Perspectives

Shifting Course

Thoughts on the Future of American Foreign Policy

The American-led intervention in Iraq — with its immediate goal of regime change and its ultimate goal of spreading democracy throughout the Middle East — has been the cornerstone of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. But as the situation continues to deteriorate in Iraq and the prospect of democracy there fades away, difficult questions have arisen about how history will judge the intervention and the ideas underlying it. Even more important, the outcome of the intervention could have serious ramifications for America’s future foreign policy.

Francis Fukuyama, director of the international development program in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, addressed these questions in a wide-ranging discussion at the RAND Corporation. Drawing from his recent book, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, he focused on what has led to the current situation in Iraq, what effect that situation is having on U.S. foreign policy now, and what direction U.S. foreign policy should take in the future.

As the situation continues to deteriorate in Iraq and the prospect of democracy there fades away, difficult questions have arisen about how history will judge the intervention and the ideas underlying it.

A Series of Misjudgments

Fukuyama noted that although he initially shared the neoconservative principles that motivated the Bush administration’s foreign policy, he was never persuaded by the administration’s rationale for the war in Iraq. According to Fukuyama, America finds itself where it is today in Iraq because of three fateful misjudgments.

First, he argued that the Bush administration applied a doctrine of preventive war, which was “eminently justifiable against al Qaeda,” to the rogue state proliferation problem presented by Iraq. “The latter is a very serious problem, but of a lower order of magnitude than the prospect of an attack by a stateless, nihilistic terrorist group potentially armed with weapons of mass destruction.”

Unlike preemption, which deals with imminent threats, preventive war tries to head off threats that are months or more often years in the future. The problem with such a strategy is that it requires the United States to be able to accurately predict the future, not just in terms of enemy capabilities but also in terms of the complex calculations that foreign leaders will make years hence. “In Iraq,” he said, “American knowledge of enemy capabilities — even its near-term capabilities with respect to weapons of mass destruction — was sorely deficient.”

DIANE BALDWIN   Francis Fukuyama, author of America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, greets guests at his RAND Corporation speaking engagement. Fukuyama is a former RAND analyst and a current member of the Pardee RAND Graduate School Board of Governors.

This misjudgment was compounded by the American failure to account for the undercurrents of anti-American sentiments at the time of the 2003 intervention — “sentiments that had been brewing long before the Bush administration took office and that had centered on U.S. support for globalization,” according to Fukuyama. When administration policy-makers formulated their neoconservative doctrine of “benevolent hegemony,” he continued, they naively assumed that the U.S. assertion of power in Iraq would be supported because it was so widely understood that American foreign policy was “simply more moral” than that of other countries.

The final misjudgment stemmed from the administration’s failure to heed the manifold lessons of nation-building in attempting to bring democracy to Iraq. As Fukuyama noted, RAND and other organizations, including many within the U.S. government, had accumulated and disseminated a great deal of knowledge about what is necessary for successful nation-building — in particular, knowledge about the levels of troops, money, and time required in a variety of nation-building environments.

Unfortunately, he noted, “the Bush administration made little use of any of this extensive body of knowledge.” The administration assumed that once Saddam Hussein was removed from power, there would be a relatively painless transition to democracy, as happened in Eastern Europe after 1989; when that did not happen, the administration was taken by surprise.

Avoiding a Backlash

The deepening failure in Iraq has yielded a bitter harvest of deleterious consequences for American foreign policy, according to Fukuyama. “One of the unfortunate legacies of the Bush administration is that its actions are being increasingly viewed as ‘toxic’” — something that has led to a growing movement in foreign policy circles toward what Fukuyama calls a Henry Kissinger–like “realism,” a more isolationist U.S. foreign policy, and a retreat from the world stage. Actors on both sides of the political aisle are now disparaging the promotion of democracy as an illegitimate activity and are increasingly phobic about any use of American power whatsoever.

Fukuyama views this stance as an overreaction to the over-militarized means used by the Bush administration to promote democracy abroad, not the ends. The failure of nation-building in one country, he suggested, should not discredit the notion of nation-building in every country.

The failure of nation-building in one country . . . should not discredit the notion of nation-building in every country.

Fukuyama believes that greater modernization and democracy will actually increase the alienation underlying terrorism in the short run. In the long run, however, democracy is a better bet than relying on illegitimate authoritarians. “The only way to get at political and social actors who support terrorist movements,” he said, “is to give them some political space in which to operate, hopefully under democratic rules.” As one example of how exercising power in a pluralistic setting can lead to a gradual process of political acculturation, he cited the Islamist PJD (Justice and Development Party) in Morocco, which has steadily adopted more moderate rhetoric over the past few years.

The Limits of Democracy Promotion

According to Fukuyama, the primary lesson that America should learn from its travails in Iraq is not that the United States should eschew promoting democracy abroad, but that there are limits to what any nation can do in promoting democracy abroad. “No country has ever been democratized without the people doing it themselves,” he noted. The demand must come from within.

But once democracy has taken root organically in a country, there is much that outsiders can do to support the process. This support includes monitoring elections, promoting civil society groups, providing open access to media, and helping to develop political parties.

“Ultimately, democracy is spread by the prestige and moral credibility of countries that are democratic,” Fukuyama said, pointing out that the United States was a beacon to Eastern European countries throughout the Cold War because of what America represented, not because of the way it used its military power.