Interesting to see Philip Bobbitt mentioned in the same breath as "prophets of the internet" and Margaret Thatcher's great reaction to the "End Of History".

Andrew Billen
July 13, 2004

Francis Fukuyama was the intellectual posterboy of U.S. neoconservatism with his book The Death of History, which attested to American's global dominance. But that was before Iraq. Now he wants his old ally Donald Rumsfeld to resign. And he explains why he can't support the president

Among signatories to a statement of principles issued in 1997 by a Neoconservative outfit called the Project For The New American Century, four names today leap out: Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. A fifth also draws attention to itself. It belongs to Francis Fukuyama, a sometime State Department official and author of the heroically optimistic bestseller of 1992, The End of History and the Last Man, a book that seemed to attest that history had come to a full stop with the fall of the Berlin Wall, leaving America Top Nation and the rest of the world panting to emulate its paradigm.

Seven years later history continues on its usual bloody course. Jeb, despite a little local difficulty in Florida, is still George Dubya’s beloved brother, Cheney is Vice-President of the US, Rumsfeld is Defence Secretary and Wolfowitz his deputy. Fukuyama, meanwhile, works at Johns Hopkins university in Washington, writing books that set cats among pigeons on issues as diverse as cloning and the disintegration of the family. His great subject, however, is foreign affairs and on these he is no longer of a mind with his co-signatories. For Iraq, Fukuyama thinks, Rumsfeld should resign – and he will not be voting for Bush.

Although its argument, as he will uncomplainingly explain, was widely misunderstood, the End Of History concluded that there was no alternative to the liberal, capitalist democratic model. But if you will the end – and Fukuyama used “end” in the sense of goal – perhaps you must will the means and this is exactly what the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) set out to do. Its aim was to “rally support for American global leadership” as it shaped the 21st century into something favourable to its principles and interests. In particular, defence spending needed to increase “significantly” in order to “challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values”.

In other words, Fukuyama was almost right: the end of history was nigh. Now America needed to hurry it along. The PNAC hawks finally got their chance in the mayhem after September 11 when they persuaded their President to “challenge” the regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Fukuyama should have been cheering — or been as near to cheering as a softly spoken professor of 51, short and slight, allows himself to get. Instead, as US troops went into Iraq, he quietly prophesied doom. At the time he was working on a book, State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First Century, whose premise was that building strong states was a noble aim but extremely difficult to achieve. Now just published here, it enumerates the US’s involvement in 18 nation-building projects since its conquest of the Philippines in 1899, and counts just three a success: Germany, South Korea and Japan. Even in Bosnia, where peace has returned and the economy revived, there is still, he says, no sign of the emergence of a democratic, self-supporting state. “State building is extremely difficult,” he tells me at a hotel in Clerkenwell, London, “and we don’t know nearly as much about it as we think we do, which means we have got to be very careful where we try to do it. It would have been better if the Bush Administration had thought that through before the Iraq war happened.”

So when he signed up for PNAC, he did not have Iraq in his sights? “Nobody did. When that letter talked about regime change, what it was supporting was the INC (Iraqi National Congress) and exiles and possibly destabilising the regime, all of which the Clinton Administration ultimately signed on to.” Unlike the White House, Fukuyama stuck to his pre-9/11 pragmatism, believing (wrongly) that Saddam had chemical and biological arms but still thinking he could be contained. “And I thought the cost of managing the postwar thing would be insupportable. If in a hypothetical situation I thought we could have handled the postwar easily, well ...”

Then he might have been pro-invasion? “Yeah, but I guess what I find a little hard to understand is that so many neoconservatives had spent the previous generation arguing against ambitious social engineering on the grounds that nobody can control unanticipated consequences. I found it surprising that they all tended to believe that the democratisation of Iraq would be a relatively straightforward thing.” Fukuyama, in fact, corrects me when I refer to Rumsfeld as neocon. Indeed, Iraq might now be doing better if he truly had been one.

“He was one of the people that was not happy about nation building. He wanted to go in and out quickly. There was a marriage between those conservatives and the neoconservatives prior to the war, where they agreed on the need to get rid of Saddam. I think one of the reasons that there was such a lack of preparation was that Rumsfeld didn’t anticipate having to stay there.” But US troops were greeted with guns, not roses. Last month Paul Bremer, the departing American administrator, left the Iraqi people with 97 new laws (one demanded that they keep both hands on the steering wheel when driving) and the strong possibility, Fukuyama believes, that their country will disintegrate into civil war and mulch into a breeding ground for terrorism.

So Rumsfeld should go? “I think that given the degree to which he was responsible for the failure to prepare, that would be an honourable thing to do. One of the things that is infuriating to a lot of people is the unwillingness of anyone in the administration to admit that they did anything wrong or that anything was unexpected. I think the reason that that’s happened is it’s an election year and if they admit that they were wrong it would just become fodder for the other party. But I don’t think it’s a good situation.”

It is not simply a bad situation for Iraq; it is bad for the proactive version of End of History project that he signed up to in 1997. Pre-emptive, nation-building America is at bay, he thinks. Even his friend Paul Wolfowitz, who as director of National Planning tempted Fukuyama out of a right-wing think-tank, the Rand Corporation, into a job in Reagan’s State Department in 1981, must be having doubts. “Of all the people in the administration I think that he’s one of the most reflective and so I think it would be very unlikely that he has not had all sorts of second thoughts,” he says, although he has spoken to him only briefly.

“I think it’s safe to say that Iraq has become such a black hole it has sucked in all the other dimensions of US foreign policy. The likelihood of this happening again in the near future is probably low. And that’s not really a good thing because it may be necessary for the US to act decisively in some future crisis and it won’t do so because of this experience. I mean, I think that it’s important not to get carried away with the criticism of the way that this particular crisis worked out, because if you look back at the history of US-European relations over the whole period of the Cold War, there were innumerable times where the US took a more forward-leaning position than the Europeans.

“I disagree that it (Iraq) was so out of keeping with the earlier pattern in US-European relations. The only thing that’s different is that in the earlier cases US judgment turned out to be good and European judgment not so good, whereas it was kind of the reverse on this one.”

Because he is both a historian and a former public servant, I hope he can explain why Bush made this misjudgment without, like the Left, imputing his integrity. In the first place, he says, nothing would have happened if 9/11 had not made it clear that it was not safe to leave Afghanistan to its own devices. The various brands of conservatism within the White House orbit then all began telling Bush the same thing and the former Governor of Texas, famously inexperienced in foreign affairs, acted. It wasn’t, then, as some say, that Bush wanted to avenge his father’s record in Iraq? “I think that’s silly. There is one revealing quotation where he was asked whether he sought advice from his father about the war prior to the war. I think this was in the Bob Woodward book (Plan Of Attack) He said something like, ‘No, I looked to my other father, the father in Heaven’. I think from these titbits that you pick up, he deliberately did not want to talk to his father about this because he did not want to be in his father’s shadow.”

Others think the war was conducted on behalf of American oil barons. “I think that’s ridiculous. If you look at what the oil industry was advocating, what they wanted was a lifting of sanctions. They wanted to be able to go back. They could work with Saddam Hussein as easily as, you know, any other country could.”

Because Fukuyama instincts are rightward his criticisms should be hurting Bush in election year. In America, however, he has chosen to lie “fairly low”. State Building, with its diagrams and pages of bibliography, has been regarded as a more or less academic text and not generated much publicity. “I am not eager to pick a fight with a lot of friends of mine,” he admits.

Instead, controversy still dogs The End of History. It started out as lecture delivered in Chicago in 1988 while he was working once more for the Rand Corporation. By the time he had rewritten it over the winter as an essay for the right-wing magazine, The National Interest, he had re-entered the State Department under the first President Bush. Understandably, it was read as an insight into the new President’s mind. When the Berlin Wall fell six months later, it seemed incredibly prescient. The book deal followed.

But not everyone was convinced. Mrs Thatcher muttered: “The end of history? The beginning of nonsense.” As the Nineties dawned and darkened and the Balkans followed Liberia, Rwanda and Iraq and Kuwait into war, one US magazine ran a front cover reading: “The End of Fukuyama”. Others, such as the historian Philip Bobbitt and various prophets of the internet age, predicted that the nation state was itself about to be superseded by new networks of power.

At least for Fukuyama’s father, Toshiko, who was born in Los Angeles, and for his mother, Yoshio, who arrived to study in America from Japan in 1949, their only son’s unexpected fame remained a source of pleasure until their deaths. It undid, Frank (as he is known) thinks, some of his left-wing father’s unease that he had worked for Rand and Reagan.

The book had, of course, a great title. It was not his own but a homage to Georg Hegel, whose theories had been drummed into him at university by his professor, Allan Bloom. Hegel had used the phrase “end of history” to refer to Napoleon’s victory over the Prussians, the moment when the ideals of the French Revolution began to become universal. “I mean, to me and all of the other students of Bloom, if you said ‘the end of history’ instantly it was, ‘Ah yes, the Battle Of Jena, 1806’.” But most of his readers would not have got the allusion? “And still have not.”

Yet if we accept that he never meant that history had ended, merely that, in a Hegelian sense, it had an end (or goal), we may still think he got it wrong. Liberal democracies are a young form of government. They are not uniformly happy. Their openness leaves them vulnerable to attack. Is he still convinced they are going to make it?

“You know, I never made a prediction about them making it in the long run. Terrorists could set off a nuclear weapon if they got their hands on it and there’d be terrible consequences. I made a much more modest observation, which is that I just didn’t see a realistic alternative.” Does he ever wish he could cast off the albatross of misunderstandings? “Well, I can’t. I keep writing these books on different subjects . . .”

And, I know, the conversation always comes back to The End Of History — as it will, after we finish our own talk, at the lecture he later gives at Reuters in Fleet Street. The guest list includes CEOs, ambassadors and professors, including Bernard Crick. It is, I say, an impressive audience for a Washington academic to attract. “Well, I have no idea why people turn up for my talks. I must say I am surprised people find listening to me so fascinating. My family (he has a wife and three children) don’t.”

One reason may be that in a downcast age he remains positive. State Building dwells on difficulty, yet the sheer density of its chapter on management theory advertises his belief that nation building can be achieved. He is sometimes pleasantly surprised when it is, as in Afghanistan, where reconstruction is going much better than predicted. Even the situation in Iraq is, he says, “serious but not hopeless”.

The Reuters evening at least resolves the mystery of his popularity as a lecturer. He is diverting and humorous. Word must have got around. Nation building is certainly possible, he jokes during the Q&A, if you have 200 years to do it in as the British had in India. At this an Indian historian pipes up that India is bedevilled by corruption, graft and red tape; people instead of casting votes “vote caste”. “To that,” deadpans Fukuyama, “I’d say nothing is perfect. You could be Pakistan.”

Of the End Of History Man’s optimism, I conclude, there is no end.

State Building is published by Profile Books at £15.99