FRANCIS FUKUYAMA INTERVIEW - Wednesday 12th April, 2006
GEORGE NEGUS: Professor, thanks very much for your time. You
were once
called, and not too long ago, actually, the neo-con's neo-con. You were
something of a poster boy, a pin-up boy for the whole neo-con ideology.
Now some of the people who were, in fact, your fellow neo-cons are
calling you a liar, the criticism has been quite fierce. Did you expect
the reaction that you got, because they seem to see you as a turncoat?
PROFESSOR FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, JOHN HOPKINS UNIVERSITY: Well, I
think
that's really only Charles Krauthammer, the 'Washington Post'
columnist. I think, actually, a lot of my neo-con friends have been
quite quiet and harbour a lot of doubts. I think that a lot of them
have not spoken out publicly because they're hoping for a deus ex
machina that's going to rescue the situation in Iraq and make the whole
war look like it was a good policy redeemed by spreading democracy in
the Middle East and that sort of thing.
GEORGE NEGUS: So you have actually...I mean, you could call it
a
seismic shift. Somebody called it a 'road to Damascus moment' that
you've had. I mean, you actually have said, very early in your new
book, "Neo-conservatism, as both a political system and a body of
thought, has evolved into something that I can no longer support."
That's quite unequivocal, but are you talking specifically about Iraq
when you say that?
PROFESSOR FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: No, I think the split - first of
all the
split really developed, I think, several years ago. I think that I got
quite uncomfortable with the direction that people like William
Crystal, the editor of the 'Weekly Standard', or Robert Kagan were
taking that thought, in terms of the use of American power, the
overemphasis on a big defence budget and power as a means of, for
example, spreading democracy to the rest of the world at the expense of
all the other, ways that the United States can influence political
development, and by the eve of the Iraq war I had really decided that
the war was going to be a bad idea because I think we, that is the
United States, would not handle the aftermath well, that President Bush
had not remotely prepared the American people for the kind of long-term
commitment that they would have to make, but it wasn't just Iraq.
I think it really is America's relationship to the rest of the world
because I think our power had suggested to a lot of neo-conservatives
that we would exercise a kind of benevolent hegemony over the rest of
the world - we'd fix all of these problems, like weapons of mass
destruction, terrorism, human rights violations, and the rest of the
world would applaud and I think that just is obviously not the case.
GEORGE NEGUS: Could I put your position this way? You tell me
whether
I'm right or wrong - that you still believe that America has a role, as
it were, as the world's policeman, but not this way - not democracy at
the point of a gun, as it were.
PROFESSOR FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Well, sure. I think that coercive
regime
change is really not the way that democracy has ever been spread. I
think that American power, you know, in a background way, is absolutely
critical.
You look at Asia - without the US-Japan security relationship, the
relationship between the US and Australia - you really would not have
had the stability in Asia that you have right now - but really the
influence comes about, I think, through soft power. It's the American
model, it's the American economy, the fact that people want to be like
the United States that's really, probably, been the most important
source of the spread of democratic ideas and institutions and so the
power aspect of it, I think, is actually very unrealistic. That's
really not the way that the United States can behave, vis-a-vis the
rest of the world.
GEORGE NEGUS: Not taking people out militarily?
PROFESSOR FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Well, look, there's a role for
that. In the
Balkans in the 1990s the Europeans, left to their own devices, got
stuck. They didn't have the rules of engagement that would allow them
to stand up to the Serbs when they did terrible things to the Bosnians
and later to the Kosovars and so it really did require the US Air Force
and the Croatian Army and other, you know, military forces stepping in,
but it's not the first resort, I think, and military power is really
something that needs to be used extremely carefully and, in this case,
it involved this huge social engineering project to democratise Iraq
and then go on from there to the rest of the Middle East that I think
we didn't really have the tools and certainly not the wisdom to
accomplish.
GEORGE NEGUS: Yep. I think you described the situation in Iraq
as it is
at the moment as a 'shambles'. Now there are suggestions, from your
part of the world, that the Bush Administration is seriously
contemplating invading Iran. Now, if they did that what do you think
the consequences would be?
PROFESSOR FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Well, I think the consequences
would be
disastrous but I don't think that that's really on the cards. The
reports that have come out are not for an invasion, it's really for air
strikes. My sense is that the Administration...
GEORGE NEGUS: What's an air strike if it's not an invasion,
though?
PROFESSOR FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Well, an invasion is what we did
to Iraq -
I mean, where you send troops on the ground and actually occupy the
country and then change the regime, and I don't think that's remotely
on the cards.
I think that, you know, the only remotely plausible military option
would be strikes against the uranium enrichment facilities and that
sort of thing but I really don't have the sense that the
Administration, you know, is at all eager to get into that.
Now I think what may happen is that they may box themselves in to the
point where that may become a more and more likely option because they
keep saying, you know, we can't permit or we can't tolerate Iran to go
nuclear. I think they're going to play out the diplomatic string, as
far as they can, in terms of getting the Europeans and the Chinese and
the Russians to vote for sanctions in the United Nations but I suspect
that that's an effort that's going to fail in the long run.
GEORGE NEGUS: Yeah, but you don't rule out the possibility of
air
strikes, at the very least?
PROFESSOR FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: You know, I'm sure they're
considering it
at the moment but, as I said, I don't think that that would be their
first option. I mean, the United States is really pretty tired, I
think, of, you know, further military adventures at this point,
including the Bush people.
GEORGE NEGUS: Given the way things have panned out is it
possible to
suggest that President Bush and others in the White House and others in
the hierarchy of the American Administration, were duped by the whole
neo-con ideology? That they got sucked in by it, bought it, went ahead
on the basis of that and now find themselves in a quagmire in Iraq, and
with this enormous anti-American feeling spreading throughout the
world?
PROFESSOR FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Well, first of all, I don't think
- there's
not a single thing... ..one of the things I tried to do in my book is
to indicate that there wasn't a neo-con ideology in the way that
Marxism, Leninism was an ideology. It was just a group of thinkers that
shared certain ideas. I do think that some of them got pushed, you
know, very strongly but I don't think it was necessarily from people on
the outside.
The two leading principals that were responsible for the war were
Vice-President Dick Cheney and the Secretary of Defense, Don Rumsfeld,
and they're really not neo-cons in any way. I mean, we don't really
know what the source of those ideas were and, furthermore, you know,
they had quite independent reasons for distrusting Iraq - Cheney was
Secretary of Defense during the '91 war.
I think it's possible that the President, in a sense, was convinced
that he really had a responsibility to prevent Iraq from getting a
nuclear weapon and giving it to al-Qa'ida. I do not think that this was
a... ..you know, it wasn't a real prospect, or Iraq should have been
deterrable, and maybe the President, you know, was convinced that this
was what... ..you know, he had to step up to this responsibility, but
that's as far as I think I would push it.
GEORGE NEGUS: So is it possible, then, that the whole neo-con
thing has
been somewhat blown out? That their influence over the Bush-White House
thinking wasn't as great as we like to think it was?
PROFESSOR FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Well, you know, people treat
neo-conservatism as this kind of alien spore that settled in the United
States and grew this strange, you know, plant that then invaded the
minds of the people in the Bush Administration, but most of the ideas
that neo-conservatives hold are actually, you know, as American as
apple pie, for example, the idea that democracy should be something
that will spread around the world is an idea that's as old as the
American republic. Distrust of the United Nations and other
international organisations was something that Senator Jesse Helms -
you know, a true southern, you know, democrat, or Republican
Conservative - was champion of.
GEORGE NEGUS: What's the alternative? I mean, do you have an
alternative to the use of military power? Democracy via military power
- what's the alternative?
PROFESSOR FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: It depends on what you're talking
about. In
the case of Iraq, I think we could have kept the sanctions regime going
for quite a while and used deterrents and containment to keep them
bottled up. In terms of spreading democracy, I think that, really, the
way democracy spreads is through soft power instruments. You know, it's
through diplomacy, it's through things like the National Endowment for
Democracy or the Westminster Foundation or the Soros Open Society
Foundation that provide support for civil society, for election
monitoring, this sort of thing.
GEORGE NEGUS: Professor, if I could interrupt you there, is it
too late
for 'soft power', as you describe it?
PROFESSOR FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Well, there are some nuts that are
too hard
to crack with those kinds of instruments so it wouldn't have worked
with Saddam Hussein, it wouldn't have worked in other totalitarian
dictatorships and that's right, but I don't think that our choice was
then to go invade them and during the Cold War we didn't do that, you
know.
We were deterred because there's a countervailing power in the Soviet
Union and so we just let events mature and, I think in general, that's
the way that we ought to behave.
Democracy does not come about unless people want it and therefore, you
know, you've, in a way, got to let people make those choices
themselves.
GEORGE NEGUS: Professor, if you don't mind me saying, whether
you've
done a backflip or however we describe it on the whole neo-con
philosophy, you're sounding very much like somebody who could be an
advisor to a Democratic candidate in the next American election. Cynics
might say that you're repositioning yourself for that kind of role.
PROFESSOR FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Oh, no. I have no interest in, you
know, in
going into government. What I do think is that there's been a very
poisonous and counterproductive polarisation between left and right or
red and blue or Republicans and Democrats in the United States. I think
that we need a centrist, bipartisan, you know, reasonable position that
is reconstructed out of the moderate elements in both parties, and, you
know, there are parts of the Democratic Party that are extremely
nationalistic, not on issues like the United Nations but on issues like
trade, and that's a danger as well.
GEORGE NEGUS: Are you saying that American needs a third way?
PROFESSOR FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Needs "a third way". I don't know
if it's
Tony Blair's third way but I think, you know, the big alternatives
right now are to go back to a, kind of, Kissinger, Henry Kissinger
style of realism, or this neo-conservatism, you know, muscular
democracy promotion and I think there is, you know, a real alternative
to that that take seriously the universality of human rights and the
American engagement in the world but just is much more sensible about
the means by which we pursue them.
GEORGE NEGUS: Professor, it's been great talking to you. It's
a shame
we don't have more time but thank you very much for talking to us now.
PROFESSOR FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Alright, thank you very much.