Francis Fukuyama, notable ex-neocon and professor at JHU’s SAIS, takes to the pages of The Washington Post today, helping tamp down the notion that emerged with 9/11 that we are in perpetual witness of great crises. Notably, despite what might be percieved as a worldwide resurgence of autocratic power (especially in China and Russia), these states lack the truly dangerous motivating ideologies of a Fascist Germany or Soviet Union and in fact, spend a fair amount of energy kowtowing to various democratic principles. More importantly, our more “dangerous” competitors — again, Russia and China — have relied heavily on capitalism to propel their economic growth (especially so in China), and as such, are considerably less likely than their ideological counterparts to pursue worldwide domination that lies counter with their prospects for prosperity.
Indeed, in today’s global economy, a country’s economic growth can increasingly rely on sound foreign policy. This is precisely what Fukuyama fears: that worldwide economic growth will fail to match the pace of increased commodity demands, resulting in a “Malthusian world in which one country’s gain will be another country’s loss.” This can already be evidenced in increasing food prices in response to shifts agricultural production towards corn ethanol in the United States. Fukuyama warns that in this world, securing peace through liberal internationalism will be increasingly difficult.
Fukuyama’s warning underscores the current need to distance ourselves from a neocon foreign policy which envisions a unilaterally acting U.S., freely moving on behalf of and clamoring towards its perceived hegemony. While the past few years have sufficiently proven the fallacy in this line of thinking, Fukuyama’s point about economic prosperity demonstrates why rolling back the hawkish neocon policies of the Bush administration (and those unquestionably shared by a future McCain administration) is not merely a matter of morality, but more importantly that of national self-interest. In hinting at the difficulties confronting a liberal world order, Fukuyama inadvertently makes this point himself:
The totalitarian dictatorships of the 20th century induced us to draw a sharp distinction between democratic and authoritarian states, a habit of mind that is still with us. But democracies don’t automatically all have the same interests (just look at the clashing U.S. and European views on Iraq), and neither do autocracies.
Fukuyama fails to distinguish between U.S. policy towards Iraq and U.S. views on Iraq. Indeed, most of Europe has been hostile to the War in Iraq, and the U.S. has been simply hostile to Iraq, but as this past week’s agreement on troop withdrawal evidences — a measure McCain had denounced as recently as July 2008 — our extracation from occupation of Iraq is at once congenial to worldwide opinion and our own national self-interest.
