Neoconservatives: Little Men Stuck in Doctrines

I imagine the article by Francis Fukuyama, After Neoconservatism, from yesterday’s NYT will be the talk of the internet today (the Duck notieced it). Let me add a couple of quick comments, loosely based on an ancient Chinese philosophical

February 20, 2006 @ 11:21 am | Comment

While there is much with which to disagree in the Fukuyama piece, I concur with his assessment that if we are serious about ‘regime change’ then we need to focus on the less direct forms of coercion, such as USAID, VOA, etc. That said: Fukuyama himself admits that the attention-span of Americans on foreign policy issues is short and unfocused. Supporting our troops rates a bumper sticker. Funding overseas development aid? Less so and less often seen in juxtaposition to “Support Our Troops” on the back of a car.

February 20, 2006 @ 2:05 pm | Comment

It’s largely bullshit, written from a selectively amnesiac right-wing perspective.

Michael

February 20, 2006 @ 3:43 pm | Comment

Bullshit? Hardly.

As a quasi-neocon myself, I found this article illuminating and hard-hitting.

From the end of WWII to the end of the Cold War, our remarkable successes at installing and maintaining democracies throughout Europe, and even non-Western nations like Japan ultimately imbued within us a frightfully skewed vision of the ease with which democracies will flourish once the tyrannical government is removed, through military force or otherwise. Now we are paying for that misjudgment. It is certainly not the first “misunderestimation” made by the United States, and it will most certainly not be the last.

America has many tools at its disposal other than old-fashioned state-vs-state warfare, the point of Fukuyama’s essay is that we must make good use of them.

Neoconservatism (real neoconservatism, not what the media brands as neoconservatism) must reconcile its greatest internal contradiction: skepticism of the government’s ability to do anything at home juxtaposed against limitless faith in government’s ability to do good abroad (it’s Oakeshott’s politics of skepticism and politics of faith all over again!)

February 21, 2006 @ 3:25 am | Comment

I enjoyed it because it was refereshing to see a neo-con take a hard look at how badly we botched things up in Iraq.

February 21, 2006 @ 3:45 am | Comment