The fixation on who's up and who's down isn't helpful
Sunday, February 19, 2006 at 4:03PM I guess i was surprised to see this from Fukuyama ("After Neoconservatism," New York Times Magazine, 19 February 2006).
It seems like he's gotten more defensive on the whole "end of history" thing as he's gotten older, so he seems more fixated on these camp arguments that I think, over the course of time, will be considered rather overblown.
In the end, Bush is Bush just like Reagan was Reagan. W sees the world in rather stark terms of good and evil, and he believes in defending the good and attacking the evil. Dressing it all up with Leo Strauss and neocons and Paul Wolfowitz secretly running more of the universe than is normal for a DEPSECDEF is all cool, in that DC-who's-up-and-who's-down sort of way, but it's not actually very descriptive or particularly helpful to our understanding of where we've been or where we going.
9/11 gave us a strong sense of where we are in history right now, along with where globalization is right now as well as Islam adapting itself to its encroaching embrace of its predominantly traditional culures. Bush acted on that realization and forged a host of new rule sets that will not go away. Some want to chalk that all up to "neocons," but I honestly think it's a whole lot deeper than that.
So Bush got us in deep in the Middle East on the basis of his view on how to respond to 9/11, and we're somewhat stuck right now with what's already on our plate. So don't expect any major military interventions any time soon. Bush is probably done for his second term, and much will depend on who comes next.
But guess what? That next president will face the same basic international environment: same problems, possibly new solutions in addition to the ones we've tried so far, but unlikely to abandon the right and the propensity to use the same tools Bush tapped, to include the military. As I like to point out: the entire post-Cold War period has seen three presidents so far use the military a whole helluva lot. I don't see that essential dynamic, or what I call the military-market nexus, going away any time soon.
What innovations a new president should bring is a more flexible definition of who can be our allies in this process. You can call this whatever school of thought you want, and many names will inevitably be employed with little common sense (but academics have rarely required that in their works) and result in numerous goofy bestsellers that explain nothing that readers don't already know and simply want reinforced.
But in the end, much will depend on the person in the Oval Office. If I could get a Bill Clinton-like player on economics and a Bush-like guy on security, I might actually have the peanut butter-chocolate combo of my dreams, and the best packages on both sides right now are probably Hillary v. Hagel, although I think there are several on both sides who can grow into that understanding over the course of a very long campaign (Warner, Brownback, maybe Feingold, very possibly Bayh). Kerry and Rice are strangely attractrive long shots, made so primarily because it's hard to imagine the transformation from--respectively--past-losing candidate and single/rather closed-off personality who's never run for office. Then again, watching Hillary's trajectory makes one realize that such transformations are completely possible.
But again, what neocons-up-or-down has to do with any of that is rather amusing but pointless to consider.
But I guess it's okay for a period of navel gazing that the wonks and academics do so well.
I, however, will do my best to resist, because I think that scorecarding is the death to big think.
Reader Comments (10)
I was somewhat surprised by Fukuyama's take on his own "End of history" argument which wasn't the impression I walked away with at the time. Evolution in thinking is a good thing or at least can be but Fukuyama may have been revising history in this instance more than ending it.
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Here's my thought on this one. The essence of the Leviathan/unipolar world is that the US military can trump anybody's intervention, beat any conventional foe. Let's say that Bush *is* done for the 2nd term and that we can't intervene elsewhere. Why are we still in a unipolar world?
Sure, the US might be back in 5 years but by then there are an astonishingly large range of interventions that would have become irreversible "facts on the ground" and not worth the effort for the US to undo. If the US really is "done", we should be coming up on a period of foreign policy adventurism among the regional powers that would normally be restrained by Leviathan.
Then again, maybe the US isn't as tied down as all that...
Tom,
I do not agree with the position that you are taking in this post. The article you reference by Francis Fukuyama, in my opinion, makes some interesting and rational points. Not only is he detailed in describing his view of the recent past and present but he is also very concise (and positive) in his suggestions for the future. For instance take your summation statement below:
But I guess it's okay for a period of navel gazing that the wonks and academics do so well.
This statment, in view of the length of breadth of this article by Francis Fukuyama, seems strong on criticism but short on critical reasoning.
I also do not concur with your below comment because in my view putting ones beliefs beyond measurement is not a necessary (or even desired) trait of a "big thinker".
I, however, will do my best to resist, because I think that scorecarding is the death to big think.
The big plus to your big think in PNM was the description of the problem to the detail necessary to allow measurements to be made. These measurements then help to validate the viability of your solution - scorecarding the shrinking of the GAP. I am not sure I understand how the horizontal "big think" is harmed by taking the time to consider the vertical realities of the day.
As I read your blog time and time again, I wonder why you never reach out to the right(neocons). You never been booked on rightwing talk show. There's huge ordinary audience that would listen to your big ideas and probable buy more of your books too. Your ideas would strike a note with the right. Sure the right has its prejudices ,but they're way more open minded when the truth hits them right between the eyes. I (after reading your book) have better view on globalization, what the gap is. The conflict in Iraq , what the War on Terror is about and what means to me as an American. When I donate to a chairty that sends school supplys to kids in Iraq. Your work puts it all into perspective.
Bush is just carrying on policies begun under Clinton, but on a grander, and I think more effective scale.
evolvedreason - One reason Barnettism isn't a cult is that Dr. Barnett doesn't hold himself out as a god-like being that does big picture and detail as well. I suspect that this is mostly because he's smart enough to realize that presenting yourself as a renaissance man is not a realistic stance to take in the modern world. There's just too much to know out there. This was one of the points of my article in the first issue of Dr. Barnett's short-lived newsletter when he was an independent.
Imagine a grid stretching out along a plane and marked out in sets of knowledge domains. Some domains are close to each other, like engineering and architecture. Others are quite far apart, like engineering and philology (if you find the examples inapt, don't complain but substitute your own as they're not important per se). Now take that 2 dimensional map of human knowledge, label it 40,000 feet and stretch it out into a 3d space. The knowledge domains drift and interact all the way down in different ways, forming unexpected connections. The bottom layer is the most basic, detailed knowledge in a domain. For instance, exactly how a network card works in terms of voltages and amperes or the exact ingredient.
This is the real problem of big knowledge and detailed knowledge. The best you can hope for is to achieve expertise at a certain level and have the capacity to dive down a domain "stack" when you want to explore in more detail. If you dive down too deep and too often, you can easily get lost in the complexity. This is how I personally interpret the "death to big think" line towards the end.
Tom,
I agree with your assessment of Fukuyama's article. He does seem to paint with far too big a brush with dismissing the neocon ideology, particularly when he ascribes an oversimplistic viewpoint of the world and the Middle East to them.
However, I'm rather perplexed that you think that Chuck Hagel is a "Bush-like guy on security". If anything it's quite the opposite. His national security views have been closer to Ted Kennedy than President Bush. Hagel harbors deep suspicion of the use of force and tends to display a fatalistic view of ultimate failure in our ventures abroad. He is too deeply scarred by Vietnam to be an effective leader.
John McCain is probably the closest thing amongst Presidential contenders for '08 in the GOP to be a "Bush-like guy on security" right now, though he might prove somewhat of a loose cannon.
The most astute and responsible Democratic political figures in the last decade were Liberman, Sam Nunn, and Lee Hamilton. The last two bailed out of politics to try to influence policy from the outside. Liberman is left in place, treated like an eccentric unlke by his party. Wassup?
Lou H
In the section of the article "What to Do?", Fukuyama offers some reasonable points that seem to be congruent with much of what Tom Barnett has written. For example "We need to demilitarize what we have been calling the Global War on Terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments" and "The US needs to come up with something better than 'coalitions of the willing'..." and "The world lacks effective international institutions that can confer legitimacy on collective action" and " we do not have adequate mechanisms of horizontal accountability among states."
These comments can apply to Tom Barnett's ideas related to the Leviathan and the other forces he proposes;to the idea of using G-8 as the effective mechanism to trigger interventions; and to the 'failed states in and good states out'. So I see, in many places the acceptance of many of the Barnett ideas.
To Hansmeister's point, I don't get the Hagel mention either. He seems to me to be such an outlier in terms of Republican candidates. And I have not seen any work of his nor of Hillary's that suggests they are capable of visionary thinking in terms of the synergies between security and economics.
In fact, if you consider the security and economics nexus, one of the great candidates to me personally is Giuliani. His book Leadership alone demonstrates that he is above and beyond anything that Hillary and Hagel would aspire to become in service to the public. In addition, Giuliani demonstrates through both his record and consistent philosophies how he would be excellent on both security and economics.
Scorecarding in the sense of who has nailed more talking points or policy victories than the other is meaningless in the long-term. The key is in what vision is driving the policy victories.