One of the most interesting storylines in the philosophical debates inspired by the Iraq War, and the Bush Doctrine generally, has been Johns Hopkins scholar Francis Fukuyama’s split with the neoconservative movement with which he has been closely associated for decades.  As he writes in the excerpt from his new book published this past Sunday in the New York Times Magazine (“After Neoconservatism,” February 20, 2006), he has close professional affiliations with many of the movement’s leading lights including Allan Bloom, himself a protégé of Leo Strauss, Albert Wohlstetter, and Paul Wolfowitz. 

These relationships make it all the more stunning that he seems to officially break his already strained affiliation with the movement in this article.  He writes that “whatever [neoconservatism’s] complex roots, [it] has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American hegemony.”  As a result,  “[n]eoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.”

In many ways, reading Fukuyama’s critique of what neoconservatism has become, and what American foreign policy should be, felt like reading the tract of a subscriber to the Democratic Party’s tradition of a muscular foreign policy; a tradition with deep roots stretching back to the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy.  Fukuyama continues:

The problem with neoconservatism’s agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a “realistic Wilsonianism” that better matches means to ends.

Fukuyama, then, forcefully argues for a version of what Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has called “practical idealism.”  Where Wilson inspired peoples around the world with his Fourteen Points, where Roosevelt worked behind the scenes to engage American might to fight evil on the European continent, where Truman adopted the “containment” strategy which led to total victory in the Cold War, and where Kennedy expanded American power into the third world battleground of the Cold War, so too Fukuyama advocates an expansive view of the potential uses of American power.  Unlike the neoconservatives with whom he breaks, however, he emphasizes not only the need to demilitarize the projection of American influence, but also the need for a dose of “realism” to temper the missionary zeal of those in the modern neoconservative movement: “[a] Wilsonian policy that pays attention to how rulers treat their citizens is therefore right, but it needs to be informed by a certain realism that was missing from the thinking of the Bush administration in its first term and of its neoconservative allies.”

This call for a form of practical idealism separates him from the traditional conservative movement, symbolized most prominently since the Iraq War by Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor to the first President Bush.  Scowcroft, a protégé of legendary realist Henry Kissinger, has repeatedly broken ranks with the neoconservative policies of the current Bush Administration by advocating a realist approach to the use of American power.  Indeed, it was this same approach that left Saddam Hussein in power at the end of the first Gulf War during Scowcroft’s tenure.  Fukuyama describes the ascendancy of what might be termed the Scowcroft opposition to neoconservative policies:

Perceived failure in Iraq has restored the authority of foreign policy “realists” in the tradition of Henry Kissinger. Already there is a host of books and articles decrying America’s naïve Wilsonianism and attacking the notion of trying to democratize the world.

The realist critique of the Bush Doctrine has been taken up with enthusiasm not only by traditional Republicans, however, but also by liberal Democrats.  Each time Scowcroft speaks out, be it via the Washington Post op-ed page or a New Yorker feature piece, Democrats wave the publication in delight.  What else could Democrats wish for politically: a top national security official from the administration of the president’s father coming out in opposition to the hubristic and imperialist policies implemented by the current administration.

This knee-jerk adoption of the realist critique worries me, however.  While I, too, strongly disagree with the way the current President Bush has projected American power, a critique of those policies from the a-moral, realist Kissingerian school leaves much to be desired.  After all, if we adopt a realist foreign policy, what would make America unique?  Retreating into this realist cocoon makes us no different from the hegemons that have dominated eras past.  Exercising American power only in cold-blooded self-interest takes away what is most American about us: the idea that freedom and liberty are the most treasured and universal of human values and that there is no higher calling than using our power to promote those values.  Indeed, I believe that it isn’t the ideal of promoting those values that world has reacted against, but rather the means by which we do so.

Fukuyama provides a third way.  American foreign policy makers are not faced with a choice between the unilateral and imperial use of American power or a realist and a-moral exercise of American might.  The third way, pioneered by such great past presidents who lay the groundwork for American victory in the Cold War, is to promote those values through the comprehensive utilization of all the tools in our foreign policy arsenal.  The military is indeed one of these tools, and it can be used with tremendous success, as it has in repelling small-state aggression (the first Gulf War), stopping genocide (Bosnia and Kosovo), and working in concert with local forces to fight terrorism and improve border security as American special forces do with great effectiveness around the world today.  Other tools fall in the portfolios of the Treasury Department and, most importantly, the State Department.  Foreign aid used to fund the development of civil society in countries slowly undertaking the transition from authoritarianism to democracy around the world represents a classic and previously successful projection of non-military power.

As Fukuyama notes, such a transition is in many ways already underway within the current administration with a rewriting of the landmark 2002 National Security Strategy and a reassertion of the role of diplomacy in the projection of American power by Condi Rice at the State Department.  And this is where there is hope for forging a new bipartisan consensus in the best traditions of American foreign policy.  There is no foreign policy truer to Democratic roots than the principled, comprehensive, and consistent projection of American power abroad that informs Fukuyama’s split with the modern neoconservative movement and Rice’s reemphasis of diplomacy at the State Department.  “The worst legacy that could come from the Iraq war,” Fukuyama writes, “would be an anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled a sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United States with friendly authoritarians.”  It is Fukuyama himself who has provided a way to avoid this outcome that is true to the greatest traditions of American foreign policy.