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Internationally renowned foreign policy scholar Francis Fukuyama lectured on America's presence in Iraq and criticized key facets of President George Bush's current policy such as unilateralism, preventative war and Middle East democratization on Thursday night to a large audience in Filene Auditorium.
As the first speaker in the Dickey Center for International Understanding's Great Issues series on conflict prevention, Fukuyama, who broke ranks with the Bush administration as late as 2004, commented wryly, "If you want to prevent conflicts, you should probably not start unnecessary wars."
While the neo-conservative in Fukuyama still emphasized the moral purpose that hard power could sometimes serve, he stated that the development of democracy overseas could not remain America's foremost goal in the region.
"There were false expectations as to the nature of democracy itself," he said.
According to Fukuyama, these expectations may have been influenced by the swift collapse of communism in 1989 in Eastern Europe.
He speculated that political veterans of the Warsaw Pact collapse, such as Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, and Paul Wolfowitz may have expected the same immediate change to occur in Iraq.
According to Fukuyama, those in favor of the war saw democracy as a kind of default that newly-freed states would revert to.
There were American misconceptions that "once the wicked witch was dead," he said, "the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation."
While a clear component of American foreign policy has been instituting democracies abroad, its previous policies of ambitious social engineering could not be applied to current international conditions, especially in the Middle East, he said.
"The first lesson is, the United States does not bring democracy," he said.
