Francis Fukuyama, who is probably my most favorite living neo-Hegelian, has sadly gone off the rails more than a little with this ecstatic, triumphalist treatise, Why Ukraine Will Win, which sounds to me a lot like the late Charlie Krauthammer on steroids and scotch circa 2004, rejoicing over the new American empire, on which, he was sure, the sun would never set.1
I, for one, applauded Dr. Fukuyama’s decision to cool it the neo-imperialism, and since then he has generally followed a course of “above all, not too much zeal”, which is my policy as well. But that was then. Now, Francis is flamin’! How is this for over the top?
The war in Ukraine, now in its seventh month, marks a critical juncture that will determine the course of global democracy.
Seriously, this kind of talk is more than dangerous. Treating the war between Ukraine and Russia as, “not merely” a war between good and evil but one that will “determine the course of global democracy” scares the shit out of me. Right now the war is going very well for Ukraine, which of course wildly pumps up war hawks like Fukuyama, who, if things start to go downhill, will furiously demand that the U.S. do whatever it takes to see that Ukraine prevails. Whatever it takes!
Vladimir Putin is a stupid, desperate man who cannot afford to accept the utter defeat in Ukraine that Dr. Fukuyama is demanding that the U.S. administer to him. We should not back Putin into a corner, which, again, is exactly what Dr. Fukuyama wants to do. Contrary to Dr. Fukuyama’s arguments, this disastrous impasse in which we find ourselves is entirely our doing, our imperialistic overreach that occurred when we anointed ourselves the champions of freedom and arbiters of the world, which failed so disastrously, over and over again, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, and in Syria. And now Dr. Fukuyama is insisting that we apply the same hubris to a frightened and unscrupulous foe armed with thousands of nuclear weapons. Try harder, Dr. Fukuyama. Try much harder.
Afterwords
As I argued at the start of this war, the U.S. should have followed George Kennan’s urgings back in 1997 and not expanded NATO until it bordered on Russia. In fact, I have been hollering quite a lot about Ukraine over the years.
1. Dr. Fukuyama was, in the past, at least a happy fellow traveler with the American Enterprise Institute interventionist crew, until a perhaps alcohol-fueled dithyramb on American greatness by Dr. Krauthammer at an AEI blow-out caused Dr. Fukuyama to move across the continent, from Johns Hopkins (then right around the corner to AEI) to Stanford, and 2,400 miles closer to home.
