The Neoconservative Moment

Summary: Francis Fukuyama
"The Neoconservative Moment"
The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq.
Cambridge University Press (2005). pp. 170-85.

In "The Neoconservative Moment," Francis Fukuyama argues that Charles Krauthammer's "democratic globalism" brand of neoconservativism is too realist and too idealist by turns.  Democratic globalists, according to Krauthammer, believe that American military supremacy should be used to "support U.S. security interests and democracy simultaneously."  

Fukuyama argues that Iraq was hardly a strategic threat, even less a global, existential threat to freedom.  But even if it had been it was clear from the beginning that neither the nature of Iraqi society nor the United States' past experience with regime change lent themselves well to the prospects of success. Finally, Fukuyama argues that democratic globalism fails to appreciate the value of legitimacy, and overlooks the fact that many of our allies "did not trust us...to use our huge margin of power wisely and in the interests of the world as a whole."  The US can no longer count on post facto legitimacy as it did during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was a competing power, and the United States and its allies agreed that frequent demonstrations of resolve, in the form of military action, could be beneficial.  

Focus now is on the Middle East, and a pre-emptively and frequently intervening superpower is as unlikely to coax the Arab world into democracy as force is unlikely to drag them into it. Fukuyama advocates a gentler, more multilateral brand of democratic globalism: reinstate diplomacy and coalition-building, promote democracy “through all of the available tools,” be more realistic about our abilities, be better prepared for nation-building when the need arises, and build institutions.  Whether this can be called ‘neoconservativism,’ Fukuyama does not know.

Singer's "Animal Liberation"

In “Animal Liberation,” Peter Singer argues that human exploitation of non-human species is a “continuing moral outrage,” because there is no justification for treating the interest of any being which has interests as less morally important than the like interest of a human being. Justice is a matter of treating equals equally, but not all inequalities matter for the relevant conception of equal treatment: for example, we should not think that minor genetic differences between races or sexes should result in different social, civil, or political rights even if those differences were found to correlate to small but measurable differences in average IQ. In short, Singer argues that it would be objectionably speciesist to believe “that we are entitled to treat members of other species in a way which it would be wrong to treat members of our own species,” because the relevant capacity for equal treatment is the capacity to suffer, and the members of many, many animal species have that capacity. He then draws out the implications of this view for current practice: vivisection, animal research, and factory farming are all morally impermissible because they brutally harm animals—animals who, by virtue of their capacity to suffer as we do, are thereby also entitled to the same level of respect and compassion.