Democracy, liberalism, capitalism, civil society, and the rule of law

As a positive political doctrine, Fukuyama says, neoconservatism is one of four principal approaches to American foreign policy. The others are realism in the mold of Kissinger, emphasizing power, stability, and tending to “downplay the internal nature of other regimes”; liberal internationalism, hoping to “transcend power politics altogether and move to an international order based on law and institutions”; and finally, in Walter Russell Meade’s term, “Jacksonian” nationalism, tending to a “narrow, security-related view of American national interests” and distrust of multilateralism. (F 7) What characterizes neoconservatism by comparison to the others in this schema? Fukuyama answers by laying out seven interconnected propositions that, as he says, form neo-conservatism’s fundamental ideological base.[1] It is an unimpeachably intelligent analysis. First, neo-conservatism arose as a highly specific moralizing doctrine for promoting American security in the ideological struggles of the Cold War...

Conjoining the two criticisms, Fukuyama argues that neoconservative principles led the Bush administration to re-fight the last war – the war for the liberation of Eastern Europe from Communism – and mistakenly to believe that the Iraq war would fundamentally be the same thing, a ‘release’ of pent-up social and cultural energy for democracy, liberalism, capitalism, civil society, and the rule of law. posted by KA at 2:46 PM