Francis Fukuyama has been hailed in Britain and the US as a supporter of the Iraq war who has now courageously defected to the anti-war camp and shredded the neoconservative arguments justifying it. If that were so, it would be quite a coup.
The American philosopher and political economist made his name in 1992 with his influential bestseller The End of History and the Last Man, written after the cold war and fall of the Berlin Wall, in which he argued that wars of ideology had ended in the permanent triumph of democratic capitalism. An early neoconservative, at 53 Fukuyama is the nearest thing to a seer in America's foreign policy establishment. He would be a powerful recruit to the "realists", liberal internationalists or other Washington factions that are hostile to neoconservatism.
Yet his new book, After the Neocons, the peg on which the story of his defection rests, undermines this dramatic interpretation. On the narrow point of Iraq, Fukuyama points out on page two that he was "never persuaded of the rationale for the Iraq war". True, he had been an Iraq hawk four years before the invasion, but a year before September 11 2001 he "finally decided that the war didn't make sense".
In the online Wall Street Journal editorial page, Bret Stephens recently sought to shake this claim of consistency. He cited an article written in the paper only five days after the fall of Baghdad in 2003 that contained "not a word... to suggest the misgivings Mr Fukuyama claims to have been harbouring for a year". But the article does not really justify this criticism. If Fukuyama did not mention his earlier doubts, he expressed sharp misgivings about the future: "[The fall of Baghdad] is likely to mark the zenith, for a while, of our perceived strength, both in a military and a political sense. As the hard work of reconstructing Iraq begins, images of the lightning maneuver war will fade into new ones of American soldiers as policemen; cheering, liberated Iraqis will turn into quarrelsome and demanding subjects."
If Fukuyama was sceptical about the war even at the moment of its apparent triumph, he cannot be depicted fairly as a late defector to the anti-Bush cause. His was an early conversion from lukewarm hawk to moderate dove. The prudential caution he displayed then shapes the post-Iraq reflections on neoconservatism and foreign policy in After the Neocons.
But there is a widespread appetite for more sweeping condemnation. A visitor to London soon becomes accustomed to nightmare theories that a small conspiracy of neocons has been manipulating US foreign policy from behind the curtains and that their Iraq venture has achieved nothing worthwhile - no free speech, no competing political parties, no liberation of political prisoners. One even encounters a barely disguised desire for a second Saigon in Baghdad with, as in 1975, a blithe unconcern for the plight of the natives as long as the Americans (and Tony Blair) are humiliated.
Fukuyama gives short shrift to this unpleasant nonsense. Much of the literature on the neocons, he writes, "is factually wrong, animated by ill-will, and a deliberate distortion of the record of both the Bush administration and its supporters".
His brief history of the neoconservative movement defends it against these fantasies. He points out, for instance, that the philosopher Leo Strauss was not the Marx of neoconservatism (as the nightmare theories have it) but bequeathed only one important concept. This wasn't the crackpot notion that elites have a duty to tell "noble" lies to the people. It was the commonsense argument that the character of a "regime" is an important influence on its international behaviour. Most other ideas in the neocons' lexicon are rooted in the reactions of liberal intellectuals to the cold war and the radicalism of the 1960s - notably, and in Fukuyama's own case especially, a scepticism towards large-scale government programmes as likely to produce unintended results.
Fukuyama identifies four main currents of neocon thought. Two have just been mentioned: the significance of a nation's internal regime and the risks of social engineering. The other two are that the US, almost uniquely among great powers, can be trusted to use its strength for moral purposes, and that international institutions cannot be trusted to safeguard security and justice.
Given urgency and apparent credibility by September 11, these ideas helped to generate the declaration of the war on terror, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the promotion of democracy as central to US foreign policy.
Many critiques of these policies have been launched since Baghdad fell. But Fukuyama's analysis is rooted in his continuing scepticism towards grand schemes of social engineering. He believes that neoconservatives ignored their own warning when they invaded Iraq and launched the democracy project. Even if such a policy could succeed - about which he is agnostic - it is an excessive response to an exaggerated threat. Islamist terrorists with weapons of mass destruction overthrowing regimes in the Middle East and posing an existential threat to the US are not the formidable force they seemed immediately after September 11, he says. They pose a problem less for US foreign policy than for western intelligence services. The Bush administration not only misdirected the full resources of American power against this target. But because others had doubts, it adopted a unilateralism that alienated allies and international institutions, increased instability in the Middle East and cast doubt on its good intentions.
This is a forceful indictment. But there is less in it than meets the eye. Fukuyama's prescription of a more "realistic Wilsonianism" is designed to rescue neoconservatism rather than to destroy it. It embodies most neoconservative aims, but pursues them by softer means: NGOs over armies, foreign aid over military intervention. The resulting policies are almost always sensible. But they look modest alongside his sharper criticisms. And they are marred by the same wishful thinking he detects in neoconservative analyses.
This weakness is clearest in his argument that Islamist terrorism is an exaggerated threat. It is true that jihadists are a small proportion of Muslims worldwide. But a small proportion of a billion Muslims would still amount to many potential terrorists. Similarly, many jihadist ideas are incubated in the alienated Muslim communities of Europe. But the internet ensures that they are rapidly transmitted to the Middle East, Indonesia and the US. The results - the USS Cole attack, September 11, the Madrid bombings, Bali - at least suggest a serious threat.
It might be less unnerving if Fukuyama had some new solution to offer other than intelligence co-operation. But he is reduced to hoping that an "accelerated" Islamic version of the Protestant Reformation will midwife the kind of social liberalism that the original version produced after a few hundred years of fierce sectarianism. Something more seems to be required.
That perhaps explains why Fukuyama, while condemning the hubris of social engineering, is not actually opposed to promoting democracy in the Middle East, even at the risk of letting extremist organisations into power such as Hamas. He would prefer the US to concentrate more on encouraging good governance - building stable state institutions, establishing a rule of law - and less on directly promoting democracy as such. But he accepts that the local people who want such things also want democracy. So the policy advocated by Fareed Zakaria in The Future of Freedom, of making democracy the final item on a decades-long programme of liberalisation is rarely a practical option. His own proposals for encouraging liberal democracy - NGOs, aid to local democrats - draw on his books Trust (1995) and State-Building (2004), which examine both the cultural foundations of good government and practical ways to encourage it. They are eminently sensible. But if jihadists are a real threat, then liberalisation even more than democracy is likely to meet with violent resistance. Local democrats will sometimes need more muscular help than bodies such as the National Endowment for Democracy - to which Fukuyama is an advisor - can provide.
And the need for such intervention is likely to be prolonged. Liberal imperialism as an exercise in ambitious social engineering has sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed. But its success in planting liberal institutions in colonies correlates pretty well with the length of imperial rule. Staying power is equally important to the promotion of democracy if it is not to end in the kind of instability its critics predict.
Whatever the current difficulties American forces will be available to keep democracy in Iraq at least moderately honest for many years. Elsewhere, however, some form of international co-operation, including military support in the most extreme cases, will be necessary if the transition to democracy is to succeed against jihadist resistance - and if it is to enjoy international "legitimacy".
Fukuyama has an original proposal for this eventuality. While he shares the neoconservative scepticism of the United Nations, his solution is not unilateralism but the US embrace of an overlapping multilateralism. This "multi-multilateralism" of competing international institutions would enable Washington to pick and choose among them when seeking a body to grant legitimacy to its actions, as Nato did in Kosovo.
But even this qualified multilateralism must be rooted in an underlying consensus among the international players. That consensus might just about be constructed in support of Fukuyama's modest and unmilitary version of promoting democracy. But it would still be likely to founder on the very "legitimacy and effectiveness" of international bodies. Most American opinion formers, not just the neoconservatives, have very different attitudes to those of the European Union and the "international community" on both points.
Especially problematic is the notion of international legitimacy. As Fukuyama pointed out in 2002, Europeans see legitimacy as something "handed downwards from a willowy, disembodied international level rather than handed upwards", as Americans do, "from concrete, legitimate democratic publics on a nation-state level".
His preference then was for the American view since the European one liberated its elites (and by extension international agencies) to follow their own preferences under the guise of pursuing common international values. In After the Neocons, however, he seems to have changed his mind: "Although international co-operation will have to be based on sovereign states for the foreseeable future, shared ideas of legitimacy and human rights will weaken objections that the United States should not be accountable to regimes that are not themselves accountable."
This is the single most substantial rejection of neoconservative ideas in the book. But it is also its least realistic argument politically. It reflects currents of opinion in departments of international relations rather than among American voters who are growing, if anything, more sceptical of elites and international bodies.
So the US is likely to continue resisting any efforts to subject America's democratic sovereignty to decisions of unaccountable institutions even as those bodies resist any US attempt to subject them to democratic control. Over time the disputes resulting from this clash of philosophies (Kyoto, the International Criminal Court, Iraq) are likely to complicate the US pursuit of overlapping multilateralism and obstruct its promotion of democracy.
Fukuyama's kinder, gentler neoconservatism may perhaps ensure that these disputes are conducted in polite diplomatic terms. That is indeed what has happened since Condoleezza Rice took over the State Department and George Bush visited Europe last year. But deep differences of policy divide the US from other international players. And unless the jihadists drive Europe into America's arms as they have driven India there, America's war on terror will continue to meet resistance even if all the neoconservatives are replaced by realists of Kissingerian respectability.
John O'Sullivan is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington and editor-at-large of National Review.
AFTER THE NEOCONS: America at the Crossroads
by Francis Fukuyama
Profile Books £12.99, 226 pages
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