A "Break" That Had To Come
The Neocon Who Isn’t (Robert S. Boynton, American Prospect)
Critics have faulted Fukuyama for clinging to his end-of-history thesis, accusing him of systematically underestimating events that challenged it, whether it was Yugoslav nationalism in the ’90s or Islamic radicalism today. “Fukuyama’s an optimist, which blinds him to a lot,” says Paul Berman, the author of Liberalism and Terror. (Reviewing “The End of History” in The New York Review of Books, Alan Ryan dubbed Fukuyama “the conservative’s Dr. Pangloss.” “If what we’ve got is what History with a capital H intends for us,” he wrote, “then we, too, live in the best of all possible worlds.”.
Krauthammer argues that it’s Fukuyama’s secular sensibility that blinds him to the appeal of radical Islam. “It has 1 billion potential adherents, which means that [Osama] bin Laden’s ideology has the potential to appeal to infinitely more people than the Aryan ideas of Nazism ever did,” he told me. “Frank has a stake in denying the obvious nature of the threat, but the fact is that history returned after 9-11 … . There are people running around trying to acquire anthrax with which to wipe out an entire city. If that doesn’t qualify as an existential threat, I don’t know what does.”
Fukuyama replies that these are the kinds of sentiments America should resist. “For the U.S. to treat every Muslim as a potential suicide bomber is precisely what fanatics like bin Laden want,” he says. “Iraq before the U.S. invasion was certainly not an existential threat. It posed an existential threat to Kuwait, Iran, and Israel, but it had no means of threatening the continuity of our regime. Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups aspire to be existential threats to American civilization but do not currently have anything like the capacity to actualize their vision. They are extremely dangerous totalitarians, but post threats primarily to regimes in the Middle East.”
Korb agrees. “The bombing in London was terrible, but it wasn’t like the Blitz,” he says. “Terrorists can make life unpleasant, but bin Laden isn’t going to end up running Great Britain, while Hitler very well might have.”
The difference between Fukuyama and his critics is as much philosophical as empirical. Whereas Krauthammer and Berman emphasize Islamic terrorism’s potential for imminent violence, Fukuyama takes the long view, reasoning that political Islam won’t win the larger ideological war regardless of how much damage it inflicts.
I sent this to Orrin Judd because I was curious what his reaction would be. And essentially, Orrin pegs Fukuyama (correctly) as adopting a "wait it out" approach to Islamic terror, viewing it as a minor threat.
Fukuyama's bigger break with mainstream conservatives (we'll not misuse the term "neoconservatives") has been brewing for a while. There's always been a tension between Fukuyama the scholar who was influenced by Straussian notions of natural right, and Fukuyama the scholar who is a neo-Hegelian (which, ultimately, leads one to the rejection of natural right). Fukuyama is obviously uncomfortable with Bush foreign-policy conservatives, who have couched American foreign policy more in moralistic than realistic terms (much to the chagrin also of realists like Brent Scowcroft). In the end, the neo-Hegelian Fukuyama just couldn't embrace that sort of foreign policy. John Kerry was much more his speed, and rightly so.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/26/05 22:09 | Other | Technorati
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The only real problem with that is that the "wait it out approach" is unnecessarily risky. If someone is trying to kill me with a screwdriver and I have a .45, he isn't really well equipped for the job, but I'm not going to put down the gun and fight him bare handed - I'm going to shoot him. Likewise, I agree with the end of history theory that totalitarianism no longer has mass appeal, but I don't see that as a reason to put down our gun and let the Islamofascists have at us with their screwdrivers (or boxcutters as the case may be).
Side issue: Krauthammer has confused me again, this time with his fuzzy math - how does 1 billion become "infinitely more"? Maybe I should call Clarence...
Posted by Tom Hanna @ 00:15 on 10/27/05
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