“The Neoconservative Moment” by Francis Fukuyama, in The National Interest (Summer 2004), 1615 L St., N.W., Ste. 1230, Washington, D.C. 20036.

Neoconservatives have come under intense criticism for their role (real and imagined) in taking the United States to war in Iraq. Now, one of their own, writing in the premier neocon foreign-policy journal, joins the critics. Fukuyama, author most recently of State-Building (2004), attacks the “emblematic” neoconservative strategic thinking of columnist Charles Krauthammer as “fatally flawed.”

As early as 1990, Krauthammer began propounding a doctrine of American “unipolarity” in the post-Cold War world as an alternative to the ideas of isolationist, realist, and liberal-internationalist thinkers. Fukuyama contends that he and other conservatives (“neo” and otherwise) around The National Interest tried to build another sort of approach based on the same critiques, but it was Krauthammer’s thinking that prevailed in the upper echelons of the George W. Bush administration.

Fukuyama says that the lack of reality in Krauthammer’s doctrine was evident in a speech he gave this past February championing democratic globalism, which Fuku­yama describes as “a kind of muscular Wilsonianism—minus international institutions.” While defining U.S. interests so narrowly “as to make the neoconservative position indistinguishable from realism,” as advocated by Henry Kissinger and others, Krauthammer’s strategy is “utterly unrealistic in its overestimation of U.S. power and our ability to control events around the world.” (Making “not the slightest nod” to such setbacks as the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, Krauthammer spoke as if the Iraq War were “an unqualified success.”)

In Krauthammer’s view, the United States should commit “blood and treasure” to democratic nation-building only in “places central to the larger war against the existential enemy.” But neither Iraq nor Al Qaeda ever threatened the existence of the United States, says Fukuyama. Strangest of all, he says, is the Krauthammerian “confidence that the United States could transform Iraq into a Western-style democracy, and go on from there to democratize the broader Middle East.” For decades, neoconservatives had warned of “the dangers of ambitious social engineering” at home. What made them think they could avoid those dangers abroad?

Fukuyama also writes that Krauthammer’s ideas about how the United States should deal with the Arab world are colored by the experience of Israel, which is surrounded by “implacable enemies.” But Arabs neither surround the United States nor implacably oppose it (though U.S. policies could solidify widespread hatred of America).

What now? Fukuyama thinks that Wash­ing­ton should continue to promote democracy, particularly in the Middle East, but that it must be more realistic about its ability to succeed at nation-building and needs to create a permanent U.S. organization to carry it out. And if existing international institutions aren’t able to meet today’s global challenges, U.S. leaders, like their post-World War II predecessors, must create new ones to do the job. That, says Fuku­yama, should have been the neoconservative agenda from the beginning.