Fukuyama

A celebrated New Yorker cartoon of the 1950s showed a plane crashing on a runway. As everyone rushed to rescue the crew a solitary scientist walked in the opposite direction. He sighed, "Oh well, back to the drawing board."

As the George Bush's Iraq adventure smoulders on the tarmac, a small group of neo-cons are starting to escape the scene with varying degrees of dignity. Some such as Paul Wolfowitz and Paul Bremer have vanished. A handful, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Tony Blair, remain in denial, parroting the Vietnam line that "we are winning, really". Others such as Francis Fukuyama have a more valid licence to recant, having doubted whether neo-conservatism was relevant to Iraq all along.

In a devastating resume of the saga so far, Fukuyama concludes that the so-called creation of democracy in Iraq cannot "justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project". The war is not worked. In any counter-terrorism operation, "successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming." The Bush doctrine "is now in shambles". America is as isolated as never before. The chaos in Iraq is spoiling the case for any further global projection of American values.

More Americans than since the end of Vietnam are now saying that America "should mind its own business". The realists are coming back into the ascendancy. From Afghanistan through Iran and Iraq to the Levant America is in strategic retreat. It cannot realistically fight another war. The Bush doctrine has polluted not promoted American values. It has made America less not more safe, and its ally Israel with it.

None of this will come as particularly new to consumers of the voluminous catalogue of Iraq book so far. It was predicted by the State Department and many in the American military and round the world (not least in Europe) before being discovered by Fukuyama. To him the realisation must be the more bitter since part his "end of history" thesis was that America had won not just the cold war but the global argument.

Fukuyama, the supreme rationalist, assumed that the rest of the world would accept defeat and American hegemony. Like many Americans he forgot nationalism, and did not predict how ineptly Americans would react to being stung He forgot that the nuclear bomb is a useless weapon since the owners cannot really use it. It has no deterrence value, as aggressors from North Vietnam to Iraq to Argentina to al-Qaeda have realised. Military supremacy does not conquer all. Philip Bobbitt and others have shown that it merely changes the nature of the game. America's biggest enemy after 9/11 was paranoia, risk aversion and a belligerent revenge psychosis. It now spends more on protecting itself against its own fears than it did against communism. In the process it has sown mayhem across the muslim world.

Fukuyama is intrigued by how this disaster came about. He rehearses the often told story of the early neo-cons, born of a mixture of Zionism, oil imperialism and honest evangelism for democracy. Among the many ironies was the neo-conservatives' libertarian aversion to state power at home yet an enthusiastic belief in its legitimacy and efficacy abroad when deployed against foreigners. Watching eager neo-cons at work in Baghdad's Green Zone I remember wondering where I had seen this before. It was under the British Labour government of Harold Wilson.

I am sure Fukuyama is right to see his former friends' desire to nanny the world as arising out of the cold war. I am less sure that its motives were wholly benign. The cold war left a giant military apparatus eager for employment. It left Washington's multitudinous defence think tanks seeking new enemies. It left rich lobbies swirling round Israel and oil. To all these, the crusade to bring democracy to the Middle East was useful as much as noble.

What is extraordinary, and what Fukuyama does not fully answer, is how so small a group of often crackpot intellectuals came to hijack a superpower. Under Bush men such as Wolfowitz, Cheney, Richard Perle, William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer should have been locked away in some log cabinet. Kristol declared, "It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power." On what planet do these people live?

Such words would have been hubristic arrogance at the height of the British Empire. The neo-cons still cannot see what harm is done their cause by Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the 101st Airborne and extraordinary rendition. They cannot see that these methods of hegemony, minor in themselves, are 9/11 to the defenceless poor of Afghanistan, Iraq and the ghettoes of Palestine. American cried feel out pain after 9/11. They cry it now. Justified or not, this is a fact with which diplomacy (or war) must contend.

The good intentions of the neo-cons may seem axiomatic from within the beltway. America's friends abroad can only reply, and at the tops of their voices, that is now how it seems elsewhere in the world. When Cheney and company now threaten Iran, again with the best of intentions, those friends wonder respectfully if American has taken leave of its senses.

Kantian ethics requires as the test of a moral precept that it be capable of generalisation. Fukuyama protests a central flaw in the 2002 National Security Strategy, Bush's core document of global intervention, that "it could not safely be generalised through the international system." America, he points out, "would be the first to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action." Washington cannot pass judgment on others, however venal, "while being unwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like the International Criminal Court."

Fukuyama writes clear prose and is a pleasure to read. Nor is he chary of offering advice. His old creed is now discredited, "indelibly associated with coercive regime change, unilateralism and American hegemony". A new international order, he says, can only be promoted by peaceful persuasion through international institutions so derided by the neo-cons. While no friend of the United Nations, he preaches "multi-multilateralism". America must move forward through "its ability to shape international institutions", not sideline them. Either way, if American policy can only stop making the world a worse place it might be on the road to making it a better one. Amen.