In Defense of Democratic RealismCharles Krauthammer-

ON FEBRUARY 10, 2004, Idelivered the Irving KristolLecture to the American

Enterprise Institute outlining a theory offoreign policy that I called democraticrealism. It was premised on the notion thatthe 1990s were a holiday from history, anillusory period during which we imaginedthat the existential struggles of the past sixdecades against the various totalitarianismshad ended for good. September 11reminded us rudely that history had notended, and we found ourselves in a newexistential struggle, this time with anenemy even more fanatical, fatalistic andindeed undeterable than in the past.Nonetheless, we had one factor in ourfavor. With the passing of the SovietUnion, we had entered a unique period inhuman history, a unipolar era in whichAmerica enjoys a predominance of powergreater than any that has existed in thehalf-millennium of the modern state sys-tem. The challenge of the new age iswhether we can harness that unipolarpower to confront the new challenge, orwhether we rely, as we did for the firstdecade of the post-Cold War era, on thevague internationalism that characterizesthe foreign policy thinking of Europeanelites and American liberalism.

Charles Krauthammer is a syndicated columnist forthe Washington Post, an essayist for Ti?ne maga-zine and a member of the editorial board ofThe National Interest.

The speech and the subsequent AEImonograph' have occasioned some com-ment. None, however, as loquacious asFrank Fukuyama's twelve-page rebuttal inthe previous issue of The NationalInterest? His essay is doubly useful. It is aprobing critique of democratic realism,yet demonstrates inadvertently how littlethe critics have to offer as an alternative.

Democratic Realism

IN MY SPEECH I describe thefour major schools of Americanforeign policy. Isolationism defines

the American national interest extremelynarrowly and essentially wishes to pull upthe drawbridge to Fortress America.Unfortunately, in the age of the superson-ic jet, the submarine and the ballistic mis-sile, to say nothing of the suitcase bomb,the fortress has no moat, and the draw-bridge, as was demonstrated on 9/11, can-not be drawn up. Isolationism has a longpedigree, but today it is a theory of nostal-gia and reaction. It is as defrinct post-9/11as it was on December 11, 1941, the daythe America First Committee disbanded.

More important is liberal internation-alism, the dominant school of American

'Krauthammer, Democratic Realism: An AmericanForeign Policy for a Unipolar World (Washington,DC: AEI Press, 2004).

^Fukuyama, "The Neoconservative Moment", TheNational Interest (Summer 2004).

. The National Interest—Fall 2004- .15

liberalism and of the foreign policy estab-lishment. Its pillars are (a) legalism, theconstruction of a web of treaties andagreements that will bind the internation-al community in a normative web; (b)multilateralism, acting in concert withother countries in pursuit of "internation-al legitimacy"; and (c) humanitarianism, adeep suspicion of national interest as ajustification for projecting power—hencethe congressional Democrats' over-whelming 1991 vote against the GulfWar, followed by a Democratic adminis-tration that launched humanitarian mili-tary interventions in Haiti, Bosnia andKosovo. Liberal internationalists seenational interest as a form of communalselfishness and thus as inimical to theirtrue objective: the construction of a newinternational system that mimics domesticsociety, being based on law, treaties,covenants, understandings and norms thatwill ultimately abolish power politics. Todo so, liberal internationalism is preparedto yield America's unique unipolar powerpiece by piece by subsuming it into thenew global architecture in which Americabecomes not the arbiter of internationalevents but a good and tame internationalcitizen.

The third school, realism, emphasizesthe primacy of power in international rela-tions. It recognizes that the internationalsystem is a Hobbesian state of nature, notto be confused with the settled order ofdomestic society that enjoys a communityof values, a monopoly of power, and mostimportant, an enforcer of norms—all ofwhich are lacking in the international sys-tem. Realism has no use for a liberal inter-nationalism that serves only to divert theUnited States from its real tasks. TheUnited States spent the 1990s, for exam-ple, endlessly negotiating treaties on thespread of WMD, which would have hadabsolutely no effect on the very terroristsand rogue states that are trying to get theirhands on these weapons.

Realism has the virtue of most clearly

understanding the new unipolarity and itsuses, including the unilateral and pre-emptive use of power if necessary. But inthe end, pure realism in any Americancontext fails because it offers no visionbeyond power. It is all means and no ends.It will not play in a country that was builton a proposition and that sees itself as thecarrier of the democratic idea.

Hence, the fourth school, democraticglobalism, often incorrectly called neocon-servatism. It sees the spread of democracy,"the success of liberty", as John F.Kennedy put it in his inaugural address, asboth the ends and the means of foreignpolicy. Its most public spokesmen, GeorgeW. Bush and Tony Blair, have sought torally America and the world to a struggleover values. Its response to 9/11 is toengage in a War on Terror whose essentialelement is the global spread of democracy.

Democratic globalism is an improve-ment on realism because it understandsthe utility of democracy as a means forachieving global safety and security.Realists undervalue internal democraticstructures. They see the state system asan arena of colliding billiard balls.Realists have little interest in what isinside. Democratic globalists understandthat as a rule, fellow democracies providethe most secure alliances and most stablerelationships. Therefore the spread ofdemocracy—understood not just as elec-tions, but as limited government, protec-tion of minorities, individual rights, therule of law and open economies—hasultimately not just moral but geopoliticalvalue.

The problem with democratic global-ism, as I argued in my address, is that it istoo ambitious and too idealistic. Thenotion, expressed by Tony Blair, that "thespread of freedom is . . . our last line ofdefense and our first line of attack" is abridge too far. "The danger of democraticglobalism", I wrote, "is its universalism,its open-ended commitment to humanfreedom, its temptation to plant the flag

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of democracy everywhere." Such a world-wide crusade would overstretch ourresources, exhaust our morale and distractus from our central challenge. I thereforesuggested an alternative, democraticrealism, that is "targeted, focused and lim-ited", that intervenes not everywhere thatfreedom is threatened but only where itcounts—in those regions where thedefense or advancement of freedom iscritical to success in the larger war againstthe existential enemy. That is how wefought the Cold War. The existentialenemy then was Soviet communism.Today, it is Arab/Islamic radicalism.Therefore "where it really counts today isin that Islamic crescent stretching fromNorth Africa to Afghanistan."

An Existential Threat

AT ITS MOST fundamental,Fukuyama's critique is that Iam misreading the new world

because there is no existential struggle. Bycalling our war with Arab/Islamic radical-ism existential, I exaggerate the threat andthus distort the whole fabric of Americanforeign policy. "Krauthammer", he writes,"speaks of the United States as being inthe midst of a bitter and remorseless warwith an implacable enemy that is out todestroy Western civilization." "Speaksof"—as one might speak of flying saucers.In reality, asserts Fukuyama, "Al-Qaedaand other radical Islamist groups aspire tobe existential threats to American civiliza-tion but do not currently have anythinglike the capacity to actualize their vision."

Fukuyama apparently believes thatthe phrase "not currently" saves him fromexistential peril. But the problem is thatprecisely as we speak, Al-Qaeda is ener-getically trying to make up for the defi-ciencies from which Fukuyama so com-placently derives comfort. When Hitlermarched into the Rhineland in 1936, hedid not "currently" have the means tooverrun Europe. Many Europeans

believed, delusionally, that he did not pre-sent an existential threat. By Fukuyama'slogic, they were right.

What defines an existential threat isintent, objective and potential capability.Existential struggle is a struggle over exis-tence and identity. Until it lost heart latein life, Soviet communism was utterlycommitted to the eradication of what itcalled capitalism, in other words, theentire way of life of the West. Its missionwas to do to the world what it had doneto, say, Lithuania and Czechoslovakia—remake it in its image. Existential struggleis a fight to the end—extermination or,even better, conversion. That is what dis-tinguishes it from non-existential strug-gles, in which the contending parties inprinciple can find compromise (over terri-tory or resources or power).

Fukuyama is unimpressed with radicalIslam because, in his view, it lacks theglobal appeal of such true existentialthreats as communism and Nazism. ButNazism had little global appeal. A master-race theory hardly plays well among theother races. Did it really have more sym-pathizers and fifith columnists in the Westthan does Islamism today? Islamist cellsare being discovered regularly in justabout every European capital, and someeven in the United States. And these, ofcourse, are just the fifth columnists weknow about. The thought is sobering,given how oblivious we were to the pres-ence among us of the 9/11 plotters. Justbecause Islamism in the West may not,like its Nazi or communist counterparts,take the form of a political party or cap-ture Western celebrity intellectuals, doesnot minimize the threat or the power ofits appeal. Radical Islam does not have itsSartre or its Pound. It is the conceit ofintellectuals to think that this counts formore than a Richard Reid, armed thistime not with a shoe-bomb but a nuclearsuitcase or consignment of anthrax.

Disdaining the appeal of radical Islamis the conceit also of secularists. Radical

dn Defense of Democratic Realism- .77

Islam is not just as fanatical and unap-peasable in its anti-Americanism, anti-Westernism and anti-modernism as any-thing we have ever known. It has the dis-tinct advantage of being grounded in avenerable religion of over one billionadherents that not only provides a readysupply of recruits—trained and readied inmosques and madrassas far more effective,autonomous and ubiquitous than anyHitler Youth or Komsomol camp—butis able to draw on a long and deep tradi-tion of zeal, messianic expectation and acult of martyrdom. Hitler and Stalin hadto invent these out of whole cloth.Mussolini's version was a parody. Islamicradicahsm flies under a flag with far morehistorical depth and enduring appeal thanthe ersatz religions of the swastika andhammer-and-sickle that proved so histori-cally thin and insubstantial.

FUKUYAMA does not justunderestimate the power ofreligion. He underestimates the

power of technology. He is trapped in thenotion that only Great Powers can threat-en other Great Powers. Because theenemy today does not resemble aGermany or a Japan, the threat is "of alesser order of magnitude." For a realist,he is remarkably blind to the revolutionthat technology has brought. The discov-ery of nuclear power is the greatest "orderof magnitude" leap in potential destruc-tiveness since the discovery of fire. True,the atomic bomb was detonated half acentury ago; but the democratization ofthe knowledge of how to make it is new.Chemical and biological weapons are per-haps a century old; but the diffusion ofthe capacity to develop them is new.Radical Islam's obvious intent is to decap-itate the American polity, cripple its econ-omy and create general devastation. Wehave seen what a mere 19 Islamists can doin the absence of WMD. We have seenwhat but two envelopes of mail-deliveredanthrax can do to the world's most power-

ful capital. Imagine what a dozen innocu-ous vans in a dozen American cities dis-persing aerosolized anthrax could do.Imagine what just a handful of the world'sloose nukes, detonated simultaneously inNew York, Washington, Chicago and justa few other cities, would do to the UnitedStates. America would still exist on themap. But what kind of country—and whatkind of polity—would be left? If that isnot an existential threat, nothing is.

Fukuyama, of course, has a stake indenying the obvious nature of the threat,having made his reputation proclaimingthe "end of history", which, if it meansanything, means an end to precisely thiskind of ideological existential threat.One can understand how he would beloath to acknowledge that history hasreturned, that the 1990s were not theend of history but a holiday from history,and that we find ourselves once again,sadly but unmistakably, with everything atstake. But he goes further. He has so per-suaded himself in denial of this new realitythat he needs some psychological reasonto account for why I and other neoconser-vatives are so inexplicably convinced thatwe are in an existential struggle. Hisanswer: Neoconservatives apparentlyidentify so strongly with Israel that theyhave come to conftise America's predica-ment with Israel's. Neoconservatives thinkUnited States is in the same boat as Israel.Fukuyama points out that it is not.

This is bizarre. Of course the UnitedStates is not in the same predicament asIsrael. So what? You do not have to beIsrael to be existentially threatened. IfIsrael's predicament represents the stan-dard for existential threat, then the Westnever experienced it during the sixdecades of anti-fascist, anti-communiststruggle that Fukuyama himself insistswas existential. Israel is threatened withCarthaginian extinction. France was con-quered by Nazi Germany, and is stillFrance today. Poland and Hungary wereconquered by the Soviet Union, and have

18- .The National Interest—Fall 2004-

become Poland and Hungary again. IfIsrael had been conquered in any of itswars, it would not be Israel today, norever again. Simply not matching up to theIsraeli standard says nothing aboutwhether one is engaged in an existentialstruggle.

What is interesting about Fukuyama'spsychological speculation is that it allowshim a novel way of Judaizing neoconser-vatism. His is not the crude kind,advanced by Pat Buchanan and Malaysia'sMahathir Mohamad, among others, thatAmerican neoconservatives (read: Jews)are simply doing Israel's bidding, hijack-ing American foreign policy in the serviceof Israel and the greater Jewish conspira-cy. Fukuyama's take is more subtle andimplicit. One is to understand that thosespreading the mistaken idea that the Waron Terror is existential are neoconserva-tives so deeply and unconsciously identi-fied with the Jewish state that they cannothelp seeing the world through its eyes.

What makes this idea quite ridiculousis that the leading proponents of thenotion of existential threat are GeorgeBush and Tony Blair. How did they cometo their delusional identification withIsrael? The American war cabinet consistsof Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, DonRumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice. Theyspeak passionately of the existentialnature of the threat to the United States.Are they Marranos, or have they beenhypnotized by "neoconservatives" intosharing the tribal bond?

"Neoconservatism "

FUKUYAMA entitles his cri-tique, "The NeoconservativeMoment", a play on the first

exposition of my theory, "The UnipolarMoment", published 14 years ago.̂ Hisintent is to take down the entire neocon-servative edifice. His method is to offer a"careful analysis" of "Krauthammer'swritings, particularly his AEI speech".

because "his strategic thinking hasbecome emblematic of a school ofthought", that is, neoconservatism.

What Fukuyama fails to understandis that there are two major strains of neo-conservative thinking on foreign policy,not one. There is the democratic global-ism advocated by Blair and Bush andlong elaborated by such thinkers asRobert Kagan and Bill Kristol. And thereis the democratic realism that I and oth-ers have long advanced. Both are "demo-cratic" because they advocate the spreadof democracy as both an end and ameans of American foreign policy. Butone is "realism" because it rejects theuniversalist scope and high idealism ofdemocratic "globalism" and alwaysrequires geopolitical necessity as a condi-tion for intervention. This is hardly justa theoretical debate. It has very practicalconsequences. They were on stark dis-play just half a decade ago, when therewas a fundamental split among conserva-tives on the question of intervention inthe Balkans. At the time, Kagan andKristol (among many others) were strongadvocates of intervention in the Balkansand of the war over Kosovo. I was not. Iargued then, as I argue now, that whilehumanitarian considerations are neces-sary for any American intervention, theyare not sufficient. American interventionmust always be strategically grounded. Inthe absence of a strategic imperative, it isbetter to keep one's powder dry, preciselybecause that powder might be necessaryto meet some coming strategic threat.On 9/11, that strategic threat revealeditself.

At the time of Kosovo, many realiststook the same position I did, while manydemocratic globalists (lazily just called"neoconservatives") took the oppositeview and criticized my reservations aboutintervention as a betrayal of democratic

'Krauthammer, "The Unipolar Moment", ForeignAffairs (Winter 1990/91).

-In Defense of Democratic Realism- .19

principles. Fukuyama's essay does not justconflate these two distinct foreign policyschools. He repeatedly characterizes me asa champion of democratic globalism, theschool with which I explicitly take issue.(Thus: "his [Krauthammer's] own posi-tion that he defines as 'democratic glob-alism'. . . .") It is odd in the extreme towrite a long critique of a speech andmonograph entitled Democratic Realismand then precis that critique thus:"Krauthammer's democratic globalismfails as a guiding principle of foreign poli-cy and creates more questions thananswers." Perhaps Fukuyama believes thathe alone has a proprietary right to theword "realism." Perhaps he believes thatby misrepresenting me as a globalist hecan then identify me with every twist andturn of the Blair and Bush foreign policies.

One of the reasons I gave this speechis that I thought the universalist, bear-any-burden language of both Blair and Bush toadvance the global spread of democracy istoo open-ended and ambitious. The alter-native I proposed tries to restrain the ide-alistic universalism with the realist consid-eration of strategic necessity. Hence thecentral axiom of democratic realism:

We will support democracy everywhere, butwe will commit blood and treasure only inplaces where there is a strategic necessity—meaning, places central to the larger waragainst the existential enemy, the enemy thatposes a global mortal threat to freedom.

FUKUYAMA finds this centralaxiom "less than helpful as aguideline for U.S. intervention"

because "it masks a number of ambigui-ties." He asks the following questions.

Does "global" here mean threats thattranscend specific regions, like radicalIslamism or communism?

Yes.If the enem,y^s reach has to be global, then

North Korea would be excluded from the defi-nition of a "strategic" threat.

Yes. North Korea is a discrete prob-lem. Islamism is not our only problem, nomore than Soviet communism was ouronly problem in the second half of the20*^ century. There can be others, thoughthey are of a lesser order. North Korea isnot on a deliberate mission to spreadJuche communism aroimd the globe or todestroy the United States. Its mission isregime survival, with intimations of threatto South Korea. Its ambitions do notextend beyond that. Which is why it is avery different kind of threat from theexistential Arab/Islamist one we face, andfalls outside the central imperative. Itneeds to be contained. But there is noimperative for its invasion, overthrow andreconstruction—unless we find that, forcommercial and regime-sustaining rea-sons, it is selling WMD to our real existen-tial enemy. Under these circumstances itwould be joining the global war on theother side.

Or does "global" instead mean any mor-tal threat to freedom around the globe?

Any serious threat to what was onceknown as the "free world" as a whole is"global." In the 1930s and 1940s, thatmeant fascism. In the second half of the20'*^ century, that meant communism.Today it means Arab/Islamic radicalism.

Does the fact that an "enemy" poses amortal threat to another free country, but notto us, qualify it as our "enemy?"

No.Is Hamas, an Islamist group which clear-

ly poses an existential threat to Israel, ourenemy as well?

As it defines itself today, as an enemyof Israel, no. Were it to join the war onthe United States, then the answer wouldbe yes.

Is Syria?Because of its hostility to Israel? No.

To the extent, however, that it allies itselfwith and supports the jihadists in Iraq, itrisks joining the enemy camp.

And if these are our enemies, why shouldwe choose to fight them in preference to

20- -The National Interest—Fall 2004-

threats to free countries closer to home like theFARC or ELN, which threaten democracy inColombia, or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela?

We should not. See above.What makes something "central" in this

global war?Whether a change in the political

direction of a state or territory will havean important, perhaps decisive, effect indefeating Arab/Islamic radicalism.Afghanistan meets that test. So does Iraq.

Legitimacy

THIS IS NOT terribly com-plicated. WTiat then is Fuku-yama's quarrel with democra-

tic realism? He seems to accept democrat-ic realism as a theory but then condemnsit in practice because ... well, because ofIraq. He has enthusiastically joined thecrowd seizing upon the difficulties in Iraqas a refutation of any forward-lookingpolicy that might have gotten us there,most specifically, any unilateralist, nation-building policy that got us there. Iraq, hesays, is a mess, and the experience provestwo things: the importance of "interna-tional legitimacy" and the futility of U.S.nation-building among Arabs.

On legitimacy, Fukuyama endorsesmy view that international support doesnot confer superior morality upon anyaction—other nations are acting out ofself-interest, not priestly wisdom. Headmits that the United Nations has "deepproblems with legitimacy", and thatKosovo demonstrated that our Europeanallies themselves do not believe in thenecessity of legitimization through theSecurity Council. Nonetheless, hecharges me with being too dismissive ofthe practical utility of international sup-port and approval.

But no one denies the utility of inter-national support. Of course there arepractical advantages to having SecurityCouncil approval, NATO assistance orwhatever political cover that might

induce, say, India or Turkey to offer assis-tance. You seek whatever approval, assis-tance, cover you can get. You even makeaccommodations and concessions to getit. None of this is in dispute. The onlyserious question is how far you go. Is"legitimacy" a limiting factor? When youfail to get it, do you abandon the policy?Should we have abandoned our policy ofregime change in Iraq—military forcebeing the only way to achieve it—becausewe lacked sufficient cover?

Fukuyama seems to be saying yes, weshould have—although he deploys aKerry-like ambiguity about what hewould actually have done. He seems to besaying that we should have deferred to theopposition of our allies and to the absenceof an international consensus, and notinvaded Iraq—and that our experience inthe aftermath of the war supports thatprudential judgment.

But this assumes two things:First, that a lack of legitimacy is the

cause of our postwar problems. Our cen-tral problem, of course, has been theSunni insurgency and the Moqtada Sadrrebellion. I hardly think that either ofthese groups, or the foreign jihadists whohave come to join them, are impressed byUN resolutions. Indeed, the SecurityCouncil passed a unanimous postwar res-olution legitimizing the American occu-pation. The UN even established a majorpresence in Baghdad right after the war.The insurgents were unimpressed: Theyblew the UN headquarters to smithereens.It is possible that we will fail to defeatthese insurgencies, but the "legitimacydeficit" will hardly be the reason.

Second, it assumes that the choice inMarch 2003 was between invasion andpostwar difficulties on the one hand andpre-invasion stability on the other. Itassumes there were no serious prudentialconsiderations that impelled us towardswar. Of course the lack of Franco-Germansupport made things more difficult. Ofcourse the lack of international consensus

-In Defense of Democratic Realism- .21

constituted a prudential reason not toinvade. But Fukuyama assumes these werethe only prudential considerations, thatdoing nothing about Iraq had no cost, thatthe Iraq problem before the war was insome kind of sustainable equilibrium. Itwas not. The tense post-Gulf War settle-ment was unstable and created huge andgrowing liabilities for all concerned, mostespecially for the United States. First, itcaused enormous suffering for the Iraqipeople under a cruel and corrupt sanctionsregime—suffering and starvation thatthroughout the Middle East and in muchof Europe were blamed squarely on theUnited States. Second, the standoff withIraq made it necessary to maintain a largeAmerican garrison in Saudi Arabia, land ofthe Islamic holy places—for manyMuslims, a provocative and deeply offen-sive presence. Indeed, in his 1998 fatwaagainst the United States, Bin Laden listedthese two offenses as crimes numbers oneand two justifying jihad against America.

Moreover, the sanctions regime wascollapsing. That collapse was temporarilyhalted by the huge pre-war infusion ofAmerican troops into Kuwait that forcedthe Security Council to reaffirm the sanc-tions—but only as a way to avert anAmerican invasion. The troop deploymentwas itself unsustainable. Upon its with-drawal, the collapse of the sanctionsregime would have continued, resulting ina re-energized and relegitimized regimeheaded by Saddam (and ultimately, evenworse, by his sons) that was increasinglyIslamicizing its Ba'athi ideology, re-armingand renewing WMD programs, and extend-ing its connections with terror groups. Asthe quintessential realist Henry Kissingerwrote recently—in the full light andawareness of our postwar troubles—of "thecalculus for preemption":

Could the United States wait until weaponswere actually produced by a country with thelargest army in the region, the second-largestpotential oil income, a record of having used

these weapons against its own population andneighbors, and—according to the Sept. 11commission—intelligence contact with Al-

There is no dispute that a paucity ofinternational support is a prudential con-sideration in any major decision. But inIraq, the paucity of international supportis not the source of our troubles today,and before the war it was far outweighedby the prudential considerations in favorof removing Saddam. And finally, in anydecision, the legitimacy issue is neverdecisive. In the 1980s, our European allieswere almost universally opposed toAmerican support for the NicaraguanContras. The common opinion ofmankind was that American imperialismwas trying to bring back Somozism. Thepolicy had zero "international legitimacy."If Fukuyama's belief in international legit-imacy is real, that should have beengrounds for abandoning the policy—apolicy that was right at the time and thathistory has decisively vindicated.

Nation-Building

TH E LAST OF Fukuyama'squestions about my "centralaxiom" was this: Was Iraq

central to the war against radicalIslamism? I believe it was and is. I arguedthat before the war, and I believe it is allthe more true today. September 11 led tothe inexorable conclusion that a half-cen-tury of American policy towards the Arabworld had failed. Ever since FranklinRoosevelt made alliance with King IbnSaud, the United States has chosen toleave the Arab world to its own politicaland social devices, so long as it remaineda reasonably friendly petrol station. Thearrangement lasted a very long time. Had9/11 never happened, it would have lasted

^Kissinger, "Better Intelligence Reform",Washington Post, August 16, 2004.

22- -The National Interest—Fall 2004-

longer. The poliq/̂ of Arab exceptionalismwas never enunciated, but it was univer-sally understood: America was pursuingdemocratization in Europe, East Asia,South and Central America—everywhereexcept the Arab world. Democratizationelsewhere was remarkably successful andwas the key to stability and pacification.The Arab exception proved costly. On9/11, we reaped the whirlwind fi^om thatpolicy and finally understood that it wasuntenable. We could continue to fightArab/Islamic radicalism by catching a ter-rorist leader here, rolling up a cell there.Or we could go to the heart of the prob-lem and take the risky but imperativecourse of trying to reorder the Arabworld. Success in Iraq would be a singularvictory in the war on radical Islam.Eailure in Iraq would be a singular defeat.

I never underestimated the task. Ihave written before, during and after thewar that the task was enormous, the riskgreat and failure possible—but that theundertaking was necessary.

Eukuyama never addresses the neces-sity question. Instead, he invokes our dif-ficulties and setbacks to discredit the veryidea of nation-building in the MiddleEast, not just because of local conditionsbut because Americans are no good atnation-building. Iraq is a fool's errandthat was bound to fail:

We have been our usual inept and disorga-nized selves in planning for and carrying outthe reconstruction, something that was pre-dictable in advance.

Curiously, however, Fukuyama neverpredicted it in advance. He waited a yearto ascertain wind direction, then predict-ed what had already occurred. At thetime of decision before the war,Fukuyama now tells the New York Times,he had private doubts which he kept tohimself: He did not think the war waswise, but "for all I knew, it might haveworked."^ At the time, then, failure was

not "predictable in advance", after all.And how does he come to predict

now? He writes as if the history to comehas already been written. It has not. Iraq isrid of Saddam, and its future is in play. Weare in the midst of a generational struggle,both in the War on Terror in general andin the reconstruction of Iraq. Fukuyama'sunmistakable conclusion that Iraq is lost is,to put it mildly, premature. It is reminis-cent of John Dos Passos's famous 1946essay, "Americans are Losing the Victoryin Europe."^ We have made serious mis-takes in Iraq. We may yet fail. ButFukuyama's conclusion that Americans aresimply no good at nation-building is retro-spective presumption. We have succeededin the monumental task of reconstructingGermany, Japan and South Korea. Wefailed in Haiti and Somalia. What was theprincipal difference? Great knowledge ofthe local culture? Democratic tradition? InKorea we did not have any great knowl-edge of the culture nor did Korea have ademocratic tradition upon which to draw.Yet South Korea is a remarkable success.

What was the key? Strategic value.When the stakes were high, and correctlyperceived at home as such, we stayed thecourse and devoted the requisite effortand time to succeed. Where the strategicstakes were minimal, as in Haiti orSomaha, we failed because we correctlyunderstood that nation-building is a hugetask and that these places were notremotely worth the cost. The single mostimportant factor in the success of nation-

'David Kirkpatrick, "War Heats Up in theNeoconservative Fold", New York Times,August 22, 2004.Passos, "Americans are Losing the Victory in

Europe", Life (January 7, 1946). The ring isfamiliar: "'We've lost the peace', men tell you.'We can't make it stick.' . . . Never hasAmerican prestige in Europe been lower. . . .We have swept away Hitlerism, but a greatmany Europeans feel that the cure has beenworse than the disease."

Defense of Democratic Realism- .23

building is seriousness.To say that the country that rebuilt

Germany and Japan and South Koreafrom rubble—perhaps the three greatestachievements in nation-building ever—isintrinsically no good at the job is silly. Andif that is the case, by the way, should wenot be cutting our losses in Afghanistan aswell, since it is far more tribal, primitiveand underdeveloped than Iraq?

WHAT IS remarkable aboutFukuyama's pessimismabout the spread of

democracy in an enormous swath ofhumanity and amid one of its most vener-able civilizations is that not long ago hedeclared that all of humanity had alreadymade the critical turn toward democracyand its triumph was inevitable. As he nowadmits, "I, more than most people, amassociated with the idea that history'sarrow points to democracy." Exceptamong Arabs, it seems. One searchesFukuyama's essay for a single "hearts andminds" idea to give "history's arrow" a bitof nudge in this critical region. Whatdoes one find? A single passing referenceto the Bush Administration's "GreaterMiddle East Initiative", a tepid StateDepartment aid and exchange program ofdemocratic engagement—already hope-lessly watered-down and understood byall to be a facade.

This will not do. Before 9/11 we werecontent to wait passively for howevermany generations it took for the Arabs toachieve what had been achieved with thehelp of American (often military) inter-vention in Europe, East Asia and theAmericas: democratization, moderniza-tion and pacification. After 9/11 we nolonger have the luxury of time.

The rejection of nation-building,whether on grounds of American incom-petence or Arab recalcitrance, reduces theWar on Terror to cops-and-robbers, tofighting Al-Qaeda operatives here andthere, arresting some, killing others in

some cave. It simply does not get to theroot of the problem, which is the cauldronof political oppression, religious intoler-ance and social ruin in the Arab-Islamicworld—oppression transmuted anddeflected by regimes with no legitimacyinto the virulent, murderous anti-Americanism that exploded upon us on9/11. You cannot be serious about post-9/11 foreign policy unless you confrontthis reality.

What is to be Done?

HOW DOES Fukuyama con-front this reality? What is hisalternative to democratic

realism? The most bizarre part of his essayis the conclusion. When he finally comesaround to offering an alternative, histhree-point "recalibradon", as he calls it,is so insignificant that he himself admitsto "falling in Krauthammer's fourth'democratic globalism' basket"—that is,he endorses the very foreign policy towhich he ostensibly had such fundamen-tal objections.

Of what does this three point "recali-bration" consist?

1. "In the first instance, doing the sim-ple work of diplomacy and coalition-building that the Bush Administrationseemed reluctant to undertake prior to theIraq War." Now, one can hold in high orlow regard this administration's display ofdiplomatic skill in the six-month run-up tothe Iraq War. But to imply that the admin-istration did not work to build supportboth in the Security Council and outside itis absurd. It worked hard but fell short.What extra work does Fukuyama imaginewould have enlisted France or Russia?Fukuyama then recommends that theUnited States "not gratuitously . . . insultthe 'common opinions of mankind."' Whois for that? If it is a recommendation foranything other than good manners, it isfor granting other nations veto power overactions the United States believes essential

24- -The National Interest—Fall 2004-

to its national interest and to the commondefense. But Fukuyama himself rejects thisidea categorically, saying that it is "utterlywrong" to maintain that "the UnitedStates should never stick its neck out andlead the broader Western world to actionsthat our allies oppose."

2. The United States should establisha new bureaucracy for nation-building.No objection here. We could use aColonial Office in the State Department.

3. Consider establishing, in Fuku-yama's words, a "global alliance of democ-racies, led by newer ones in easternEurope and Latin America" that "couldplay a legitimizing function around theworld in a way that NATO cannot."Another perfectly good idea. I proposed itover a year ago.̂

So, a well-mannered diplomacy, acolonial office and perhaps a new allianceof democracies. That's it? This isFukuyama's alternative to democraticrealism? Well, he adds: "I believe thatEast Asia is under-institutionalized andripe for some creative thinking by theUnited States." Al-Qaeda brings downthe World Trade Center, war with thejihadists rages all over the world, Iraq is inplay, and Fukuyama calls for thinking cre-atively about new East Asian institutions.

FUKUYAMA begins his essayby promising to "come upwith a foreign policy that is

very different from the one he[Krauthammer] lays out." He ends with

a tweak: a couple of new institutions andmore diplomacy. One finishes the essayin puzzlement. What was this polemicabout? He declares himself an adherentof "democratic globalism", the veryschool of thought he was ostensibly tak-ing on. "He retains", he tells the NewYork Times, "his neoconservative princi-ples—a belief in the universal aspirationfor democracy and the use of Americanpower to spread democracy in theworld." What is left of his promise of avery different foreign policy?

The reason he offers none is that, ashe concedes, no plausible alternative theo-ry presents itself. Isolationism is obsolete.Liberal internationalism is too naive to beeffective. And realism fails to see thepower and promise of democratic trans-formation. Democratic realism offers aclear framework for responding to thechallenge posed by history's unwelcomereturn in September 2001. Fukuyama'sendorsement of democratic realism is wel-come, and his recalibrations duly noted. D

''See "A Costly Charade at the UN", WashingtonPost, February 28, 2003. "We should beginlaying the foundation for a new alliance toreplace the now obsolete Cold War alliances.. . . It might include the United States,Britain, Australia, Turkey, such willing andsupportive Old Europe countries as Spain andItaly, and the New Europe of deeply pro-American ex-communist states. Add perhapsIndia and Japan and you have the makings of anew post-9/11 structure."

I am sick of all this horried business of politics, and Europe ingeneral, and think you will hear of me going with the children tolive in Australia.

—Queen Victoria, 1859, letter to the Princess Royal

Jn Defense of Democratic Realism- -25