Word: fukuyama
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Fukuyama is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy...
...FRANCIS FUKUYAMA I believe that the balance sheet for the war at this moment is quite negative. The war foreclosed the possibility of Saddam restarting his WMD programs and replaced his dictatorship with Iraq's new democracy--both real gains. Balanced against these gains are costs that go well beyond the direct human and financial ones. The occupation of Iraq has served as a tremendous stimulus for Arab and Muslim anti-Americanism and thus has made radical Islamist terrorism significantly worse than it would otherwise be. America's reputation around the world has taken a huge hit among ordinary people...
...decision to topple Saddam Hussein three years ago. William F. Buckley Jr., as close to a conservative icon as America has, recently wrote that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed." George F. Will has been a moderate skeptic throughout. Neoconservative scholar Francis Fukuyama has just produced a book renouncing his previous support. The specter of Iraq teetering closer to civil war and disintegration has forced a reckoning...
...Fukuyama's sharpest insight here is how the miraculously peaceful end of the cold war lulled many of us into overconfidence about the inevitability of democratic change, and its ease. We got cocky. We should have known better. The second error was narcissism. America's power blinded many of us to the resentments that hegemony always provokes. Those resentments are often as deep among our global friends as among our enemies--and make alliances as hard as they are important. That is not to say we should never act unilaterally. Sometimes the right thing to do will spawn backlash...
...Remember what has happened in the past decade, when several trenchantly argued theses have rapidly become conventional wisdom. One thinks of Francis Fukuyama (history has ended with the triumph of liberal democracy), Bernard Lewis (the rage of the Islamic world is a consequence of its own failure), Robert Kagan (Europeans and Americans are fundamentally different). All these authors make their case brilliantly, but none of their arguments are uncontested by serious scholars in relevant fields. They are popular in part because they provide wonderful material for Op-Ed columns and sound bites...