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| America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy | 
 enlarge | Creator: Francis Fukuyama
Publisher: Yale University Press
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  31 reviews
Sales Rank: 45656
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 264
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.4 x 0.6
ISBN: 0300122535
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.73
EAN: 9780300122534
ASIN: 0300122535
Publication Date: March 20, 2007
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 26 more reviews...
 A neocon critique of the Iraq War, sure to raise eyebrows March 14, 2006
90 out of 97 found this review helpful
When Francis Fukyama writes a book critiquing the war in Iraq and the neo conservatives who backed the policy, one must sit up and take notice. His previous book, "The End of History," with its positivist view and thesis that history is inexorably marching towards liberal democracy and capitalism formed a central text in describing the neo conservative world view. Given his background, Fukuyama's decision to write a book attacking the Bush administration's Iraq policy will surely not be easily lumped with many other books opposing the war, nor will he make as easy a target for lambasting by the White House press office.
Fukayama's book focuses on two critiques of the war, on practical and the other philosophical. The first offers no real surprises as it simply states facts now widely published and generally accepted by all but the most ardent supporters of the Iraq War. These include the lack of troops on the ground, the absurd idea that all Iraqis would welcome the US as liberators, failure to quickly quell looting and lawlessness after the fall of Saddam, general lack of interest in the specifics of Iraqi culture and history, bureaucratic sidelining of experts from the state department, and the list goes on. Again, the only thing that makes this particularly interesting is that this author cannot be simply dismissed with hollow phrases like "leftist" or "Bush Basher."
In the second category, Fukuyama's book truly stands out for both a unique approach and perspective. Yes, the author does believe that world history moves towards democracy, but he looks wearily at the idea that American power can hasten that march through military power. However, the neo cons at the White House believed exactly that idea; that if one simply removed the stones of totalitarianism in Iraq, democracy would blossom. Accepting this given as an almost religious truism, the authors of the Iraq policy could simply ignore the cultural and historic realities that made it failure so tragically predictable. In an interesting connection, Fukuyama points to the simplistic idea held by many neo cons that the fall of the Soviet Union is almost entirely the result of the American military buildup in the 1980s, instead of one factor in a complex historical matrix. The author argues persuasively that, once having accepted the idea that military might led to this great historic sea change, one can easily conclude that military might can accomplish anything.
Fukuyama is not one who believes in shrinking from the use of American power. Instead, he argues it must be used judiciously or else risk a backlash. In particular, he examines the idea that American hegemony should not frighten the world because American policy is conducted with a high degree of morality, a concept near and dear to the hearts of the neo conservative movement. Fukuyama does not reject this premise, but rightly points out that it only can be meaningful if the rest of the world believes the US is moving from a point of high minded principles. Lamenting that America now stands near alone in the world, having squandered the great outpouring of international sympathy that came after 9/11 and led to the world standing almost united in the war in Afghanistan, Fukuyama offers powerful arguments about the value of diplomacy and cooperation.
In the end this more than anything else stands at this book's heart. When an American government takes a "with us or against us" approach, resentment and anger will follow as night follows day. Policy conducted based on high minded ideals may be all to the good, but one cannot simply dismiss real world concerns and expertise as "old thinking." While Fukuyama's belief in the importance of so-called "soft power," (economic aid, cultural connections, and diplomatic resources) clearly fell on deaf ears in this White House one can only hope future administrations will take such ideas more seriously. In any case, citizens wishing to formulate a post-Bush foreign policy would do well to spend time with this excellent work.
 The Start of (Revisionist) History March 21, 2006
72 out of 92 found this review helpful
Francis Fukuyama's place in the public consciousness is originally tied to his 1992 seminal work The End of History and the Last Man. With America at the Crossroads, he seems eager to prove not only that history has not ended, but that he feels it could use a little selective editing -- especially when it concerns Mr. Fukuyama himself.
As first glace, the book seems to be another thick tome from a heavyweight intellectual weighing in on the war in Iraq and the direction he feels the government should take. It even has added weight given that Mr. Fukuyama was an early supporter of the war, dating back even before the current administration. In 1998, Mr. Fukuyama joined more famous neo-cons like Pail Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Bolton -- collectively known as the Project for the New American Century -- in signing a public letter addressed to then-President Bill Clinton calling for Saddam Hussein to be toppled. It's available online, opining that Mr. Hussein had become "more serious than any [threat] we have known since the end of the cold war."
Many of the letter's 18 signatories eventually became the architects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but before then, American at the Crossroads says, Mr. Fukuyama himself began having second doubts about the wisdom of the then-pending war. But if that is true, why did Mr. Fukuyama continue writing articles and essays lauding the war well into 2003? In public not a word about his misgivings was published until 2004 -- the internet is littered, meanwhile, with articles arguing the opposite -- and he apparently didn't become fully convinced of his opposition until the end of that year, more or less when he says he started to work on this book.
None of this is hard to find: it took less then ten minutes with the a9.com search engine to realize the nagging doubt I had reading the book was related to something real.
Put all that aside, and Mr. Fukuyama's suggestions make good sense. He argues convincingly that the government failed to correctly calculate the extent to which the war would ignite anti-Americanism, for example, and that plans exaggerated the threat Mr. Hussein represented. True and true.
But I can't get around the fact that Mr. Fukuyama built this book around the notion that he had misgivings about the war more than a year before he started to reflect those in his writings. If the timing is a fabrication designed to strengthen this book then that's just wrong. But if the book is right and the articles and essays were inaccurate then that's borderline criminal given that if he had used his influence in 2002 and 2003 there's little doubt that Mr. Fukuyama could have changed the shape of the war, lessening the impact of a bloody and costly blunder.
The Post-Neoconservative Moment April 28, 2006
35 out of 40 found this review helpful
For anyone who followed the Krauthammer/Fukuyama feud of 2004, this book, a follow-up, should come as no surprise. To summarize, Krauthammer gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute extolling the Bush administration's policies of unilateralism, preemption, regime change, and benevolent hegemony (empire?). For Krauthammer, it was the correct strategy for confronting the evils of Islamic totalitarianism. For Fukuyama, it was the breaking point; he could no longer support these policies and wrote his response for "The National Interest" called "The Neoconservative Moment."
Since then the debate has been raging and Fukuyama has started his own journal "The American Interest," fleshing out his post-neoconservative position.
In the present work, he traces the origins of neoconsevativism to a group of leftist intellectuals (Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz being the most prominent) at the City College of New York who were anti-Stalinist during the Cold War and anti-New Left during the Vietnam War. From this group emerged a set of principles that defines neoconservatism. 1)They believe that liberal democratic states are by their nature non-threatening and should therefore be promoted; 2)they believe in the use of American military power for moral purposes; 3)they are dismissive of international institutions for being too corrupted by illiberal regimes; and 4) they do not believe in government projects that entail "social engineering" or "nation building."
One can see from the fourth principle why the project in Iraq went awry. Removing a totalitarian regime with no civil society to fall back on, only forced the people into warlordism, sectarianism, and jihadist insurgency groups. Fukuyama, the Bush administration, and just about everyone else now realize that we are in an expensive long-term struggle to reconstruct a society that is coming apart at the seems. Our unilateralism and our disregard for the views of our traditional allies (cheese-eating surrender monkeys?) will make the task all the more difficult and costly. That said, he correctly believes that we should see this project through to the end. Pulling out now would only leave more fertile ground for Islamic totalitarianism.
Fukuyama feels that the neocons were seduced by the success of Reagan's policies toward Europe in the 1980's. They thought that as the Baathist regime collapsed the people would spontaneously embrace liberal democracy as they did in Eastern Europe earlier. It was a serious misreading of Middle Eastern culture. This is not to say that Iraqis won't achieve a liberal democracy, they will probably first have to experience a Reformation and an Enlightenment.
Fukuyama devotes the last part of the book staking out a revised version of his prior neoconservative position, calling it a "realistic Wilsonianism." He is a policiy wonk and a social scientist who believes that if the policy does not fit, it should be rectified. His updated version recognizes the limits of American military power and the limits of our ability to change other cultures. State-bulding in the narrowest sense is possible, nation-building is not. We should consult more with our allies and rely more on the proverbial "soft power." It is more effective, more likely to succeed, and it is cheaper to exercise power through mulitilateral institutions. We can still be the predominant power, but we have to be smarter about it.
Fukuyama is a very independent and creative thinker, but he is still the Hegelian author of "The End of History and The Last Man." He believes that all societies must inevitably embrace globalization and modernity. And that it is the proper role of American power to push this process along. But instead of using military force, we should be promoting it with the power of ideas. Fukuyama is very close to getting it right. I definitely recommend this book.
 Intellectualizing the Obvious! May 5, 2006
26 out of 68 found this review helpful
Fukyama, Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins, has managed to take three obvious conclusions that most Americans have already reached - absent PhDs or expensive tuition - and create 240 boring, useless pages. These conclusions are: 1)The Bush administration wrong made preventive war the central tenet of its foreign policy. 2)It also badly misjudged global reaction. 3)The Bush administration's third error was failing to appreciate the difficulties involved in establishing a successful democratic government in Iraq.
The fact that Fukuyama was a neoconservative supporter does not change the triviality of the conclusions; it does, however, demonstrate that, unlike President Bush, he is open to accepting contrary information.
A total waste of time, money, and paper.
The Twilight of Post-Cold War Triumphalism April 5, 2006
21 out of 24 found this review helpful
When one reads this book, it is hard to believe this is the same Francis Fukuyama who fifteen years ago was cheerleading the coming global democratic capitalist crusade with the enthusiasm of Urban II. How those days have passed. Since September 11, and the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, the author has had to adapt his theoretical tenets to current geopolitical complexities, creating results that are not entirely desirable for the author.
You can always detect a grand theory's degeneration when its own advocates begin writing confessions about the failures of their pet theory in the world of practical application. To that extent, `America at the Crossroads' should be the right's `God That Failed.' However, the author's reticence in the face of the debacles (with the 2003 Iraq War being the reality debunker) only reifies the continued belief of neoconservatives in their world quest. For his part, Fukuyama commits the ultimate wire act of critiquing his grand theory without ever admitting its complete inapplicableness, while living the illusion that the US, residing in a globalized world with de-nationalized states, can continue to rule as if we were living in the Victorian Age.
:The Origins of the Fallacy:
The book starts by illuminating on the antecedent roots of American neoconservatism. For those that are not in the know, neoconservatism is basically a post-World War Two innovation of conservatism. Its first disseminators were disgruntled Marxists and Trotskyites, such as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol (for a good example of this dedication to Communism by early neoconservatives, reference Norman Podhoretz's ode to the Red Army during the Battle of Stalingrad). These early American Marxists became obviously disenchanted with the Soviet Union by the 1950s and with the left entirely, precipitating their move to the right, albeit with a concentration on foreign policy and international issues (a separation from the nativist nationalism and isolationism of pre-World War Two conservatives/paleoconservatives).
Parallel to this movement was a lesser known, but highly influential, sect of young impressionable students of the naturalized American academic Leo Strauss. Strauss was a neo-classicist, who felt most all of the political problems of society could be deciphered through reading the philosophical works of the Greeks and Romans (a not too disagreeable pursuit). However, Strauss's lessons, what ones he weaned, were subjectively defined in terms of the necessity for force for the maintenance of civilization. Parroting early fascist thinkers like Gabriele D'Annunzio, ironic considering that Strauss was Jewish, the Straussian interpretation of the classics is one closer to a society based on the bold action of philosophers in the ancient mold (with particular attention to Socrates and Plato). Strauss's philosopher kings and decisions makers were not believers in the liberal relativism of classic democratic Athens, but those who believed government should take a greater role in promoting virtue (the philosophical enabler for those who would go on to greater endeavors in the civilian section of the DOD to promote forceful `democratization' of Iraq). It is a strange marriage of Plato's Republic, which has been denounced by many as a blueprint for totalitarianism (Karl Popper, et al.), along with a highly dark, cynical, even necessarily violent view of human nature, but this is what made Strauss so unique.
Over time, neoconservatism developed from its Marxist and Platonic roots to what we know today, a worldview predicated on a belief in an interventionist foreign policy (environment of perpetual war, be it real or simply a hegemonic political and economic struggle between peer competitors [i.e., the US and the Soviet Union]), a garrison state (national security taking priority in all budgetary matters), and an unbending faith in the universal application and imposition of their preferred form of government--capitalist democracies (of course, this was not perfectly applied throughout the Cold War, since many of these same neoconservatives supported the empowerment of market authoritarian regimes in countries with democratic socialist outcomes [i.e., Chile, Guatemala, Persia, etc.]). Thus, democratic interventionism became for enlightened leaders and their intellectual guardians (who Strauss calls scholars, but have apparently morphed into fellow pundits and friendly media outlets for contemporaries) the call for action to promote a virtuous cause, a cause of good vs. evil, if you will.
:Early Post-Cold War Trials:
According to Fukuyama, neoconservatism's first real test came with the end of the Cold War and the search for new places and rationales for intervention (since anti-Communism no longer held the same ideational legitimacy as before 1989). That test was hand delivered when Iraq made the fateful decision to invade Kuwait in 1990, but the consequences of the Gulf War were never entirely satisfactory. Its ending lacked the reintroduction of a global competitive ideology in dire need of destruction and its resident populations liberated courtesy of the uniformed sons and daughters of others.
The promise of humanitarian intervention in the late 1990s, especially in Kosovo, illustrated a new justification for the use of force, a new call of arms for the promotion of global virtue, but was not counterbalanced by a competing ideology (since most humanitarian interventions, be it Somalia or the Balkans, were utilized to punish outbreaks of nationalism and localized ethnic violence). It was not until the September 11, 2001, attacks that neoconservatives were able to finally associate this Manichean task to an old cause most dear to them since 1991, democratizing recalcitrant Muslims.
:2003 Iraq War: The Height and Fall of Neoconservatism:
It should be noted that at one time Fukuyama was the academic standard for believers in post-Cold War democratization and the miraculous benefits of globalization. This led the author to sign a public letter in 1998, as well as one right after September 11th, along with fellow neoconservatives calling for an invasion and occupation of Iraq (other signatories to the 1998 letter include future Bush Administration Iraq War policymakers Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz). Fukuyama defended his initial support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, as the potential use of military force as a liberating mechanism for democratization in the Middle East, thereby making Iraq a potential demonstration effect for the rest of the region's autocratic states (most of whom, interestingly enough, including theocracies like Saudi Arabia, are closely allied with the US). Nevertheless, Fukuyama was also an early (going back to 2004) neoconservative in-house critic of the resultant occupation blunders.
I do not need to recount the news of the past three years to illustrate the monumental failures of attempting to introduce democracy to regions and peoples with no history of such a form of government (Fukuyama allots a good amount of space in the book to this effort). Suffice it to say, Iraq has not turned out like most neoconservatives thought it would (anymore than the believers in the first Five Year Plan). To this point, most have chosen to remain silent on the complete inability of their campaign for the promotion of virtue to succeed or engender eternal appreciation by the oppressed. Indeed, if you read the front pages of neoconservative publications, like The Weekly Standard, it is still operating with an air of unreality, as though everything has succeeded beyond its wildest expectations (with periodic recognition of some "bumps" along the way).
For Fukuyama, the failure to recognize the problems of Iraq has done more than anything else to discredit neoconservatives in the eyes of those of us that pay attention to reality. Out of the entire text, this contention rings the most hollow, on account that the author signed two very public petitions calling for the invasion of Iraq before 2003 and defended the war initially, before becoming critical of it (a year afterward), even though Fukuyama claims to have had reservations about going to war in Iraq a full year beforehand. If this was truly the case, then why did he not state those objections? If he was truly worried about the war, worried enough to write a book about it three years following the invasion that has led to all of the calumnies he now claims to have foreseen back in 2002, why wait until 2006 to write anything about it? That is, unless he wanted to wait until the war became such a disaster that he knew he could politically get away with criticizing it openly. Either way, it makes the author look disingenuous.
It is also this disingenuousness that clarifies the author's lack of capacity to admit defeat, to which he remedies the shortcomings for neoconservatism by advancing a "return" of what he calls "realistic Wilsonianism" (it seems dubious to assert the need for a return to something that has never existed). It is a more refined variant of neoconservatism that takes into account local political and cultural realities and, most offensive of all, retains the need to work within the constructs of international institutions. Naturally, the author, still not completely disheartened with the test and post-test results, continues to cling to the belief in a global morality play, pitting the barbarism and backwardness of the "jihad elite" (a nicer of way of saying bin Laden and his associates) against his end-of-history progressive forces of democratic capitalism. The remaining ideological absolutism is almost stultifying, especially his refusal to envision anything between the two worlds of being a happy global consumer or suicide bomber.
Just how continually blind is Fukuyama? He claims that of the post-September 11th interventions by the US, only post-2001 Afghanistan "resembles" post-World War Two Germany and Japan in the degree to which its leadership has "rejected" the political order (i.e., the Taliban) replaced by the US. Ladies and gentleman, five years after World War Two, in 1950, West Germany and Japan retained full political sovereignty and complete domestic political stability (with no insurgencies to speak of), not to mention recovering economies that would go on to make these nations two of the wealthiest countries on earth. To this day, there is little to no electricity in Afghanistan's capital city of Kabul, and its "moderate" political leadership (the ones who "rejected" the Taliban) depends on people whose theological conceptualization of the world is still mired in the greatest hits of the 7th century Arab peninsula. To even compare Afghanistan in 2006 to post-war West Germany and Japan epitomizes why Fukuyama still has a difficult time grasping reality.
:Conclusions and Observations:
This book reads like the intellectual's confession of guilt for the sins of his past. Of course, theories have been the fetish of the intelligentsia since the modern age, and it is not ironic that so many of today's stars of neo-conservatism owe their epistemology to Marx. It merely took a re-imagination of their innermost beliefs and extrapolated onto another cause, with the same messianism, universalism, and belief in expansionism and global domination that motivated the likes of Trotsky to today's advocates of democratization through cluster bombs. Fukuyama calls this Wilsonian creed the missionary aspect of neoconservatism, but couching it in religious terminology gives it a legitimacy it does not deserve.
Lastly, it is Fukuyama's inability to make the final break with his utopia that ultimately dooms the book to the farthest rungs of a marketing ploy to snooker readers into buying something they almost never see, an American neoconservative finally admitting that their god failed. For those commissars who can not imagine such a break, there need be no worry. The author still lives the faith. He just thinks we should be more cooperative about blowing countries up.
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