JHU SAIS Professor Francis Fukuyama Publishes New Book on Democracy and the Neoconservative Legacy
Francis Fukuyama, the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and director of the International Development Program at the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), crystallizes four years of thinking and writing about U.S. foreign policy in his latest book, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. Yale University Press will officially publish the book--out now--on 03/31.
Fukuyama's criticism of the Iraq war put him at odds with neoconservative friends both within and outside the Bush administration. In America at the Crossroads, he explains how, in its decision to invade Iraq, the Bush administration failed in its stewardship of American foreign policy. First, the administration wrongly made preventive war the central tenet of its foreign policy. In addition, it badly misjudged the global reaction to its exercise of "benevolent hegemony." And finally, it failed to appreciate the difficulties involved in large-scale social engineering, grossly underestimating the difficulties involved in establishing a successful democratic government in Iraq.
Fukuyama explores the contention by the Bush administration's critics that it had a neoconservative agenda that dictated its foreign policy during the president's first term. Tracing the varied strands of neoconservative thought since the 1930s, Fukuyama argues that the movement's legacy is a complex one that can be interpreted quite differently than it was after the end of the Cold War. He lucidly traces the main principles of the neoconservative movement and critiques the way that legacy was interpreted by certain neoconservatives during the 1990s and put into practice by the Bush administration in the first term.
Analyzing the Bush administration's miscalculations in responding to the post-09/11 challenge, America at the Crossroads proposes a new approach to American foreign policy through which such mistakes might be turned around-one in which the positive aspects of the neoconservative legacy are joined with a more realistic view of the way American power can be used around the world.
Fukuyama stakes out a position that is not captured by existing schools within today's U.S. foreign policy debate, but is one that he thinks a fairly broad spectrum of Americans would support. Provisionally labeling it "realistic Wilsonianism," Fukuyama defines a more realistic way for the U.S. to promote political and economic development other than regime change through preemptive war, and he opens up an agenda of multiple multilateralisms appropriate to the real, existing world of globalization.
Other recent books by Fukuyama include State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century; Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution; The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order; Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity and the best-selling The End of History and the Last Man.
SAIS is one of the country's leading graduate schools devoted to the study of international relations. Located along Embassy Row in Washington's Dupont Circle area, the school enrolls more than 450 full-time graduate students and mid-career professionals and has trained more than 12,000 alumni in all aspects of international affairs.