When Francis Fukuyama was a young policy geek working at the State Department in Washington in his thirties, he came up with a theory and a catchphrase that transformed him into an intellectual rock star. He wrote a remarkably prescient article called The End of History? in a small-circulation journal which electrified the academic world.
“What we are witnessing,” he wrote boldly, “is not just the end of the cold war, or a passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
It was the summer of 1989 and the Berlin Wall was soon to fall. The velvet revolutions of eastern Europe followed in short order and the Soviet titan itself went on to collapse. Fukuyama was given a generous advance to turn his musings into a book, which became a global bestseller.
With his Japanese-American background and international take on the world, Fukuyama was the perfect vehicle for his own theory. “End of history? Beginning of nonsense,” Margaret Thatcher is supposed to have said, but it was exhilarating to see the chips fall his way.
It is more or less what President George W Bush keeps telling the recalcitrant Iraqis, but despite a couple of inspiring elections they are not with the programme yet. Nor is Fukuyama, who has come to believe the Iraq war was a colossal mistake.
About a month after the toppling of Saddam’s statue in 2003, Fukuyama had lunch with an American friend who boasted that events in Iraq were going pretty well. “I made a bet with him that in five years’ time things will be a mess, and I expect to collect on it,” he says.
One might have predicted that Fukuyama would join in Bush’s optimistic pro-democracy chorus. For years he has closely identified himself with the tightly knit band of brothers who make up America’s neoconservatives, the intellectual warriors of regime change in Iraq.
Long before most Americans had given any thought to the subject, Fukuyama signed a letter to President Clinton in 1998 on behalf of the neocon Project for the New American Century, urging Saddam Hussein’s overthrow. Among the signatories were Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who went on to make the invasion happen under Bush at the Pentagon.
Fukuyama signed a similar letter after the September 11 attacks in 2001, and when the tanks rolled into Baghdad he wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal noting that the fall of Saddam was “justly celebrated”. At that point he still seemed to be in step with his friends.
“Who wouldn’t justly celebrate such an event?” he now says. All along, however, he harboured misgivings about the invasion, which have now burst into the open.
“I’m an apostate,” Fukuyama tells me starkly.
Fukuyama has openly split with the neoconservatives because he thinks the war in Iraq is wrong in theory and practice and they don’t, despite all the reverses.
“Most of them are lying low because they realise what they advocated hasn’t worked out at all and they’re just hoping something will turn up,” he says.
In person Fukuyama is so soft-spoken that I sometimes have trouble hearing him, but in print his views are loud and clear. In his new book After the Neocons, published next week, he writes forcefully: “I have concluded that neoconservatism, both as a symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.”
After much consulting of diaries we finally get to meet in his small, book-crammed study at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, where Fukuyama is professor of international political economy. As one of the world’s globetrotting thinkers, it is not easy to catch him on his home turf.
It was in Britain a couple of years ago that some of Fukuyama’s scepticism about the neocon project took shape.
“I remember being struck by the real unhappiness with the United States. One of the mistakes Americans have made is to misjudge that feeling. It’s easy to discount it as the usual anti-Americanism, but I was hearing it from people who were friends of America.”
I tell Fukuyama that The End of History probably had quite an influence on Tony Blair, who will have inhaled it with the zeitgeist even if he never actually read it.
There are few more shining believers than our prime minister in the universal application of liberal democracy, I suggest. And while the horrors of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s led many commentators to sneer, “What end of history?”, under Blair democracy ultimately reached Belgrade — courtesy of the American and British military.
That, however, was an unambiguously Good War. The Iraq war, in Fukuyama’s view, is a bad one, and he does not care for my suggestion that he may have had an indirect hand in Britain’s intervention.
Blair, he believes, has become an “honorary neoconservative” who has deluded himself into thinking that democracy can be imposed at the speed of one’s choosing at the point of a gun. That is not at all what he meant by the end of history, which took a more nuanced view of the many bumps on the road to man’s final destination.
“With Blair, I find it hard to tell what he really believes as opposed to what he has calculated is in his interest,” Fukuyama says. “He obviously wanted to preserve the special relationship with the United States and then talked himself into thinking the war was historically necessary.
“Something similar happened to Bush. When he stood for president, he talked about having a ‘humble’ foreign policy and attacked nation-building, and since then has talked himself into believing in it.”
Fukuyama feels personally let down by the turn of events. “I voted for Bush in 2000 precisely because I thought that if he got elected a lot of my friends would be running foreign policy and they would do a lot better than the Clintonites.
“That’s why this whole thing has been such a terrible disappointment. It has turned out exactly the opposite.”
Fukuyama is against the whole concept of a pre-emptive war — “As Bismarck said, it’s like ‘committing suicide for fear of death’” — but he has also been shaken by its execution. It is tough when you blame your own friends for the debacle.
“I’m not just shocked, I’m completely appalled by the sheer level of incompetence. If you are going to be a ‘benevolent hegemon’ (a reference to America’s status as the sole superpower), you had better be good at it.”
Fukuyama says his wife Laura Holmgren, a graduate in Soviet studies and stay-at-home mother of three, was strongly anti-war from the start.
“She started out as a pretty conservative Republican and has ended up detesting Bush.” He says he “really admires” the way she was able to see past her usual loyalties.
He also thinks she intuitively rumbled the neoconservatives, while he was still intellectually wedded to their ideas. “It was partly a personal reaction. She knew a lot of the people socially who favoured the war and thought they were way too sure of themselves.”
How did a scholarly boy fall in with such bullish company? Fukuyama, now 53, grew up in New York where his father was a Protestant minister and civil rights activist with a social conscience. The son turned out to be much more strait-laced. “We had a lot of fights over politics,” Fukuyama says.
He describes himself as a “born academic” and may have inherited his passion for study from his grandfather, the founder of the economics department of Kyoto University in Japan. His mother emigrated to America in 1949 and became a New York social worker.
Fukuyama read classics at Cornell University, where he heard the legendary Allan Bloom, a disciple of the philosopher Leo Strauss, lecture on Plato’s Republic. Many of the neocons share the same Straussian intellectual roots, including Wolfowitz, who came to know Fukuyama at Cornell and gave him a job as his intern in the early years of the Reagan administration.
The two men haven’t spoken lately. “I suspect he may be somewhat annoyed,” Fukuyama says.
Fukuyama was also a postgraduate at Harvard, where he became friends with William Kristol — who went on to become the driving force behind the Project for the New American Century and is editor of the influential neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard (owned by News Corporation, which also owns The Sunday Times). Fukuyama ended up inheriting Kristol’s flat at university. “Good apartments were hard to come by,” he says.
Kristol’s father Irving was a founder of neoconservatism: one of the original band of bright working-class intellectuals in New York in the 1930s who were attracted to Trotskyism, loathed Stalin, and became committed anti-communists in the post- war era.
Fukuyama had other direct channels into the neocons. Another of his mentors was the cold warrior Albert Wohlstetter at the Rand Corporation, who counted Wolfowitz, the former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the ambassador to Iraq, among his protégés.
As the definition goes, neoconservatives are “liberals who have been mugged by reality”, so what baffles Fukuyama is why they have returned to a “Leninist” view of history.
If they distrusted the Soviet Union’s attempts at social engineering (and even disliked its watered-down versions in the West, such as aspects of the welfare state), how could they possibly imagine that a society as complex as Iraq could be rebuilt from top to bottom as a democracy, he wonders? It is perhaps the book’s most wounding insight.
Before we met, I went to hear Fukuyama chair a debate in Washington with Kristol and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French superstar philosopher. It was all very polite and good natured — there were lots of mon cher Francis and mon cher Kristol from Lévy — but it was obvious that the affable Kristol was seriously annoyed at being branded a Leninist.
He has since decided he might as well accept the label, up to a point. In The Weekly Standard, Kristol went on to turn the tables on his old friend. Are we Leninists? “No,” he wrote. “Does it mean we believe — as Fukuyama defines Leninism — that ‘history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will?’ . . . Yes.”
It would be nice, Kristol added, if we lived in a world without jihadists where we didn’t have to take the enemies of liberal democracy seriously. “To govern is to choose, and to accept responsibility for one’s choices. To govern is not wishfully to await the end of history.”
Fukuyama takes a far less alarmist view of the power of jihadists and tends to regard the September 11 attacks as a particularly lucky strike. “It’s possible that terrorists may get a nuclear weapon,” he says doubtfully, “but that one scenario has driven a great deal of fear.” He would like to see more multi-multilateralism, as he calls it, to supplement the work of the United Nations in defusing international tension.
Somewhat surprisingly, he describes himself as a Marxist, “in the sense that I believe in a general process of economic and social modernisation”. You can only steer things and speed things up at the margins of society, he tells me.
For somebody with such a deterministic view of history, isn’t he writing off the chances of success in Iraq too soon? Especially since he still believes humans are made for liberal democracy.
“It’s way too premature to predict how it will play out,” he admits. “It’s not clear the final judgment will be negative. It is entirely possible that Iraq will become a democracy, but the causality will be extremely muddled.”
In other words, if things turn out well in Iraq, history may well record that it is despite — rather than because of — the best efforts of Bush and Blair. That seems harsh to me, but Fukuyama is implacable. Whether they win or lose history’s gamble, he believes the champions of the war should be blamed for starting it.
After the Neocons by Francis Fukuyama is published by Profile at £12.99. It will be reviewed in Books by Simon Jenkins next week.
