken anti-reform ones.
For Fukuyama, this means, for example, ‘developing a local constituency in
favour of fiscal reform, or otherwise eliminating the political support for
recalcitrant political groups’. His plausible conclusion here is that
‘institutions will not be created unless there is a strong internal demand
for them.’ Strong external demand, coming, say, from the US, is not a
sufficient condition for successful institution building or institutional
reform. The administration’s plans for swiftly democratising Iraq were
doomed from the outset, he persuasively argues, because the US had ‘no
organised local allies’ there. The planners and managers of the invasion
paid no attention to this fatal lack. They were taken aback by the
invasion’s chaotic aftermath because of their appalling ignorance of the
elementary preconditions of political stability. That formal institutions
function properly only when supported by informal social networks seems to
have occurred to none of those assigned to manage the postwar process of
reform.
Such grave misapprehensions obviously diminish the legitimacy but also the
effectiveness of US efforts in the war on terror. That they have undermined
the decency and even sanity of America’s response to 9/11 is Fukuyama’s
unnervingly persuasive claim. Administration dead-enders are unlikely to
appreciate his final suggestion that ‘a new team’, with ‘new policies’,
would be able to free itself from this spider’s web of fallacies and
fixations. Less partisan readers will be grateful for the random rays of
hope, justified or not, with which Fukuyama lightens his bleak but
informative account of an American foreign policy that has completely lost
its bearings, with consequences, grievous and perhaps irreparable, that we
have yet to see.
Stephen Holmes is research director at the Center for Law and Security at
New York University School of Law. The Cost of Rights, written with Cass
Sunstein, appeared in 1998.
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