I don't think Fukuyama is a supporter of globalization. Lawrence thinks that I would agree
with Fukuyama. I doubt it.
In Fukuyama's End of History argument ("the world is trending towards liberal democracies"),
he sees that the USSR collapsed and the liberal democracies won. The world will end up as a
large confederacy of democratic countries.
But that didn't take into account globalization, which undermines the economic basis of the
idea of the nation-state. The liberal democracies in turn get dissolved into a New World
Order, as the first Bush put it.
Fukuyama's (and the neocons) main error is their understanding of the end of the Cold War.
Under Reagan, they all thought that Reagan puffed and the USSR fell down. Weinberger,
Cheney, Wolfowitz, etc. all think the USA beat the Soviets because the USA had the audacity
to increase its defense spending such that the Soviets, in trying to keep up, went bankrupt.
Thus the same lesson can be applied everywhere else: the USA can simply force/push/attack
other countries into complying. This is the essense of Neocon.
They think this is justified because they think the USA is a better country and does this
only for the good of mankind (okay, hold down all your laughter.)
The problem is that the Cold War didn't end that way. The USSR collapsed, but now, looking
at their internal records, we see it was decayed from its inefficiencies. (Before Lawrence
starts to cheer, that's not good news. The Soviets tried to create a managed society. It was
General Motors on a large scale. If its not technically possible to manage a large society,
then it's not good news for the USA.) The USSR would have collapsed anyway, even if Reagan
had not existed. The Reagan defense buildup (trillions of dollars) was irrelevant and,
well... wasted.
However, at the time, the neocons didn't realize this, and with Bush Jr., they applied the
cure 20X; now we have utterly spectacular debt. It's an entirely possible risk now that the
USA may collapse. One reason for the massive current problems in the USA is Reagan's debt.
Bush Jr grew this huge debt yet larger. With such massive debt ($2 trillion wasted in Iraq
so far), there is no money to fix anything in the USA. A lousy $100 billion would fix the
entire medical system and all schools in the USA and bring them up to European/Asian
standards. That's 5% of what we've poured into the Iraqi sand. The Iraq War may end up
costing the USA $5 trillion dollars.
Fukuyama's February article is remarkable in that he comes around to this realization. Maybe
the neocon understanding of the Cold War, which has been the dominant theory in Washington
for the last 25 years, is... wrong? Maybe the entire neocon agenda is... not possible? The
USA can't export democracy; it can't forcefeed democracy.
Fukuyama writes that the neocon agenda is wrong, and thus Iraq War was based on a wrong
theory. Therefore, the war is a failure. The neocons have given up in Iraq.
yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com
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