The end of a neo-con

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Mike Steketee, National affairs editor

FRANCIS Fukuyama is the American public intellectual who pronounced the end of history 19 years ago and was a neo-conservative, an idea and an ideology that both suggest he is out of date.

To the contrary, his visit to Australia this week demonstrated that he has a great deal to say that is incisive and challenging. Now a supporter of Barack Obama, the Johns Hopkins University professor of international political economy epitomises the great shift taking place in American democracy, one that this year may swing the most aggressively conservative and unilateral US administration in modern history all the way to one led by a black president who advocates engagement with Iran, American enemy No.1.

The contrast between Fukuyama and George W. Bush, the candidate he supported eight years ago, is stark. The latter, as former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan put it this week, is "a gut player" who operates in a White House bubble where outside views are excluded. Fukuyama, on the other hand, has the kind of intellectual curiosity that led him last year to the Papua New Guinea highlands to pursue his interest in building the institutions required to avoid failed states.

After the September 11 attacks, he and other prominent neo-conservatives signed a letter to Bush arguing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But he pulled back before the invasion in 2003, arguing that the US should seek UN Security Council support, that Iraq was the wrong target for combating terrorism and that the administration was underestimating the difficulty of establishing a stable democracy. Fukuyama recanted his neo-conservatism because he saw where it was leading.

Why was it, he asked, that the warnings the neo-cons made about the unintended consequences of social engineering in domestic policy were being ignored in the wholesale reconstruction they were attempting in Iraq?

These days, there are few sterner critics of the war. This is how he summed it up in my interview with him this week: "Even if it comes out right at the end, it was a tremendous waste of resources. We have invested so far five years worth of effort, 30,000 casualties, $1 trillion in overt expenses and probably another trillion in delayed expenses. Politically, it was counter-productive: it produced more terrorism and more nuclear proliferation than it stopped."

Fukuyama argues that the invasion hastened the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea. All that is missing from his tally are a few hundred thousand dead Iraqis.

He does say the surge is a success and adds that, as long as the US is prepared to maintain 130,000 troops in the country, the situation will remain stable. But he also believes most forces will be withdrawn in the next four years, whoever ends up in the Oval Office.

His argument is that, even under Republican John McCain, the failure to significantly draw down troops by the next presidential election in 2012 would create significant political problems. What happens to Iraq after the troop withdrawals is "anyone's guess", but he harbours significant doubts that Iraq will be able to stand on its own feet.

Fukuyama believes the threat of terrorism has been exaggerated, an approach that stemmed from the fear after September 11 that the next terrorist act would involve a nuclear bomb. The consequence of overreacting through the use of torture and pre-emptive war, he says, has been to create more anti-Americanism, more terrorism and more nuclear proliferation.

Fukuyama sees the politics of the presidential election year as too quirky to predict an outcome but he does not rule out a McCain victory. What he does regard as inevitable is substantially increased Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, leaving him wondering whether a president McCain would be able to get much done. He also doubts whether, despite the dramatic shift in the politics of climate change in the US, the rhetoric from all the candidates will be matched by hard economic decisions.

Fukuyama thinks it important for the next US administration to make some big symbolic breaks with the past, such as ruling out the use of torture, which is incompatible with the US claim to promote human rights. He argues that the Bush administration's mindset was anchored in the collapse of the Soviet Union following the hard line Ronald Reagan took against it. The first did not automatically follow the second but Fukuyama's point is that it does help explain the uncompromising approach Bush's Republican administration took to foreign policy.

From next year, he sees a much greater emphasis on soft power: the US leading by example and greater consultation and co-operation with other countries. What he advocates as a more imaginative multilateralism would involve a greater role for existing regional security organisations such as NATO and the development of a new one in northeast Asia bringing together China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the US.

As for the end of history, an overly literal interpretation of the title of Fukuyama's 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has led to his arguments being widely dismissed, on the basis that a few things have happened since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama concedes that, "I was probably a bit over-eager" about the speed with which democracy would spread after the Cold War.

But what he was putting forward was much more than a prediction. It was a thesis about modernisation: that, as countries develop, the desire for freedom and participation grows, leading to the eventual triumph of democracy. Geoffrey Garrett, chief executive of the University of Sydney's US Studies Centre, which brought Fukuyama to Australia, calls it "the emblematic idea of the 1990s".

It does not have universal application. Singapore is rich without being democratic, while India became a democracy despite being one of the world's poorest countries.

And what about the Islamic rejection of modernisation? Fukuyama argues this does not invalidate his thesis because radical Islam is not a viable alternative to democratic government. Radical Islamists had come to power only in Iran and for a period in Afghanistan and had influence in Saudi Arabia. China has managed spectacular development while remaining an authoritarian state and Fukuyama concedes that this looks like the strongest challenge to the idea that economic growth leads to democracy.

But he argues it is early days, with China only half as rich as South Korea and Taiwan in the 1980s, when they became democracies.

"In China right now you have maybe 200(million) to 300 million people who are either middle class or elites that have benefited greatly from China's modernisation and growth," he told a US Studies Centre audience. "I think very few of those people want democracy because they understand that if you open up the political system, there are so many people left behind in Chinese society that there'll be enormous demands for redistribution that will then kill this goose that's laying the golden egg."

The situation could be different in another 10 to 15 years, when China reached a per capita income of $8000 a year - about South Korea's level in the '80s - and with wealth more evenly distributed. The past year has seen about 4000 acts of violent social protest in China over issues such as developers stealing land from peasants and poisons being dumped into water supplies: the kind of issues that create the need for democracy.

Fukuyama envisages that China as a great power may be more like a 19th-century Germany and France: nationalistic but not with a universal doctrine it wants to impose on the rest of the world. But he takes out the saver that ambitions tend to expand with power, so that China's present modest international goals may change.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story...23-7583,00.html