From the Publisher

Francis Fukuyama’s criticism of the Iraq war put him at odds with neoconservative friends both within and outside the Bush administration. Here he explains how, in its decision to invade Iraq, the Bush administration failed in its stewardship of American foreign policy. First, 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.  Providing a fascinating history of 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–September 11 challenge, Fukuyama 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.   

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

America at the Crossroads serves up a powerful indictment of the Bush administration's war in Iraq and the role that neoconservative ideas — concerning preventive war, benevolent hegemony and unilateral action — played in shaping the decision to go to war, its implementation and its aftermath. These arguments are made all the more devastating by the fact that the author, Francis Fukuyama, was once a star neoconservative theorist himself, who studied with or was associated with leading neoconservative luminaries like Paul D. Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Albert Wohlstetter and Allan Bloom, and whose best-selling 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, was celebrated (and denounced) as a classic neoconservative text on the end of the cold war and the global march of liberal democracy.

The Washington Post - Gary Rosen

America at the Crossroads is no screed. Like its author, it is sober, fair-minded, even a bit dry. Its chief interest as a manifesto lies not only in the points it scores against neoconservatism but also in Fukuyama's curious departures from the arc of his own thinking. It arrives, moreover, at a moment of high tension in the foreign policy debate on the right, especially for advocates of the Bush Doctrine, with its emphasis on preemptive war and aggressive democracy promotion. Already burdened with a fragile nation-building project in Iraq, the United States now faces, among other troubles in the Middle East, a regnant Hamas in the Palestinian Authority and a rising Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Fukuyama is hardly alone in wondering if this is what the post-9/11 world was supposed to look like.

Foreign Affairs

In this important and clear-sighted book, Fukuyama offers one of the best available concise histories and explanations of the neoconservative movement and its chief ideas, places himself firmly within that movement, and then goes on to register his strong and passionate dissent from the interpretation of the neoconservative approach to foreign policy that characterized George W. Bush's first term. Having broken with his former friends and colleagues over the Iraq war (from which Fukuyama dissented on pragmatic rather than principled grounds), he argues that Bush administration neoconservatives have wound up repudiating a central element in the original neoconservative body of doctrine: skepticism about the power of government to perform large tasks of social engineering. It is precisely and ironically this, Fukuyama points out, that the "official" neoconservatives of the Bush era have ended up attempting to achieve in Iraq. Although maintaining that his own version of the faith is the true one, Fukuyama does not intend to fight over the neoconservative label. He intends henceforth to sail under the "realist Wilsonian" banner. More and more, American foreign-policy makers and opinion leaders seem headed in this direction; Fukuyama is better able than most to sketch the basic outlines of what he hopes will become a major new pole in American political discourse.

Library Journal

Fukuyama's (international politics, Johns Hopkins) The End of History and the Last Man, written immediately after the abrupt collapse of Soviet communism, rocked theorists and international policymakers alike by positing that ideological struggle was essentially made pass by a near universal embrace of classical liberalism. Some who share that worldview will be shaken by Fukuyama's rejection here of the Iraq War and of the overreach by the very neoconservatives with whom he came of political age. What ultimately draws Fukuyama's greatest-if reluctant-opprobrium is the Bush administration's rejection of international cooperation for a unilateralism that in hindsight was fated to be resisted as heavy-handed, hypocritical, and threatening from nearly all quarters. Readers should know that Fukuyama is mostly writing for his immediate academic and think-tank colleagues, many directly invested in the outcome and implications of the Iraq War. Most casual readers should turn to New Yorker journalist George Packer's brilliantly balanced account of the war's intellectual roots in The Assassins' Gate. By comparison, Fukuyama's writing is not only dry but cautious, understandable given that he is delivering a message to an audience similarly wrestling with ambivalent disappointment. Vital for academic collections but not public libraries.-Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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America at the Crossroads

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Chapter One

During the first term of George W. Bush's presidency, the United States was attacked on its own soil by the radical Islamist group al-Qaida, in the single most destructive terrorist act in history. The Bush administration responded to this unprecedented event with dramatic and sweeping new policies. First, it created an entirely new federal agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and pushed through Congress the Patriot Act, designed to give domestic law enforcement greater powers to act against would-be terrorists. Second, it invaded Afghanistan, a land-locked country on the other side of the world, and deposed the Taliban regime there that had sheltered al-Qaida. Third, it announced a new strategic doctrine of preemptive action-actually, a doctrine of preventive war-that would take the fight to the enemy, rather than relying on deterrence and containment that were the staples of Cold War policy. And fourth, it invaded and deposed the regime of Saddam Hussein on the grounds that he had or was planning to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The first two of these initiatives were inevitable responses to the September 11 attacks,urged by members of both political parties and supported by an overwhelming majority of the American people. While some have criticized aspects of the Patriot Act as impinging excessively on individual liberties, it is hard to imagine that the nation would have continued in its lackadaisical approach to homeland security after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

The second two initiatives, however-announcement of a broad preemptive doctrine and the invasion of Iraq-were not obvious responses to September 11. Both policies could be justified on a number of grounds. What made them especially controversial, however, was the almost obsessive emphasis that the Bush administration placed on regime change in Iraq and the implicit assertion of American exceptionalism that gave Washington not just the right but the duty to take care of this problem. Various administration officials, beginning with the president himself, made clear that the United States would proceed against Saddam regardless of the views of its allies. This decision had evidently already been made by the summer of 2002, before the reentry of U.N. weapons inspectors into Iraq or formal Security Council debate. Although the United States made clear that it would be happy to receive support from the Security Council, it felt in no way constrained by what its allies or the broader international community thought. The Bush administration expected a short war and a quick and relatively painless transition to a post-Saddam Iraq. It gave little thought to the requirements for post-conflict reconstruction and was surprised to find the United States fighting a prolonged insurgency.

Neoconservative intellectuals, in their years out of power before the 2000 election, had proposed a foreign policy agenda involving concepts like regime change, benevolent hegemony, unipolarity, preemption, and American exceptionalism that came to be hallmarks of the Bush administration's foreign policy. Many neoconservatives were strong public advocates of the war and defended the shift in focus from al-Qaida to Iraq. Moreover, the Bush administration has left a relatively rich doctrinal record of its own thinking on grand strategy in the form of speeches and policy statements such as the president's state of the union and inaugural addresses, his West Point and American Enterprise Institute speeches in June 2002 and February 2003, and the National Security Strategy of the United States, published in September 2002. Collectively, these have been informally labeled the Bush Doctrine. These official pronouncements are consistent with what neoconservatives outside the administration were arguing; indeed, in the case of Bush's second inaugural, some outsiders provided ideas directly. Given this record, it is not surprising that many observers saw the Bush administration as being decisively shaped by neoconservatives.

But while there is reason for associating neoconservatism with Bush's first-term policies, a central theme of this book will be that the connection is often overstated and glosses over a much more complex reality. Until memoirs are written and future historians do their work, we will not know the degree to which key figures in the administration were driven by larger ideas, as opposed to muddling through in response to fast-changing events. The administration principals most in favor of the war-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney-were not known as neoconservatives before their tenures, and we do not at this point know the origins of their views.

More important, even if ideas were drivers of policy, the ideas held by neoconservatives were themselves complex and subject to differing interpretations. The administration's foreign policy in particular did not flow ineluctably from the views of earlier generations of people who considered themselves neoconservatives. The neoconservative legacy is complex and diverse, tracing its roots back to the early 1940s. It has generated a coherent body of ideas that informed a wide range of domestic and foreign policy choices.

Four common principles or threads ran through much of this thought up through the end of the Cold War: a concern with democracy, human rights, and more generally the internal politics of states; a belief that U.S. power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and often undermines its own ends.

When they are stated in this abstract fashion, most Americans would find little to object to in these principles: Henry Kissinger and his realist disciples would not deny that democracy is important, while supporters of the United Nations will concede that organization's limitations and failings. One is thus inclined to conclude that the Bush administration's mistakes were simply errors of prudential judgment or policy implementation, rather than reflections of underlying principles.

The problem is not that simple, however, because the abstract ideas were interpreted in certain characteristic ways that might better be described as mindsets or worldviews rather than principled positions. The prudential choices that flowed from these mindsets were biased in certain consistent directions that made them, when they proved to be wrong, something more than individual errors of judgment. There were three main areas of what we might call biased judgment that led to mistakes on the part of the Bush administration in its stewardship of U.S. foreign policy in its first term.

The first was threat assessment. The administration overestimated, or perhaps more accurately mischaracterized, 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, the administration 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 U.S. intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq's WMD programs before the war. But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/WMD threat as did the administration itself. Overestimation of this threat then justified the elevation of preventive war as the centerpiece of a new security strategy. The administration argued that September 11 had made preventive war necessary as a means of taking the fight to the enemy, but that argument made sense only if the real enemy had been correctly identified.

In addition, the Bush administration failed to anticipate the virulently negative global reaction to its exercise of "benevolent hegemony." The administration came into office with a strong ideological bias against the United Nations and other international organizations such as the International Criminal Court. Officials failed to recognize that they were pushing against a strong undertow of anti-Americanism that would be greatly exacerbated by their seemingly contemptuous brush-off of most forms of international cooperation. The emergence of a unipolar post-Cold War world had made the extent of American hegemony, as it turned out, a source of anxiety even to America's closest allies.

Finally, the Bush administration failed to anticipate the requirements for pacifying and reconstructing Iraq, and was wildly overoptimistic in its assessment of the ease with which large-scale social engineering could be accomplished not just in Iraq but in the Middle East as a whole. This could not have been a failure of underlying principle, since a consistent neoconservative theme, as noted above, had been skepticism about the prospects for social engineering. Rather, proponents of the war seem to have forgotten their own principles in the heat of their advocacy of the war.

Whatever its complex roots, neoconservatism has now become inevitably linked to concepts like preemption, regime change, unilateralism, and benevolent hegemony as put into practice by the Bush administration. Rather than attempting the feckless task of reclaiming the meaning of the term, it seems to me better to abandon the label and articulate an altogether distinct foreign policy position.

Neoconservatism is one of four different approaches to American foreign policy today. There are, in addition to neoconservatives, "realists" in the tradition of Henry Kissinger, who respect power and tend to downplay the internal nature of other regimes and human rights concerns; there are liberal internationalists who hope to transcend power politics altogether and move to an international order based on law and institutions; and there are what Walter Russell Mead labels "Jacksonian" American nationalists, who tend to take a narrow, security-related view of American national interests, distrust multilateralism, and in their more extreme manifestations tend toward nativism and isolationism. The Iraq war was promoted by an alliance of neoconservatives and Jacksonian nationalists, who for different reasons accepted the logic of regime change in Baghdad. They sidelined the realists in the Republican Party like Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, who had served in George Herbert Walker Bush's administration and were skeptical about the rationale for the war.

As Operation Iraqi Freedom degenerated from a triumphant liberation to a grinding occupation and guerrilla war, the neoconservatives found themselves on the defensive, and the realists started to gain ground. The neoconservatives regained their position after the January 30, 2005, Iraqi elections but lost it again as the insurgency continued. There will certainly be further ups and downs as the consequences of the war play themselves out that will, once again, change the relative authority of one faction over the other. The problem is that none of these positions-neoconservative, realist, Jacksonian nationalist, or liberal internationalist-properly defines the approach to the world that the United States needs to follow in the aftermath of September 11 and the invasion of Iraq. The realist and neoconservative positions in particular were defined partly in opposition to each other during the Cold War, and both are inadequate to the world that is emerging in the twenty-first century. That world is characterized by American hegemony and a global anti-American backlash, complete with inchoate forms of "soft" balancing; a shift in the locus of action away from nation-states toward non-state actors and other transnational forces; an accompanying disintegration of sovereignty both as a normative principle and as an empirical reality; and the emergence of a band of weak and failed states that are the source of most global problems.

In light of this emerging external environment, the United States needs to define an approach to foreign policy that is not captured by any of these existing positions. This approach begins from certain neoconservative premises: first, that U.S. policy and the international community more broadly need to concern themselves with what goes on inside other countries, not just their external behavior, as realists would have it; and second, that power-specifically American power-is often necessary to bring about moral purposes. It also draws on a neoconservative principle that neoconservatives seemed to have forgotten in the lead-up to the Iraq war: namely, that ambitious social engineering is very difficult and ought always to be approached with care and humility. What we need, in other words, is a more realistic Wilsonianism that better matches means to ends in dealing with other societies.

Realistic Wilsonianism differs from classical realism by taking seriously as an object of U.S. foreign policy what goes on inside states. To say that nation-building or democracy promotion is hard is not to say that it is impossible or that it should be scrupulously avoided. Indeed, weak or failed states are one of the biggest sources of global disorder today, and it is simply impossible, for reasons relating both to security and to morality, for the world's sole superpower to walk away from them. Neither realists nor neoconservatives have paid sufficient attention to the problem of development over the years, nor have they focused on parts of the world like Africa or Latin America where development is most problematic (except, of course, when countries in these regions became security threats).

Realistic Wilsonianism differs from neoconservatism (and Jacksonian nationalism) insofar as it takes international institutions seriously. We do not want to replace national sovereignty with unaccountable international organizations; the United Nations is not now nor will it ever become an effective, legitimate seat of global governance. On the other hand, we do not now have an adequate set of horizontal mechanisms of accountability between the vertical stovepipes we label states-adequate, that is, to match the intense economic and social interpenetration that we characterize today as globalization. The state retains a critical function that cannot be replaced by any transnational actor: it remains the only source of power that can enforce a rule of law. But for that power to be effective, it must be seen as legitimate; and durable legitimacy requires a much higher degree of institutionalization across nations than exists currently. A multi-institutional world that will meet these needs is gradually coming into being, but we are not there yet, and none of the existing schools of foreign policy provides adequate guidance to get us there.

This book suggests a different way for America to relate to the world, one that is neither neoconservative nor realist, Jacksonian nor liberal internationalist. It attempts to define a more realistic way for the United States to promote political and economic development other than through preemptive war, and opens up an agenda of multiple multilateralisms appropriate to the real, existing world of globalization.

(Continues...)

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