Francis Fukuyama's "brutal critique" of Bush's foreign policy (Guardian)

Critical thinking: Francis Fukuyama turns on Bush's foreign policy in his brutal critique, After the Neocons, says Martin Jacques

After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads
by Francis Fukuyama
226pp, Profile, £12.99

This book is a brutal critique of neoconservatism as practised by the Bush administration: and it is all the more damaging for the fact that Francis Fukuyama has himself been strongly identified with the neo-conservative cause. His tone is measured but the comprehensive nature of his demolition of Bush's foreign policy leaves it - and neo-conservatism - in tatters. What, of course, has really done for Bush is "events", above all those in Iraq. Rarely has a policy been exposed so rapidly and comprehensively on such a grand scale, but then wars have a habit of doing precisely that: the rhetoric and platitudes are suddenly and mercilessly subject to the cold test of reality.

Fukuyama is good at reading "the moment", the most famous example being The End of History, a rather poor book that received far more attention than it deserved, but which succeeded very effectively in capturing the zeitgeist after the collapse of the Berlin wall. One suspects that Fukuyama has accurately read the runes once more and that his book anticipates a sea-change in the American mood. Indeed, the latter seems already to be under way, with support for Bush dipping to new and dangerous lows. The invasion of Iraq has failed so comprehensively that it seems bound to stimulate much soul-searching in Washington over the coming years. The defeat in Vietnam had a long-lasting effect on American foreign policy: the Mesopotamian disaster may come to be seen in not dissimilar terms.

Fukuyama engages in a root-and-branch critique of Bush's foreign policy. He sees the rise of neoconservatism as in part an excessive response to the defeat of the Soviet Union, with the belief that such an apocalyptic event, leading to a wholesale regime-change in eastern Europe, was of more general significance and could be imitated elsewhere. Beware triumphalism - it is a poor guide to action and so it has proved in Washington. This was accompanied by an overblown belief in the effectiveness of military action together with the idea that American casualties in the new era of hi-tech weaponry could be kept to a minimum, as they had been in the first Gulf war and in Kosovo. In addition, there have been the hugely exaggerated claims about the threat posed by both Islamic terrorists and Saddam Hussein, which were so obviously make-believe that it is difficult to understand how so many purportedly intelligent people could possibly have fallen for them. The straw men have been downed one by one: the link between Saddam and al-Qaida, the mirage of the WMD, leaving just regime-change, and now that is crumbling before our eyes as Iraq seems to be sinking tragically into civil war. Fukuyama forensically examines the Bush/neo-conservative case and dismantles it brick by brick.

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