ìThe Art of Reconstruction,î by Francis Fukuyama, Wall Street Journal, 28 July, p. A12.

Iíve always greatly admired Francis Fukuyama and haveóat timesóimagined myself following his same career pattern. One of the best books I used in my Ph.D. dissertation on East European-Third World security relations in the 1970s and 1980s was a collection of articles edited by Fukuyama. Thatís right. Both he and I not only started as Soviet experts, but both of us came out of the same, far more narrow field of Soviet bloc relations with the Third World. Fukuyama left that narrow specialty far behind when he wrote ìThe End of Historyî in the early post-Cold War years, and since has become a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, but a big thinker par excellence. I hope to do similar things with my career as a result of finally bringing PNM to the world.

Fukuyamaís latest book is ìState Building,î so his current ideas are naturally gravitating toward the same conclusions Iíve reached regarding the need for the Sys Admin force.

Fukuyamaís big point in this op-ed concerns the size of government and how we need to understand that asking most Gap countries to go smaller in their governments is the wrong way to go. Only when a state/economy/society reaches a certain maturity does it make sense to start asking the government to get out of the way. Until then, stronger public institutions are crucial for developing, especially in weak states. Fukuyama quotes Milton Friedman as saying he was wrong to tell all the former socialist states to privatize at all costs in the early 1990s: ìBut I was wrong. It turns out that the rule of law is probably more basic than privatization.î In other words, get the security, then the rules, and then the economics can unfold more freely.

Then, at the end of the op-ed, Fukuyamaís logic leads him to the same basic conclusion I reached in PNM: we need a new US Government entity thatís first and foremost about what I call the ìback half,î or that transition space between war (the ìfront halfî) and peace (that future worth creating that involves shrinking the Gap). Hereís how he ends the piece:

The Americans who presided over the successful reconstruction of postwar Europe and Japan were for the most part New Dealers who had just lived through a period of intense state-building in Washington. No similar cadre exists now. If there is any lesson to be drawn from our haphazard reconstruction of Iraq, it is that we need to reorganize all of our soft-power agencies (State, USAID, the civil affairs units of the military and the broadcasting agencies) to be better able to do both reconstruction and development. In the place of ad hoc planning, we need to provide a permanent institutional home for people with experience in prior efforts. Difficult and contradictory as these functions are, they will be as much a key to overall American power and influence in the coming years as the technological prowess of our armed forces.

What Fukuyama is basically calling for is a Dept. of Something that lies between the Department of Defense/War and the Department of State/Peace, and itís exactly what Iím aiming for in enunciating the need for the Sys Admin force, because unless the Department of Defense creates such capacity, talking about the other parts that may eventually migrate toward it from the other side of the Potomac River will remain just thatótalk and nothing more.