Francis Fukuyama Publishes Book on Democracy,
Neoconservative Legacy
By Felisa Neuringer Klubes SAIS
Francis Fukuyama, the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of
International Political Economy and director of the
International Development Program at
SAIS, crystallizes
four years of thinking and writing about U.S. foreign
policy in his latest book, America at the Crossroads:
Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy, just
out from Yale University Press.
Fukuyama's criticism of the Iraq war puts him at odds
with neoconservative friends both within and outside the
Bush administration. In America at the Crossroads,
he writes that in its decision to invade Iraq the Bush
administration failed in its stewardship of American
foreign policy. First, he says, the administration wrongly
made preventive war the central tenet of its foreign
policy. In addition, it badly misjudged the global reaction
to its exercise of "benevolent hegemony." And finally, it
failed to appreciate the difficulties involved in
large-scale social engineering, grossly underestimating the
difficulties involved in establishing a successful
democratic government in Iraq.
Fukuyama explores the contention by the Bush
administration's critics that it had a neoconservative
agenda that dictated its foreign policy during the
president's first term. Tracing the varied strands of
neoconservative thought since the 1930s, Fukuyama argues
that the movement's legacy is a complex one that can be
interpreted quite differently than it was after the end of
the Cold War.
Analyzing the Bush administration's miscalculations in
responding to the post-Sept. 11 challenge, America at
the Crossroads proposes a new approach to American
foreign policy through which such mistakes might be turned
around, one in which the positive aspects of the
neoconservative legacy are joined with a more realistic
view of the way American power can be used around the
world.
Fukuyama stakes out a position that is not captured by
existing schools within today's U.S. foreign policy debate
but is one that he thinks would be supported by a fairly
broad spectrum of Americans. Provisionally labeling it
"realistic Wilsonianism," Fukuyama defines a way for the
United States to promote political and economic development
other than regime change through pre-emptive war, and he
opens up an agenda of multiple multilateralisms appropriate
to the real, existing world of globalization.
GO TO MARCH 27,
2006
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