After Neoconservatism

JB

Fukayama makes the excellent point that neoconservatives were perhaps seduced by the ease with which Communism fell in the late 1980's and early 1990's. The fall of Communism was, after all the great confirmation of neoconservatives' fervent anti-communism and their belief that promoting American ideals of democracy and freedom could make the world better. But that very example also shows why the Bush Doctrine was so deeply unrealistic. The fall of communism began with Truman's policies of containment in the late 1940's, which were continued with various fits and starts along the way by every U.S. President thereafter for 40 more years. Only after a long and sustained strategy of opposition and containment, in which military force played only one role (and often, as in Korea and Vietnam, not an entirely successful one), did Soviet-style Communism finally give up the ghost. Neoconservatives were right to believe that it was worth fighting the Cold War, but they had forgotten why it was called a "cold" war-- that it did not primarily rely on the use of direct military force to topple your enemy.

That does not mean that the best way forward is the model of the Cold War in all of its aspects. The current struggle is different in many respects. What the failure of neoconservatism does teach us is the inevitable limits of an ideological approach to foreign policy, and indeed, to human betterment generally. Neoconservatives first emerged as disillusioned leftists who criticized the naivete of American liberalism, arguing that it was not enough merely to have good intentions to make the world better place; that society was far more complex than human foresight could comprehend, and that direct and massive interventions into social arrangements would inevitably produce unintended consequences. How ironic that this lesson of the first generation of neoconservatives was lost on the next generation, who boldly, blindly, and smugly led the United States into a foreign policy disaster.