Francis Fukuyama addressed approximately 300 students, professors and local Baltimoreans in the Glass Pavilion on Tuesday. Brought to campus by the Foreign Affairs Symposium for the fifth of their seven-part series, "Ideologies in Flux," Fukuyama spoke on "America at the Crossroads: Finding Our Role in a Changing World."
Fukuyama, a professor at SAIS, the director of its International Development program and chairman of the editorial board of new magazine The American Interest, sought in his speech -- as he does in his newest book, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy -- "to rescue the term 'neoconservative.'"
The groundwork for the book was laid in a critical piece he wrote on the war in Iraq for The American Interest in 2004 after feeling an increasing disconnect with its supports. Fukuyama said, "as we got closer to the war, it seemed to me that the rationale made less and less sense."
Before elaborating on his position on the war, Fukuyama gave a history of "the neoconservative movement of which [he's] been an integral part," starting with the blooming of the intellectual scene at the City College of New York.
There, the neoconservative group united on a leftist stance because "they sensed the monstrosity that real-world socialism under Stalin had become." Through the magazine The Public Interest, they expressed their ideas, such as how military power could be used to do good.
With that history in mind, Fukuyama went on to explain his idea of the three critical misjudgments involved in the Bush administration's handling of the war in Iraq.
First, he spoke of the preventive war doctrine that was adopted as a response to 9/11. Fukuyama noted that the issue of weapons of mass destruction is "a different, lesser-order problem." It was the connection between Al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction that Fukuyama feels lead the Bush administration to be"most dishonest."
He further noted that the term "preventive war" in such applications is inaccurate because its true military meaning applies to the prevention of impending danger, rather than four years in advance. "[This is] like committing suicide because you're afraid of dying ... Preventive war requires being able to see into the future. It's a dangerous policy," Fukuyama said.
The second misjudgment is the belief that we as Americans could support preventive war when we would deter others from the policy. This idea of benevolent hegemony, Fukuyama noted, breeds anti-Americanism and resentment for "the lack of reciprocity" between our nation and those we affect. Fukuyama said, "benevolent hegemony is not seen by the rest of the world as a legitimate exercise of power."
The final misjudgment is the overconfidence of the Bush administration in its ability "to bring down such regimes." The entire communist regime, Fukuyama pointed out, was swept away in six or seven months, thereby breeding the creation of "the generalization that all totalitarian regimes are hollow inside."
Fukuyama then addressed current misconceptions, in particular those of terrorism as stemming from Islam and the "clash of civilizations." Radical Islam, Fukuyama believes, is in fact "a byproduct of modernism" and the deterritorialization of Islam.
He noted that many radical leaders, like Osama Bin Laden, took ideas from extremist contemporary European ideologies -- not from Islam.
This, Fukuyama said, "tells us that the Bush administration's contention that radicalism is driven by Islam is wrong," a realization which leads to the question of how democracy can fix a problem caused by modernism.
The question for the future, Fukuyama said, will be how to deal with the transition occurring in the Islamic world from religion, which is rooted in social practice, to a more interior religion. This inward turning can lead to more radicalism.
In concluding, Fukuyama urged his listeners to not reject the neoconservative idea, and to understand that it is, ultimately, "a battle of ideas."
