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Francis Fukuyama
AFTER THE NEOCONS
America at the
crossroads
226pp. Profile. £12.99.
1 861 97922 3
The neoconservative
influence on American
foreign policy has not
had an enthusiastic
response outside the
United States. Its
failure to bring peace
and democracy to Iraq
has now resulted in a
spate of critiques in
America itself, even
from within the policy
establishment. The
highest-level defection
has been that of Francis
Fukuyama, author of The
End of History and the
Last Man (1992), the
paean to the triumph of
capitalism that became a
canonical
neoconservative text of
the 1990s, articulating
the transition from the
Clinton administration
to that of George W.
Bush. In his new book,
After the Neocons,
Fukuyama argues that key
neoconservative tenets
were systematically
violated in making the
case for the war in
Iraq, and, further, that
the broader attempt to
combat terror is
ill-served not only by
the war but also by the
neoconservative project
of democratic reform in
the Middle East. The
failure of these
projects, he argues, is
a phenomenon less of the
Middle East than of the
disoriented modernity of
Muslims in the West –
Western Europe
particularly. In
conclusion, he offers a
replacement for
neoconservative foreign
policy, something that
he calls “realistic
Wilsonianism”.
The arguments over
Fukuyama’s new book have
not just been among
conservative think-tank
intellectuals. Soon
after publication the
White House itself
entered the brawl,
sending emails citing
contradictions between
Fukuyama’s past
statements and the
positions taken in his
new book, particularly
his support in 1988 for
the forcible overthrow
of Saddam Hussein. As
Tod Lindberg, Editor of
the Hoover Institution’s
Policy Review, put it,
the Bush administration
has been “more
influenced by Mr.
Fukuyama’s work than by
that of any other living
thinker”.
On the sidelines,
liberal commentators and
reviewers in the United
States have watched with
a mixture of
righteousness and glee
the long-awaited
conservative crackup
over the ideological
basis of the Bush
administration’s foreign
policy.
The End of History and
the Last Man began as an
article written while
Fukuyama was at the Rand
Corporation, the
quintessential Cold War
think tank. Written in
the flush of victory and
the collapse of Soviet
Communism, it argued
that the world was at a
historical moment in
which history itself –
at least “history” in
the sense of fundamental
arguments over political
ideology – was
essentially over.
Liberal democracy,
market capitalism, and
the welfare state had
won, both because they
were right in principle
and because they had
been proven right in
practice, while their
twentieth-century
totalitarian,
collectivist competitors
– Communism, Nazism and
Fascism – had all been
seen off. The End of
History was, then, a
disquisition on the end
of alternatives to
liberal democratic
capitalism, at least
those alternatives that
sprang from the
modernizing project. The
book did not consider
the possibility of a
challenge from outside
the realm of modernity
as understood in the
West. Islam is mentioned
only in passing.
Much of the anger
directed at Fukuyama by
neoconservatives and by
Bush administration
intellectuals since the
publication of After the
Neocons arises from the
perception that he
intended The End of
History to be a
universal pronouncement,
applicable across the
span of world history,
not limited merely to
the ideologies of
modernity. In his new
book Fukuyama makes no
retraction; he claims
rather to have been
misread. His argument
was never meant to be
universal, he says, and
it is the fault of the
neocons for not
recognizing the limits
of what a policy of
promoting democracy and
liberalism in the Middle
East can – and cannot –
get you.
In the years after the
publication of The End
of History, the
neoconservatives in
foreign policy held the
line that the basic
institutions and values
of democracy, human
rights, liberalism, free
markets and the
emancipation of women
were accepted worldwide
and not open to
question. Fukuyama
himself moved on: in
Trust: The social
virtues and the creation
of prosperity (1996), he
fleshed out certain of
the cultural values that
made liberal capitalism
work; in State-Building:
Governance and world
order in the 21st
century (2004), he
addressed the problem of
failed states; and in
Our Posthuman Future:
Consequences of the
biotechnology revolution
(2003), he considered
how to avoid yet another
modern dystopia.
During the early Bush
years, as liberal and
conservative thought in
America became
increasingly polarized,
Fukuyama and other
conservative thinkers
continued to set the
tone of the
administration.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in
the world, as we now
know, intellectuals with
a very different idea
were also at work. They
too had a global
political vision; but
theirs was a dream, not
of the end of history,
but of a rebirth, a
resumption of the long
march of Islam, stalled
by centuries of Western
expansion but
reinvigorated by
contemporary global
demography. The true
challenge to
neoconservative foreign
policy came, not from
liberals on the Potomac,
but from armed theocrats
in the Old World. The
Islamist project is a
paradoxical vision of
history simultaneously
old and new, premodern
in its deployment of
ancient Islamic
doctrines but postmodern
in its highly selective
use of them. It borrows
notions from the heart
of Western thought –
multiculturalism,
anti-colonialism,
ressentiment – but in
the service of a radical
alternative to secular
liberal capitalism. Like
Fukuyama himself,
Islamists have an
end-time ideology – in
their case not a
secular, democratic,
civil society writ
global, but the
worldwide umma, as
prescribed in the Koran.
For a crucial period of
time, the Islamist
vision was almost
invisible to the West,
even as it was under
elaboration; articulated
in another language, in
Arabic rather than
English, its audience
was not in think tanks
in Washington but among
the resentful leftovers
of modernity in
immigrant communities in
the cities of Europe.
The ascendancy of the
Islamist alternative is
the test for both
liberal and
neoconservative
thinking. And After the
Neocons can be seen as
an oblique response to
it, one that attempts to
set American foreign
policy on a new course.
The history of
neoconservatism it
offers, both internally
and in its relation to
other American
approaches to foreign
policy, is fair-minded
and sober. Fukuyama is
helpful, for example, in
gently dismissing the
tendency of the American
Left today to discern
conspiracies around
those who studied
several generations back
with the University of
Chicago’s Leo Strauss, a
classicist whose dense
theorizing on the
questions of truth and
relativism is only
tangentially related to
contemporary political
theory. Richard
Hofstadter’s “paranoid
style” in American
politics is not limited
to the Right, a truth
amply demonstrated by
arguments prevalent in
the Left intellectual
blogosphere today that
purport to reveal
Straussianism as the Da
Vinci Code of the Bush
administration.
As a positive political
doctrine, Fukuyama says,
neoconservatism is one
of four principal
approaches to American
foreign policy. The
other three are: first,
realism in the mould of
Kissinger, which
emphasizes power and
stability, and tends to
downplay the internal
nature of other regimes;
second, liberal
internationalism, which
hopes to transcend power
politics and move to “an
international order
based on law and
institutions”; and
finally, in Walter
Russell Meade’s term,
“Jacksonian”
nationalism, tending to
a security-related view
of American national
interests and distrust
of multilateralism.
What characterizes
neoconservatism in
comparison to the others
in this schema? Fukuyama
answers by laying out a
number of interconnected
propositions that, as he
says, form
neoconservatism’s
fundamental ideological
base. It arose, he
argues, as a highly
specific moralizing
doctrine for promoting
American security in the
ideological struggles of
the Cold War. In the
late Cold War, it played
idealist antagonist to
Kissingerian realism.
More precisely, it
opposed the Kissingerian
realism embraced by
Nixon and Ford, a
doctrine that preached
accommodation to the
“inevitable” appeal and
spread of Communism.
This doctrine of
“declinism” was endorsed
both by the endlessly
cynical Nixon and
hopelessly naive Carter,
and only decisively
rejected (to the
amazement and derision
of most of America’s
elites, whether cynical
or naive) by the great
hero of the
neoconservative
movement, Ronald Reagan.
Fukuyama’s next point is
that although
neoconservatism is about
“security” in the broad
sense of preserving
America, both its power
and its ideals, it is
not about power alone,
or the maintenance of
state-to-state realist
stability. It is,
rather, a belief in the
power of ideas, ideals
and ideology as
necessary conditions of
victory in the Cold War,
an understanding that
Pope John Paul II was as
necessary to the victory
over Communism as Nato’s
battalions were.
Finally, he says,
neoconservatism asserts
that the internal
affairs of states –
their attachment to
democracy, human rights
and liberal values – are
overall indicators of
external state behaviour;
predictors, even if
imprecise ones, of their
tendencies to war and
peace. And
neoconservatism conjoins
simultaneously a belief
in the universal
validity and appeal of
fundamental American
ideals with an equally
firm belief in American
exceptionalism.
After the Cold War,
neoconservatism asserted
the special legitimacy
of American power. It
was unapologetic about
using this for moral and
idealist purposes.
Sometimes these purposes
directly involved US
security interests, such
as in the case of the
Cold War itself.
Sometimes, it was
asserted, force could be
used in defence of basic
propositions of
international order,
such as the defence of
Kuwait in the first Gulf
war. In the
neoconservative view
America was also
entitled to act
internationally from
morality alone, when its
security was not
directly at stake. Thus
it was primarily
neoconservatives who
made the case, sometimes
successfully and
sometimes not, for armed
action in Somalia,
Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda,
East Timor, Kosovo and,
today, Darfur.
Fukuyama points out that
neoconservatism shares
with American realism an
abiding scepticism
regarding international
institutions, at least
those, such as the
United Nations, that go
beyond a certain minimum
state-centred
multilateralism, while
invoking high-minded
visions of global
governance and the
decline of sovereignty.
Neoconservatives adopt
the realist critique
that, whatever countries
may say in relation to
international
institutions, they do
not, in fact, act on
their own
pronouncements. Neocons
also go a step further,
into the realm of
ideals, and argue that
democratic sovereignty,
and America’s democratic
sovereignty in
particular, is an ideal
also, one with its own
moral legitimacy, and
that insofar as
international
institutions seek to
undermine that sovereign
democracy, they are
wrong in principle.
Fukuyama has one final
proposition about
neoconservatism, one
crucial to his argument
that the Iraq war was a
betrayal of
neoconservative
principles. This is
based, though, more in
the experience of
domestic politics than
international relations.
It is what he
characterizes as a
profound “distrust of
ambitious social
engineering projects”.
The untoward
consequences of
ambitious efforts at
social planning, he
writes, are a
“consistent theme in
neoconservative thought
that links the critique
of Stalinism in the
1940s with . . .
skepticism about the
Great Society in the
1960s”.
The previous half-dozen
of his propositions hang
together as the lessons
of victory in the Cold
War. To what extent, he
asks, are these lessons
the right guide to the
US to war in Iraq and,
more generally, the
“war” on terror? Are
they not rather a case
of fighting the wrong
war, the ideological
equivalent of the
oft-noted tendency of
generals to pursue the
tactics used in the
previous conflict, all
too often with
disastrous results? His
final proposition
focuses attention on an
inconsistency within the
neoconservative
world-view: the belief
that engineering
democracy in Iraq could
be achieved simply by
the external device of
forcibly removing the
dictator and that it
could be pursued without
unanticipated negative
consequences.
According to Fukuyama, a
misinterpretation of
neoconservative
principles led the Bush
administration to
refight the last war –
ie, the war on Communism
– mistakenly believing
that the Iraq war would
fundamentally have the
same result, a release
of pent-up social and
cultural demand for
democracy, capitalism,
civil society and the
rule of law. It should
have been clear that the
social and cultural
pressures for democracy
and so on in Eastern
Europe were the result
of very long-term
conditions simply not
present in the Arab
Middle East. Thus, in
releasing the grip of
the dictator, the US
opened the door for
forces of sectarian,
tribal and other causes
of violence and,
potentially, civil war.
These were not in the
lexicon of anticipated
consequences because
neoconservatives had
mistakenly drawn their
template from the
fundamentally Western
cultural examples of
Europe and modernity.
This aspect of
Fukuyama’s argument has
occasionally been
unfairly characterized
as racist, a
lesser-breeds-without-the-law
view of the Arab world.
What it is really is
realist, urging caution
on moralist action. It
entails the recognition
that liberal democracy
emerges from particular
long-term social and
cultural matrices and
cannot simply be enacted
through elections, and a
further recognition that
democracy itself is a
fragile social condition
even where it exists,
and that its underlying
conditions can be
destroyed far more
quickly than they can be
created. It is a
conservative critique of
neoconservatism that
points to a
contradiction within
neoconservative moral
assumptions. It is,
perhaps, not precisely
realist, in the sense of
citing narrow national
interest or state
stability; it is,
rather, the position of
a moral realist.
Fukuyama’s view of these
things, it may be noted,
itself shows
inconsistencies. In The
End of History he was
something of a Hegelian
triumphalist. In the
present book, he
displays Burkean
caution, if not outright
pessimism. It may be his
discomfort over having
changed his mind that
accounts for the
peculiar fact that
Burke, despite hovering
above nearly every
substantive critique
Fukuyama makes of
neoconservative
triumphalism, barely
figures in the actual
text of After the
Neocons.
What does Fukuyama’s
farewell to his former
companions in arms mean
for the debate over the
Iraq war? On the Left,
many have abandoned
their traditional
Wilsonian idealism to
revel in a mean-spirited
realism usually
associated with the
Right, opposing the Iraq
war not just on the
legitimate grounds that
it was not likely to
achieve its aims and
risked creating
something worse – but in
the course of this,
culpably downplaying the
evil that Saddam did.
Recall how during the
1990s, it was taboo in
liberal circles in the
United States, Canada,
or Western Europe even
to suggest that the
Balkan wars might be the
result of centuries-old
ethnic hatreds. That was
wicked conservative
realism voiced by
morally indifferent
Republicans such as
Brent Scowcroft, and
denounced with eloquence
by progressive
internationalists such
as Michael Ignatieff and
Samantha Power. I made
speeches to this effect
myself when I worked for
Human Rights Watch –
insisting, with Kantian
moral certainty, that
wars are never
ascribable to ancient
ethnic hatreds
(Yugoslavia), and that
there can be no peace
without justice (Sierra
Leone), and that
impunity always rebounds
(Chile). The progressive
position was that
ascribing the Yugoslav
wars to ancient ethnic
hatreds rather than the
manipulations of
present-day politicians
was an immoral and
cynical ploy to avoid
getting involved. Today,
on the other hand, a
card-carrying liberal
realist such as the
Democratic Party’s Kos
Moulitsas can write,
“It’s clear that in the
Middle East, no one is
sick of the fighting.
They have centuries of
grudges to resolve, and
will continue fighting
until they can get over
them”. Meanwhile Saddam
Hussein seems to be
being reinvented on the
Left as merely another
minor bad guy in a
courtroom that offers
him insufficient
procedural protections.
That Iraq today is worse
than Iraq yesterday may
of course actually be
true, although it seems
to me in fact far from
so.
Or it might yet turn out
to be true. But the
downgrading of human
rights idealism and the
embrace of Kissingerian
realism in the matter of
Iraq is ill-becoming to
American liberals. It is
as though they had been
long constrained to
worship at the church of
pious Wilsonianism, and
were now suddenly freed
to go out into the
streets for a carnival
of realism, suddenly
freed to expound on the
virtues of containment,
stability and national
interest.
Fukuyama has a great
deal to say about the
neoconservative run-up
to the Iraq war. In this
he is consistent: he
opposed it from the
beginning. Perhaps his
Burkean instincts,
deriving from the work
he had done since 2000
on the rigours of
state-building and the
profound difficulties of
creating from scratch
conditions for democracy
in the world outside
Eastern Europe, began to
kick in.
Neoconservatives who
applauded The End of
History seem not to have
read his books on
nation-building and
international
development.
Fukuyama is largely
right, it seems to me,
in his critique of naive
neoconservatism and its
belief that the
liberation of Eastern
Europe would repeat
itself in Iraq. But it
is not necessarily
correct to credit these
neocons with the
administration’s policy
in Iraq. They were a
crucial part of the
coalition for war within
the Bush administration.
But essential figures,
and leading proponents
of the war, notably Dick
Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld, are better
described, using
Fukuyama’s chosen
category, as
conservative Jacksonian
nationalists.
Traditional conservative
realists like Scowcroft
and Kissinger said no to
the neoconservative
venture; while the
conservative Jacksonian
nationalists said yes.
This was a crucial
difference. Neither can
be characterized as
idealist or moralist.
And there is a piece
missing from Fukuyama’s
account of the Bush
administration’s war
coalition. It is the
transformation of at
least some of these
realists – or Jacksonian
nationalists – into
fully fledged
neoconservatives, that
is, the convergence of
realism and idealism. A
case in point is
Condoleezza Rice, the
Secretary of State, who
started out as a realist
protégé of Scowcroft but
emerged as an ardent
proponent of what we may
characterize as the Bush
doctrine, holding that
the pursuit of democracy
and universal values is
itself a realist
strategy. This school of
thought argues that old
realist doctrines of
containment,
accommodation, stability
and narrow national
interest are what got us
into the current
predicament; and that
only a greater vision
can get us out. Idealism
– and this is a phrase
which has appeared
repeatedly in
conservative defences of
the Iraq war – is the
new realism. On this
view, which should be
distinguished from naive
neoconservatism, war for
regime change and
democratic
transformation becomes,
in the instrumentalist
calculus of realists, a
calculated bet on the
possibilities of
political
transformation, one
magnified by the
perceived threat of
transfer of WMD
technology. Different
people may weigh the
probabilities
differently, make
different estimations,
arrive at different
bets, including the bet
on doing nothing much at
all. It was on this
basis that I, for one,
supported and continue
to support the Iraq war,
and it seems to me an
argument that Fukuyama
conspicuously fails to
address. It is not that
Fukuyama slays a straw
man – there were indeed
plenty of naive
neoconservatives,
presumably now much
chastened by events –
but there are also
plenty of not-so-naive
realist-into-idealists
for whom the outcome of
the bet remains very
much undecided.
Fukuyama has a second
argument against the
Iraq war and against
transformative politics
as a strategy in the war
on terror. Drawing on
such writers as Olivier
Roy, he argues that
democratic regime
transformation in the
Middle East will not
address the problem of
Islamist extremism and
terrorism, because they
are phenomena not
principally of the
Middle East, but of
Muslims in the West
confronting the loss of
identity. Even assuming
that the transformative
strategy managed to
stabilize Iraq, he
argues, the social
precursors of terrorism
are not to be found
there. They are drawn
from places we cannot
attack with military
force – Hamburg, London,
the Parisian banlieues.
Thus the phenomenon of
Islamist terror is not a
regional, political or
even sociological
problem; it is, rather,
the accumulation of
individual psychologies,
massed together in
shared and yet still
highly individual
narratives of
resentment, exclusion
and the search for
Muslim social and
economic integration,
and particularly Muslim
middle-class
integration, within
European pluralist
modernity. Even if the
birthplaces of the 9/11
hijackers were Saudi
Arabia and Egypt, this
argument runs, their
jihadist spiritual
formation was in Western
Europe. The Bush
administration launched,
on this account, a war
that missed the point,
targeting the wrong
region and the wrong
country.
I would not wish to deny
the strength of
Fukuyama’s psychological
observations. They are
an indispensable part of
any deep understanding
of the esprit de corps
of the terrorists. They
are a powerful
prescription, in my
view, for deep-seated
ideological changes in
Western societies and
their states, though
perhaps not the changes
that Fukuyama has in
mind. The changes they
indicate the need for, I
would argue, involve the
explicit abandonment of
the doctrines of
multiculturalism in
Western societies,
doctrines that have so
damaged and weakened
them. They are an
argument for a vigorous
reassertion of
traditional liberalism,
above all its guarantees
of free expression, even
for blasphemy, and of a
traditional liberal
refusal to tolerate the
intolerant.
At some point, Europe
and America will have to
defend more vigorously –
in the face of the
cultural challenge of
Islamism and other
violent fundamentalisms,
their broadly liberal
inheritance (in America,
liberal pluralism, to be
precise, rather than
liberal secularism,
descended from European
anticlericalism). The
core of that defence is
a clear attitude to
religious extremism.
Islam – “moderate” Islam
– must take its place
alongside other
religions. That is to
say, it must dwell
within the cage of
tolerance, an iron cage
that insists without
apology that religions
tolerate the liberal
secular order of public
life. Muslim communities
in the West must know
that the larger society
will not compromise its
demands that all respect
the values of a liberal
society; they must also
know that they will be
protected with force
against the demands of
extremists from within
their own community.
Fukuyama’s psychological
argument, important
though it is, does not
dispose of the argument
for forcible regime
change, nor for the
attempt to open
possibilities for
democratic
transformation in the
Middle East. The story
is not all about Muslims
in the West. The
ancillary roles of
corrupt, authoritarian
Middle Eastern regimes
that prop themselves up
with religious ideology
and of Saudi-financed
Wahhabism cannot be
discounted. No doubt the
push for democracy in
the region will produce
unanticipated
consequences. One that
has already been
anticipated, by the
Egyptian legal scholar
Hesham Nasr among
others, is the rise of
Islamist parties and
sharia law among
populations which,
having seen the failure
of socialism and
neo-liberalism to better
their lives, are willing
to give at least
parliamentary Islamism a
chance. The issue, Nasr
points out, is not so
much whether they should
be allowed to give it a
try, but whether, having
tried it and perhaps not
liking it, they will
still have a political
system that allows them
to give it up. How, he
asks, does a society
give up God’s own legal
system?
Fukuyama’s last
argument, his answer to
what
post-neoconservative
policy should be, is
less persuasive than his
earlier critique of it.
He calls for a new
foreign policy paradigm,
a hard-headed liberal
internationalism that he
calls “realistic
Wilsonianism”. The
terminology seeks to
combine idealist and
realist strands. The
deep contradictions of
neoconservative foreign
policy, he says, can
only be addressed by a
renewed and invigorated
multilateralism. First,
he proposes, the United
States should “work
toward a multilateral
world, not give special
emphasis to the United
Nations”. He locates the
source of multilateral
legitimacy not in UN
institutions but in a
looser configuration,
one more tightly
multilateral than US-led
coalitions of the
willing, but less so
than the UN. Second,
Fukuyama argues that the
goal of foreign policy
should not be the
“transcendence of
sovereignty and power
politics but its
regularization through
institutional
constraints”.
In practice, what
Fukuyama describes is
the old, familiar
liberal internationalism
with a bit less emphasis
on existing
international
organizations. What is
hard-headed about this,
I wonder? In practice it
would be likely to
amount to a
multilateralism that
empowered the middling
powers of Europe. This
is counsel that will
warm the hearts of many
in Europe and many on
the American Left, but
not mine. And it is
quite disconnected from
Fukuyama’s earlier
argument. “Realistic
Wilsonianism” seems to
be born of a desire to
find a new paradigm –
any paradigm – that will
constrain American
neo-conservatism from
further action. It is
not so much a solution
to neoconservative
contradictions as an
effort to quarantine
them.
Events since the book
was written do not make
this prescription any
more germane. Today,
with the recent conflict
in Lebanon, we have
entered a new phase of
foreign policy in which
seemingly nothing but
the hardest realism
counts. Iran acts
through its proxy,
Hezbollah; having tested
and found Western powers
tired and weak, it has
discovered what game
theorists have long
noted, that the world is
vulnerable to
free-riders, and to
those who call the bluff
of tough but insincere
diplomatic talk. Iran is
betting on the prestige
of nuclear weapons it
has yet to complete;
Syria has discovered the
difference a year makes
in the will of
international
institutions. The
worn-down Bush
administration appears
to be sleepwalking
through its remaining
two years with the
blessing of its
multilateralist
partners; it wants
nothing more than to
pass along any remaining
foreign policy crises to
the next administration.
If Bush does act alone
on Iran or North Korea,
we may be assured that
this time it will not be
willingly. No one,
apparently, has any time
for idealism;
neoconservative
arguments over democracy
and freedom seem quite
dead in the midst of
this new Middle East
war.
Fukuyama’s solution to
this can better be
described as ineffectual
internationalism. This
version of idealism
seems doomed from the
outset to be heroically
internationalist in
precisely the ways that
most ensure its
ineffectiveness. The
effects can be seen in
the current inaction
over Sudan. They were
chronicled in the New
York Times Magazine a
few months ago, in a
profile of the Chief
Prosecutor of the
International Criminal
Court. The international
community will not
prevent genocide in
Darfur, the article
argued, so instead let
us get on with preparing
criminal trials for
those we were unwilling
to stop in the first
place. But, in this
case, why should the ICC
bother? Is it not
morally corrupt to stand
and watch genocide go
by, comforting oneself
with a stern but vague
promise to arrest some
people after it is over?
This is an example of
the vices both of
internationalism and
realism. In the case of
Iraq neoconservatives
preferred war. Their
search for a quick and
painless democratic
transformation, which
they did not find, was a
naive one. But their
other belief was not so
naive: this is the
belief that over the
long run, the realist
strategy of
accommodation and
containment of execrable
regimes – the pursuit of
stability at all moral
costs practised by the
West for thirty years –
would only serve to feed
the beast. In After the
Neocons, Francis
Fukuyama has analysed in
exquisite and sobering
detail where that vision
went wrong, where it is
internally
contradictory, and where
it draws on inapt
historical parallels to
refight the Cold War.
His book is sharp and
shrewd, although
ultimately not so
devastating as he
believes. The
alternative he offers,
by contrast, so-called
realistic Wilsonianism,
merely prefers
ineffectual
internationalism. Alas,
in these difficult
times, this is no
alternative at all.
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