Francis Fukuyama, Cornell '74 and author of The End of History and the Last Man spoke today as the 2007 Einaudi Center Foreign Policy Distinguished Speaker.
Fukuyama's talk, "American Foreign Policy After the Bush Administration", was fairly critical of the policies of the last years. This is particularly noteworthy since he initially shared the ideology, training, and perhaps even dormroom of Straussian neocons, including Paul Wolfowitz (Cornell '65).
Fukuyama first articulated his opposition to the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration. He began by outlining the four main components of the Bush doctrine, calling it "a coherent policy":
1. The US faces a dire threat assessment following 9/11.
2. Preemption is an effective way to eliminate current and future threats.
3. American leadership (unilateralism) is required in its dealings with allies.
4. Democracy promotion is the mission underlying policies involving preemption.
Fukuyama argues that while this policy is coherent and perhaps valid in a realist international system (with strong states), it uses faulty assumptions when operating in the modern world. "We live in a weak state world," he said. By this, he means that the Greater Middle East - defined by him as a swath of nations that encompasses North Africa, parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East proper, and South Asia to the India-Pakistan border - is composed of weak and failing states.
This point, he feels, has not been well understood by many people, including high-level American statesmen. He refers to an article Kissinger wrote after the 2006 Lebanon war, in which Kissinger recognizes that we no longer live in a world with Westphalian states. As Fukuyama wryly notes, anyone who has been paying attention to Africa in the last 20 years already knew that.
Fukuyama takes apart the four components of the Bush Doctrine:
1. The US faces a dire threat assessment following 9/11.
Fukuyama feels that the threat assessment is skewed, largely because of a fundamental misunderstanding of one question often asked in the weeks following 9/11:
Why do they hate us?
Two answers have frequently been offered:
1. They don't like our values.
2. They don't like our foreign policy.
The Bush administration officially concluded that answer 1 was correct, and frequently made reference to it in speeches. Considerable history and contemporary analysis suggests that answer 2 may be correct, and rooted in forward bases in the Middle East, the invasion of Iraq, and the US's unflinching support of Israel.
Fukuyama feels that both are needed to understand the situation. If "they" refer to Muslim extremists, then 1 is indeed the correct answer. If instead "they" refer to the populations of the Middle East, then 2 is more accurate.
2. Preemption is an effective way to eliminate current and future threats..
Fukuyama states that the logic of preemption is "iron-tight". If someone knew that an attack was imminent, it would make complete sense to do what it took to prevent it if possible, perhaps even through preemptive military action. Preventative war, however, fails to distinguish between deterring/combatting states within states (like Hezbollah or Al-Qaeda), and deterring actual states. While deterrence doesn't work well with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Fukuyama feels that it does work effectively with states that have a functioning central authority - Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. His claim is that no matter how crazy their foreign policies appear, the interests of the leaders are such that they will behave more or less as Westphalian states - affected by deterrence, bilateral negotiatons and other tools in the realist's toolbox.
3. American leadership (unilateralism) is required in its dealings with allies..
Fukuyama points out that even Bush realizes that this is not accurate. The Six-party talks regarding North Korea and the attempts to include the EU in efforts to get Iran to suspend its nuclear program reflect the growing need, if not willingness, of the Bush administration to include its allies and other nations in its efforts to bring about stability in two very volatile - but very different - places in the world.
However, Fukuyama does agree that American leadership is still essential. He points to the failure of the European Union and Russia to collectively act during the Balkans wars until US involvement in the conflict.
Nobody appreciated the headwind of anti-Americanism following the collapse of the Soviet Union. This headwind, he feels, may simply be a product of the disproportionate influence of America on the world, and the non-reciprocal relationship that many nations have vis a vis the United States. While the US has the power - military, economic, and cultural - to influence the process and impact of international organizations, trade agreements, and military actions against its enemies, many nations lack the resources to effect such change at even a regional level. In other words, it may be less in the substance of American values, institutions and culture and more in the power that arguably results from these that much of the rest of the world resents.
4. Democracy promotion is the mission underlying policies involving preemption.
Fukuyama strongly believes that democracy promotion is and ought to be the underlying goal of most US foreign policy efforts. However, he recognizes that a commitment to democracy can often be at odds with American short-term interests, and that the failure to be consistent can be even more costly than accepting the consequences of democracy. For example, he feels that the US would have been wiser not to put all of its eggs in Musharraf, and instead actively encouraged Musharraf to hold free and open elections. (In the Q&A that followed, Fukuyama points out that the Pakistan case is distinct from Gaza, noting that Pakistan had lawyers protesting in the street to defend the rule of law.)
Overall, he feels that regardless of the errors in policy, the administration was most guilty of gross incompetence in implementing and administering policy. Two examples he highlights are the reorganization of the federal government to create the Department of Homeland Security and the attempts - twice - to reorganize the intelligence agencies under a single Director of National Intelligence. Another example he references is the F process (transformational diplomacy initiative), a process by which foreign development aid is allocated within a broader strategic framework driven by the State department's political agenda. He did not make particular criticisms, except to suggest that this leads to excessive and counterproductive micromanagement of funds.
Perhaps most interestingly, Fukuyama devoted somewhat less than half of his talk to Asia, where he felt the rules were significantly different. He argued that, by and large, East Asia consisted of fairly stable states with effective central governments. Consequently, the old rules under which the international system operated can and do work. He may not be the first to point out that the "international system" is neither uniform nor unchanging with time, but I think he is the first I have heard to actually point this out in different areas, and to actually take a stand for retaining some of the tools of the Cold War era system in a particular area of the world.
Fukuyama felt that the largest challenge in Asia was to figure out how to accommodate a rising China and India. (He focused his talk primarily on China, presumably because India, being a democracy and having many complications associated with federalism and internal divisions, would not be nearly as aggressive or effective in its efforts to increase its economic and political power).
Fukuyama notes that, with one exception, the international system has failed to accommodate the entry of rising powers. The classic example he references is the failure of Britain and France to recognize the changes brought about by German unification in 1871, which laid the seeds for two world wars.
He alluded to the thesis that "democracies don't go to war with each other", and that many hold the hope that China will inevitably become a democracy. He feels that this might be the case, and that indeed, China may be the first country to become a democracy because of environmental issues. However, he feels that this would not happen within the next 10-15 years.
Fukuyama notes that the pressures to become liberal democracies in Western nations occurred because of a critical mass of middle class individuals demanded political participation. However, China's rapid economic growth has benefitted a relatively small subset of the population - Fukuyama states "200 to 300 million" out of a population of 1.3 billion. This is reflected in the Chinese Gini coefficient of about 49. By comparison, the US has a Gini coefficient of 47.0 in 2006 (and interestingly, has had a secular trend upward from 39.7 in 1967, when Gini was first measured), while most Western industrialized nations have a Gini around or below 40. (A Gini of 0 represents complete equality, and 100 represents complete inequality.)
In the Q&A section, Fukuyama also suggests that one of the main challenges facing the average Chinese citizen is that the central government does not exert much authority at the local level - local political bureaucrats collude with developers and other wealthy groups to exploit local villages and the environment. One consequence is the rise of violent popular protests - an estimated 4,000 in China last year.
Yet even if China became democratic, it would not solve the foreign policy problem.
Fukuyama commented that in 1945, the "Wise Men" (Acheson, Kennan) thought very much in institutional terms, and that it would benefit the United States to do so at this critical juncture. "Would China's ambitions expand, or will it become a stakeholder in international institutions?"
He suggests that if the habits of interaction and channels of communication are established now, then China would be far more likely to be a willing participant and effective leader in international institutions. The Cold War strategy might be to encircle China and its satellite states with a hostile military and economic alliance, a Marshall Plan and NATO for the East. However, Fukuyama feels that any institution needs to build China in, and make it beneficial for the nation to promote and preserve the institution.
Fukuyama would like to see the Six-party talks converted into a more permanent OSCE-like body for North East Asian security. Such a body would be responsible for developing forward-thinking institutions and strategies for various crises, including the possibly inevitable and catastrophic sudden collapse of North Korea.
In the Q&A, Fukuyama also discussed the challenges facing the next president. In particular, he highlighted groupthink and the imperial presidency.
From his own time as a staff member in the policy planning office of the Reagan State Department, Fukuyama suggests that those outside of the bureaucracy severely underestimate the effect of tribalism within the Exectuive branch. Loyalty is to the tribe, above and beyond all other loyalties. The tremendous power of the presidency and this pressure towards tribalism guarantees groupthink and sycophantism.
One anecdote, borrowed from Zbigniew Brzezinski, illustrated the point. Brzezinski was the National Security Advisor for Jimmy Carter. During the first year of Carter's term, he was able to come into the Oval Office and offer criticism to the President's policies. By the 4th year, that became impossible, as the President had become accustomed to demanding respect and deference from his subordinates.
Fukuyama closed with a brief comment on civil-military relations. He recognizes that America now is different from the America that existed during his time at Cornell, when there were armed students protesting Vietnam. The dependence on a volunteer army and the limitation of armed service to communities largely in the south guarantees a disconnect between how civilians and the military perceive the world. He did not go so far as to say that that was dangerous, but it was implied that this was an area of concern that could in principle be ameliorated by universal service.
Overall, I thought this was a great talk. Fukuyama got panned after the press latched onto the title of The End of History and the Last Man, and his reputation suffered even more when neoconservativism reared its ugly head in the last few years. I look forward to reading his new book, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy.
