The speech of prof. F. Fukuiama at the Round Table devoted to the problems of international policy and perspective of Russian-American relations

     Thank you very much for that very kind introduction. I am really very honored to be invited to the Gorbachev Foundation and to meet Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev in person.
     I have to say that when he was the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party I was a very young researcher and I think that during the late 1980-ies I probably read almost every one of the speeches he made in that position. The idea for «The End of History» actually came to me after reading one of your speeches where you were talking of the changing nature of socialism in a way that made me realize that the ideological confrontation that had propelled the Soviet Union and the United States to engage in the Cold War clearly had to be over. And so I feel like I am meeting a historical figure of enormous proportions and I am really very honored to be able to meet you and to speak to all of you today.
     I would like to talk today about American foreign policy which has obviously been of central interest to many people around the world given how powerful the United States is. This for me is a bit of an autobiographical issue because I had many close friends in the Bush Administration and, in fact, had worked for Paul Woolfovitz, our former Deputy Secretary of Defense, on a couple of occasions in the Arms Control Agency and the State Department. I’ve known Condie Rice. Actually Condie Rice is a year younger than I am and was an intern at the RAND Corporation when I had started working there. So I have known her ever since graduate school. And Scooter Libby and quite a number of other people that had been in the Bush Administration.
     Although in the 1990-ies I had supported a very hard line against Iraq as the Administration made in its arguments for war in 2000 after September 11 I found myself less and less persuaded by the kinds of arguments that were being made in favor of the war. And it made me wonder about the whole neo-conservative movement of which I had always felt that I was a part. And so I wrote a book about this and I want to talk a little bit about the history of how the United States got into the current – I think there is no other word than fiasco – to describe where the United States is in the Middle East right now. But then, hopefully, to look forward to the future and talk about new directions because we are going to have a new Administration next year and clearly new directions in American foreign policy.
     Now when you use the word neo-con, it conjures up very negative images virtually everywhere, especially in Europe, in suggesting that this is a form of American militarism or fascism. I think this is unfortunate because actually the genesis of neo-conservatism goes all the way back to a very great group of intellectuals who mostly were educated at the City University in New York in the late 1930-ies and early 1940-ies. This included Irving Crystal, Irving How, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moinihan, former senator from New York, all of whom went on to be major public intellectuals. And many of them, like Irving Crystal, actually started out as Trotskyites.
     The politics in those days in New York City was very radical, and City College was divided between a Stalinist wing and a Trotskyite wing. So these people came out of the extreme left but in the course of World War II came to appreciate the role that the United States played both in defeating Germany and imperial Japan and in setting up a democratic post-war order. So there are always two themes in their thinking about foreign policy. One was the observing of what had happened under Stalin in the Soviet Union when the great socialist ideals were put into practice in a way that undercut the very social justice objectives that they had sought with terrible consequences.
     But the second had to do with American power and the possibility that American power could be used for positive purposes in establishing a democratic world order. In many respects these two themes persisted in the thinking of many neo-conservatives up until the Iraq war. One of the things that I think is ironic is the fact that if the neo-conservatives had taken more seriously their own observations about the dangers of excessively ambitious social engineering that they saw in Stalin’s Russia or in many domestic American social programs in the 1960-ies and the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson, then they would have been much more careful in trying to build a democracy in Iraq and to transform the politics of a region that was very distant and very difficult to control.
     Unfortunately, I think the other principle ended up predominating – that is to say the principle of American power and the belief that American power could be used to reshape events. It lead to an intellectual justification for the foreign policy of the Bush Administration that consisted of several interlinked ideas.
     It’s ironic because the Bush Administration, I think, had one of most coherent foreign policy strategies. It was laid out in a number of documents, especially the National Security Strategy, that the White House published in September of 2002 before the Iraq war. But although it was coherent, I believe almost every single one of its premises was wrong.
     The first idea that was put forward had to do with preventive war as a means of dealing with the post-September 11th terrorist threat. Second idea had to do with America’s willingness to work with allies or, rather, the willingness to go alone and act unilaterally in absence of multilateral legitimation of American action. The third had to do with the use of democracy as an instrument for achieving American strategic goals. So, as I said, each one of these was flawed in a fatal way that contributed to the current crisis that I think American foreign policy is in.
     Let’s just take them briefly one by one. The problem with preventive war I think has been discussed quite extensively at this point. It was a legitimate response in a certain way to September 11 as the idea that you had terrorists with potential access to weapons of mass destruction who would not be susceptible to deterrence or the containment or the usual tools that were used during the Cold War in the mutual relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States, and, therefore, you had to act proactively and stop them before they could attack you.
     That, I think, was a good theory but it was applied, unfortunately, to the wrong object. It was applied to Saddam Husein’s Iraq. Saddam Husein was not a nice person. He had a very bad record in all sorts of ways both towards his neighbors and towards his own people. But he did run a state and was not a stateless terrorist and, therefore, I think, would be subject to deterrence in the way that other states have been. But the Bush Administration applied the general doctrine of pre-emption to this particular target, and, therefore, used the tool of preventive war against a different target that represented a different and less pressing problem.
      I believe as a result of that we are in worse shape with regard to preventing proliferation because the hope, I think, was that you would raise the costs of potentially achieving nuclear weapons status so high that you would deter other countries from doing this. This may have happened with regard to Libya but I think both Iran and North Korea decided that they are actually safer having the nuclear weapon than not having one because that would actually be the one thing that would prevent the United States from changing their regime and, I think, both of those countries ended up with accelerating their nuclear programs rather than ending them. And so we are still in the midst of trying to deal with both of those problems.
     The second aspect of the strategy that the Bush people put into of the place had to do with multilateral cooperation. I think they were actually reacting too many of the experiences of the 1990ies when the Europeans trying to deal with the crisis in the Balkans simply showed that they were unable to take care of the moral and political crisis that was occurring in their own back yard. And it was only as a result of American leadership both in Bosnia and in Kosovo that ended up resolving those problems – the first through the Daton Accords and then the second through the intervention in Kosovo.
     I know a lot of Russians do not agree with the position particularly taken in Kosovo but it does seem to me that Europeans did really have a good way of managing it either. So when it came to the post September eleventh period people in the Bush Administration simply decided that America would have to act by itself and other people will have to follow because the international system both through the Security Council or through the  EU or through NATO was incapable providing adequately strong leadership to deal with serious security crisis.
     I think that this in a certain way was understandable but it ignored the tremendous undercurrents of anti-Americanism that, I believe, are simply part of the global scene. This started in the Clinton Administration, in the Clinton years. I think its is largely the result of the structural imbalance between the power of the United States and the power of the rest of the world. The United States spends as much on its military today as virtually the entire rest of the world combined and also is dominant in political, economic and cultural realms of power.
     I think it is almost inevitable that there is going to be a tremendous amount of resistance because other nations do not feel they can exert a reciprocal kind of influence on the United States. So I think the unilateralism of the US was pushing against a very strong head wind of anti-Americanism, and it made it worse in a sense by the apparent disregard for international opinion, even the opinion of close American allies in NATO.
     The final element of the strategy had to do with the use of democracy as a tool of American strategy. There is a new American security strategy. Documents that has been published last year which, together with President Bush’s second inaugural address, outline the centrality of democracy promotion as the chief instrument of American national security strategy. They don’t talk of nuclear weapons or aircraft carriers or army divisions. They talk about democracy promotion.
     I think democracy promotion is a good thing. I think it has been used effectively over the years in many places. But I think that the stress on democracy as a means of achieving American national objectives in the Middle East puts undue stress both on democracy and on American foreign policy.
     The problem, of course, is that, first of all, from the standpoint of promoting democracy by associating democratization with the policies of the Administration in Washington that had become quite unpopular you make it much more difficult in a sense for people that want democracy to accept American help, so that in Iran today, for example, Congress has allocated $ 75 million to support pro-democracy movements, and nobody wants to take the money because it is simply too dangerous.
     But the other problem from the standpoint of American foreign policy is that democracy is always going to be an important goal but will never be the exclusive goal that America seeks to achieve. We also want energy security. We want to fight terrorism. We want to support allies. And, therefore its always going to look as if we are being hypocritical because there will be times when we will want to support non-democratic states and allies.
     So, the pushing of this as a component of strategy put American foreign policy in a more difficult position and also put it in a way people that wanted democracy in a difficult position.
     I guess the final issue really that is relevant to the question of global leadership simply has to do with the competence with which policies have been carried out. In the United States there has been this whole series of books and debates and discussions over what were wrong in Iraq. And I think a lot of the analysis points to the simple failure to plan, to anticipate, to foresee the kinds of consequences that would come out of the invasion that then made the post-invasion situation there and in the rest of the region simply much worse than they had to be.
     So, that’s the past. The question really concerns what will happen in a post-Bush period.
     In some respects, I think, the second term of the Bush Administration already represents the post-Bush period because the Bush Administration itself has been adjusting to some of the mistakes it made in the first four years. So Condie Rice as Secretary of State has been much more multilateral in her approach to both Iran and North Korea. She’s been working through the European Contact Group in Iran and through the Six Party Talks in North Korea.
      Although there are occasional statements about the possibility of the use of force, I think that that is extremely unlikely in either of these cases. Despite the surge strategy going on in Iraq I think the Republicans increasingly understand there needs to be a serious exit strategy out of Iraq. And one of the things that will happen after September of this year is that we will have a much more serous debate about how to reduce and ultimately eliminate the American presence in that country.
     The real question that I think Americans will be debating is what are the larger ideas that will structure America’s approach to the rest of the world in the post-Bush period. I think it’s safe to say that if you have a Democratic president in 2009 given the record that the last Administration will leave behind, it is going to want to do almost everything differently, just as the Bush people wanted to do everything differently from the way they perceived the Clinton Administration had acted.
     But there is really a lot of variation in the “not-Bush strategy”. One possibility is a much more radical retrenchment of American commitments around the world that has been argued by certain academics in a much more vigorous way as a result of the Iraq war to in a way try to withdraw American forces entirely out of the Middle East, to act as an off-shore balancer but not as a direct participant in security arrangements in the Persian Gulf and other parts of the Middle East, to reduce commitments to NATO, to downplay commitments to Japan and Korea in the Far East. So that is an extreme version of a kind of global retreat or a much more modest footprint strategy.
     Second possibility is to return to a classic realism, the sort that Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, James Baker were associated with, in which we de-emphasize democracy promotion, human rights in our dealings with China and Russia. We work with authoritarian regimes in the Middle East to ensure energy security and generally work to maintain a kind of neutral balance of power in global politics. This would certainly make in certain ways US – Russian and US – Chinese relations easier because it takes away certain ideological element that was present in the neo-conservative approach.
     And then a third possibility is actually the one that I favor, which is to continue to pay attention to the internal politics of countries around the world and make that still an important criteria or consideration in the way that America relates to other countries. But to use different methods - obviously democracy promotion via military intervention - I think is not a very productive path. But, on the other hand, ignoring what happens inside countries, given the nature of our globalized world is also not an adequate way of seeing the world because in many respects the insides of countries relate very directly to their external behavior.
     You cannot deal – particularly in the Middle East – adequately with the Middle East unless you paid attention to the need, for example, to strengthen state authority in places like Palestine or Lebanon or Iraq itself. And, therefore, a policy that is designed, in a sense, reach into states and promote good governance and democracy and legitimate state authority is something that remains appropriate, but the means need to be different.
     The big questions, I think, that I cannot answer in this forum have to do with how the American people themselves will line up with regard to these possible strategies. There is a «red state» conservative voter base that is George Bush’s base of support that typically has wanted a relatively restricted American foreign policy. They are willing to fight wars if American security interests are directly involved but they have very little interest in promoting democracy or human rights. They are actually hostile to immigration. They are suspicious of free trade and globalization.
     «Red states» – it’s the opposite in the political spectrum from the Soviet Union. «Red» means Republican. There are Republican internationalists. These represent business interests, multinational corporations that lead the global economy, that also tend to vote Republican but they are much more internationalist and would be much happier with a Kissinger realist kind of policy.
     And then there is a lot of centrist voters who, I think, are simply confused by events of the past few years, who have been drawn to the extremes of the political spectrum because of the polarization of American politics but who, I think, could actually be persuaded with the right kind of leadership to support a moderate, engaged American internationalist position.
     So those are the contours of the future. Despite the fact that I wrote a quasi-Marxist book called «Тhe End of History», I am actually not a materialist determinist in my view of how history works. I actually believe that leadership and individual agency are important. I believe that if Mikhail Sergeyevich had not been General Secretary in the 1980-ies, things would have worked out differently. So I do believe that individuals matter. Please, don’t ask me who is going to be the next president of the United States because I have no idea.
     But I do think that those are the major generic choices ahead of us and I look forward to the comments of the other panelists as to their views.
     Let me just say one last thing. One of the things that has troubled me as an American over the last few years is that because the United States is powerful as it is, Americans have not been very good at listening to other countries and how we look and how the world looks from the perspective of other people and other places. And I think any effort to in a sense restore American position in the world has to be premised on the simple inability to listen better.
     So I am very eager to hear your comments and of the other panelists. Thank you very much.