Seeker Blog

Its unfortunate that so much foreign policy debate and analysis of the crises in the Arab-Islamic world is carried on as though ‘neocons’ are the only ones with any explaining to do.

Patrick Porter at Oxblog offers some useful analysis contrasting neo-conservative and realist foreign policy perspectives.

But before dissecting it, its worth making some observations about the broad political philosophy ‘neo-conservatism.’ Thanks to the horrific loss of life and anarchy in Iraq especially in late 2006, the word ‘neocon’, like the word ‘liberal’ in US domestic politics, has degenerated into an empty and lazy word for anything in foreign policy that is undesirable.

I might have written “…that is undesirable with the benefit of hindsight, a super-power that is denied to real leaders”.

<more> See also Kenneth Anderson’s review of Francis Fukuyama’s latest book After the Neocons. According to Anderson, Fukuyama offers “a replacement for neoconservative foreign policy, something that he calls “realistic Wilsonianism”.

….In the years after the publication of The End of History, the neoconservatives in foreign policy held the line that the basic institutions and values of democracy, human rights, liberalism, free markets and the emancipation of women were accepted worldwide and not open to question. Fukuyama himself moved on: in Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity (1996), he fleshed out certain of the cultural values that made liberal capitalism work; in State-Building: Governance and world order in the 21st century (2004), he addressed the problem of failed states; and in Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the biotechnology revolution (2003), he considered how to avoid yet another modern dystopia.

During the early Bush years, as liberal and conservative thought in America became increasingly polarized, Fukuyama and other conservative thinkers continued to set the tone of the administration. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, as we now know, intellectuals with a very different idea were also at work. They too had a global political vision; but theirs was a dream, not of the end of history, but of a rebirth, a resumption of the long march of Islam, stalled by centuries of Western expansion but reinvigorated by contemporary global demography. The true challenge to neoconservative foreign policy came, not from liberals on the Potomac, but from armed theocrats in the Old World. The Islamist project is a paradoxical vision of history simultaneously old and new, premodern in its deployment of ancient Islamic doctrines but postmodern in its highly selective use of them. It borrows notions from the heart of Western thought – multiculturalism, anti-colonialism, ressentiment – but in the service of a radical alternative to secular liberal capitalism. Like Fukuyama himself, Islamists have an end-time ideology – in their case not a secular, democratic, civil society writ global, but the worldwide umma, as prescribed in the Koran. For a crucial period of time, the Islamist vision was almost invisible to the West, even as it was under elaboration; articulated in another language, in Arabic rather than English, its audience was not in think tanks in Washington but among the resentful leftovers of modernity in immigrant communities in the cities of Europe.

…As a positive political doctrine, Fukuyama says, neoconservatism is one of four principal approaches to American foreign policy. The other three are: first, realism in the mould of Kissinger, which emphasizes power and stability, and tends to downplay the internal nature of other regimes; second, liberal internationalism, which hopes to transcend power politics and move to “an international order based on law and institutions”; and finally, in Walter Russell Meade’s term, “Jacksonian” nationalism, tending to a security-related view of American national interests and distrust of multilateralism.

Recommended.