Gary Rosen is the editor of Commentary and a self-confessed neo-conservative. He has a book-review of Francis Fukuyama's new book. The article is titled; The War Among the Conservatives. A leading neocon thinker breaks ranks with his former allies over Iraq. The review itself is boring and doesn't help me decide to read the book or not, but the second half of the article is all refutation. That is where it gets interesting.

Fukuyama is no fly by night neo-conservative. He was one of the signers to the Project for a New American Century [PNAC]. His thesis that liberal democracy and free-markets represent the highest form of human organisation possible was espoused in his book, End of History and The Last Man . This served as the moral backing for the projection of American principles and values into areas of the world that were still mired in despotism, mercantilism and theocracy.

This thinking came from a Cold War perspective where liberal democracy and capitalism were more efficient at providing prosperity than communism and central planning. In my opinion this is where the neo-conservatives misjudged the lesson of the cold-war. Rather than a state backed organisation method winning through the moral authority of the nation-state; it was the triumph of systems that were more decentralised than their opponents.

Humanity is a technological species and endlessly innovates. Organisational innovation is just as valid a technology as an iPod or Space Shuttle. We are witnessing the rise of a destructive form of decentralised organisation in the Middle East in the insurgency and terrorism.

There are numerous examples in science of people making loud proclamations that we now know everything about the atom, or that everything that can be invented has been. When Ernest Rutherford presented his conundrum of the electron whizzing around the nucleus of an atom without its orbit degrading and crashing into the nucleus, you get an idea of some of the mental gymnastics people have to go through to wrap their head around the change.

Richard Feynman commented on atomic behaviour in the 1960s with;

Because atomic behaviour is so unlike ordinary experience it is very difficult to get used t and it appears peculiar and mysterious to everyone, both to the novice and to the experienced physicist.

The same parables can be drawn with western civilisation since the Westphalian agreement. We have become used to nation-states with heavily centralised authority and sovereignty occasionally battling it out on the world stage. The last century has been dominated by nation-states head-butting in a permanent state of conflict ending with the Cold War.

Now we are facing non-state actors who have destructive purposes and are capable of creating massive disruption to the overly centralised institutions and structures of the modern nation-state infrastructure. Basically, anything that is centralised is vulnerable. Government, energy, etc. Note that after the September 11th and New Orleans disruptions the economy was one of the least affected areas. This is because of its decentralised nature.

Back to the Book Review

According to the book review, Fukuyama is now advocating soft power, rather than the hard power of military might for change that is part of neo-conservative doctrine. Irving Kristol wrote ;

Behind all this is a fact: the incredible military superiority of the United States vis-a-vis the nations of the rest of the world, in any imaginable combination. ... And it is a fact that if you have the kind of power we now have, either you will find opportunities to use it, or the world will discover them for you.

The military is a central component in neo-conservative foreign policy and moral force for change in other nation-states. I wrote that this use of a military was unwise and unsustainable in August of 2004 . It appears the Fukuyama has joined that opinion.

But Rosen is not convinced of soft power's ability. Neo-conservatives distrust the meta-national institutions and agreements such as the United Nations preferring unilateral action or bilateral agreements. What Paul Keating called "American exceptionism". Rosen asks;

But can such "soft power" succeed without sterner stuff behind it? Is it an answer to the multiple pathologies of the modern Middle East? Short of military intervention, it is difficult to see how any sort of democratic spark could have penetrated Iraq's police state.

For that matter, in a region flush with petrodollars, dominated by strongmen and sheikhs, and threatened by Islamist insurgency, reform-minded leaders are unlikely to emerge anywhere without considerable pressure from the outside -- at the very least, of the economic and diplomatic variety.

Fukuyama prefers carrots -- "our ability to set an example, to train and educate, to support with advice and often money" -- but the job plainly demands sticks as well if we hope to see results in our own lifetime.

Rosen does not look at Iran which was making steps toward liberal democracy and was the greatest threat in the region to do an Indonesia and overthrow the theocracy and hard-liners through elections. Rosen does not take note that the soft way into Iraq was through the elections that Hussein held. This is a massive vector of weakness - as Suharto found out.

Rosen writes;

Fukuyama himself remains committed to the promotion of democracy, but not through the policies of the Bush administration, which have "overemphasized the use of force." His own tool of choice is what foreign policy types call "soft power" - the less coercive means at America's disposal, from foreign aid and election monitoring to the sort of civil affairs know-how that was so conspicuously lacking when U.S. forces arrived in Baghdad.

Election monitoring? South Sea Republic covered that in February 2005 with; The International Electoral Commission . Fukuyama is discovering Australian Republicanism. Good on him.

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