Hans Rustad Francis Fukuyama har et essay om neoconservatisme i site Nytimes Magazine, som er en forsmak på hans neste bok: America at the Crossroads, som utkommer på Yale Un. Press denne måneden.
I artikkelen analyserer han de neokonservative rundt Bush, hva de har betydd. For første gang slapp det til idealister på høyre fløy, som ønsket å bruke USAs makt til noe godt. for Freedom. Dessverre gjorde de ikke hjemmearbeidet grundig nok. Irak var en stor feil. Fukuyama ser faren ved at amerikanerne vender seg bort fra internasjonale engasjementer og blir isolasjonister. Men han håper det ikke skjer. Han håper heller ikke at USA vender tilbake til den gamle realpolitiken under Kissinger, og støtter opp under autoritære regimer så lenge de holder islamister og jihadister under kontroll. Fukukyama ønsker at USA beholder noe av den wilsonianske idealismen, men at USA utvider repertoaret. Den store feilen de neokonservative gjorde var å satse altfor mye på militærmakt. Det har ikke USA råd til, og det er kontraproduktivt. USA må satse mer på soft power, på allianser. Og her sier Fukuyama noe interessant: FN er bare nyttig til et visst punkt. Verden trenger nye multinasjonale institusjoner, og nevner NATOs innsats i Kosovo. Da Russland sa nei i Sikkerhetsrådet, steppet NATO inn.
Noe av det mest fascinerende er hva Fukuyama skriver om opprinnelsen til neocons:
The roots of neoconservatism lie in a remarkable group of largely Jewish intellectuals who attended City College of New York (C.C.N.Y.) in the mid- to late 1930’s and early 1940’s, a group that included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The story of this group has been told in a number of places, most notably in a documentary film by Joseph Dorman called «Arguing the World.» The most important inheritance from the C.C.N.Y. group was an idealistic belief in social progress and the universality of rights, coupled with intense anti-Communism.
It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky was, of course, himself a Communist, but his supporters came to understand better than most people the utter cynicism and brutality of the Stalinist regime. The anti-Communist left, in contrast to the traditional American right, sympathized with the social and economic aims of Communism, but in the course of the 1930’s and 1940’s came to realize that «real existing socialism» had become a monstrosity of unintended consequences that completely undermined the idealistic goals it espoused. While not all of the C.C.N.Y. thinkers became neoconservatives, the danger of good intentions carried to extremes was a theme that would underlie the life work of many members of this group.
Fukuyama skriver det som kalles intellektuell historie: om personene som formet politikken på 90-tallet. Hvem som var lærer til hvem, og hvordan elevene ble påvirket. Historien et spennende fordi mennesker i posisjoner i USA har makt til å forandere verden.
y the 1990’s, neoconservatism had been fed by several other intellectual streams. One came from the students of the German Jewish political theorist Leo Strauss, who, contrary to much of the nonsense written about him by people like Anne Norton and Shadia Drury, was a serious reader of philosophical texts who did not express opinions on contemporary politics or policy issues. Rather, he was concerned with the «crisis of modernity» brought on by the relativism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as the fact that neither the claims of religion nor deeply-held opinions about the nature of the good life could be banished from politics, as the thinkers of the European Enlightenment had hoped. Another stream came from Albert Wohlstetter, a Rand Corporation strategist who was the teacher of Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad (the current American ambassador to Iraq) and Paul Wolfowitz (the former deputy secretary of defense), among other people. Wohlstetter was intensely concerned with the problem of nuclear proliferation and the way that the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty left loopholes, in its support for «peaceful» nuclear energy, large enough for countries like Iraq and Iran to walk through.
I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the neoconservative movement. I was a student of Strauss’s protégé Allan Bloom, who wrote the bestseller «The Closing of the American Mind»; worked at Rand and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked also on two occasions for Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted my book «The End of History and the Last Man» (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. «The End of History» is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern — that is, technologically advanced and prosperous — society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.
Fukuyama påpeker noe som ikke kan sies for ofte: de mest dødelig terroristene er utklekket i Europa. Det er i møte med europeisk modernitet at de blir terrorister. slik vil det være, sier Fukuyama, som også sier at ånden er ute av flasken: bevegelsen mot politisk deltakelse i Midtøsten lar seg ikke stanse, og han tror vi vil se flere valgseire for islamistene.
We need in the first instance to understand that promoting democracy and modernization in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian election bringing Hamas to power. Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society. It is no accident that so many recent terrorists, from Sept. 11’s Mohamed Atta to the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to the London subway bombers, were radicalized in democratic Europe and intimately familiar with all of democracy’s blessings. More democracy will mean more alienation, radicalization and — yes, unfortunately — terrorism.
But greater political participation by Islamist groups is very likely to occur whatever we do, and it will be the only way that the poison of radical Islamism can ultimately work its way through the body politic of Muslim communities around the world. The age is long since gone when friendly authoritarians could rule over passive populations and produce stability indefinitely. New social actors are mobilizing everywhere, from Bolivia and Venezuela to South Africa and the Persian Gulf. A durable Israeli-Palestinian peace could not be built upon a corrupt, illegitimate Fatah that constantly had to worry about Hamas challenging its authority. Peace might emerge, sometime down the road, from a Palestine run by a formerly radical terrorist group that had been forced to deal with the realities of governing.
Her bagatelliserer Fukuyama noe av trusselen Hamas og Iran representerer. De kan være i stand til å styrte regionen og verden ut i katastrofer. Den muligheten ligger der, og de sier det selv.
Bush forsto at noe måtte gjøres radikalt annerledes i Midtøsten, at den gamle politikken ikke holdt. Men valgene han traff var kanskje ikke spesielt smarte, og særlig ikke måten de ble gjennomført på.
