DEMOCRACY, POWER, AND THE NEOCONSERVATIVE LEGACY
Francis Fukuyama
The subject of this book is American foreign policy since the al- Qaida attacks of September n , 2001. This is a personal subject for me. Having long regarded myself as a neoconservative, I thought I shared a common worldview with many other neoconservatives— including friends and acquaintances who served in the administration of George W. Bush. I worked for former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz on two occasions, first at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and later at the State Department; he was also responsible for recruiting me to come to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies while he was dean there. I worked with his mentor Albert Wohlstetter at the latter’s consulting firm, Pan Heuristics, and like him was an analyst for several years at the Rand Corporation. I was a student of Allan Bloom, himself a student of Leo Strauss and the author of The Closing of the American Mind. I was a classmate of William Kristol in graduate school
and wrote frequently for the two magazines founded by his father, Irving Kristol, The National Interest and The Public Interest, as well as for Commentary magazine. And yet, unlike many other neoconservatives, I was never persuaded
of the rationale for the Iraq war. I started out fairly hawkish on Iraq and in 1998 signed a letter sponsored by the Project for the New American Century urging the Clinton Administration to take a harder line against Baghdad after Saddam Hussein blocked the United Nations weapons inspectors. An American invasion of Iraq was not then in the cards, however, and would not be until the events of September 1 1 , 2001. In the year immediately preceding the invasion, I was asked to participate in a study on long-term U.S. strategy toward the war on terrorism. It was at this point that I finally decided the war didn’t make sense, and the study gave me an opportunity to think through many of the issues in the present book. I have spent much time since then wondering whether I had somehow changed my views in a way that disqualified me as a neoconservative or whether the neoconservative supporters of the war were misapplying common principles we all still shared (…)
