On Paper, Policy Feud Heats Up
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The policy feud between two intellectual heavyweights, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer and Francis Fukuyama, author of “The End of History and the Last Man,” has turned far more acrimonious.
Responding to Mr. Fukuyama’s hard-hitting critique of neoconservative tenets in the pages of National Interest – specifically to Mr. Krauthammer’s own stated American foreign policy prescriptions – the Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist came back in the fall issue of the magazine with a 6,000-word rebuttal that bristles with resentment.
Most vehemently, Mr. Krauthammer took issue with Mr. Fukuyama’s assertion that the columnist’s “views on how the Israelis need to deal with the Palestinians colors his views on how the United States should deal with the Arabs more broadly.” While Israel faces an existential threat from Arab terrorism, Mr. Fukuyama said, America faces “a more complex situation” that is less dire.
For Mr. Krauthammer, a strong proponent of Israel’s right to defend itself from Palestinian Arab terrorism, those were fighting words.
Calling his argument “bizarre,” Mr. Krauthammer accuses the internationally famous Mr. Fukuyama of “psychological speculation” that “allows him a novel way of Judaizing neo-conservatism.” Mr. Fukuyama is the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University,
“His is not the crude kind, advanced by Pat Buchanan and Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad, among others, that American neoconservatives (read: Jews) are simply doing Israel’s bidding, hijacking American foreign policy in the service of Israel and the greater Jewish conspiracy,” Mr. Krauthammer writes. “Fukuyama’s take is more subtle and implicit.”
In an interview with The New York Sun, Mr. Krauthammer said Mr. Fukuyama’s argument was “pernicious, gratuitous, and false,” pointing out that American foreign policy is driven by President Bush, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Cheney, and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld – “none of whom are Jews.”
In an interview with the Sun, Mr. Fukuyama said he took offense to Mr. Krauthammer’s charges and said he would write a letter to the National Interest clarifying his position.
“He is calling me by implication anti-Semitic,” Mr. Fukuyama said. He said his point was that a “certain set of strategic ideas” become “common currency” by viewing the Middle East through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One idea is a belief among some neoconservatives of the “illegitimacy of the United Nations,” which he said stems from the U.N.’s frequent – and in his view condemnable – hostility toward Israel.
Messrs. Krauthammer and Fukuyama have not talked since Mr. Fukuyama’s essay was published, though they did not speak on a regular basis before their falling-out, according to Mr. Fukuyama.
Mr. Fukuyama’s confrontation with neoconservatives has taken many by surprise. A forceful advocate of liberal democracy, Mr. Fukuyama has in the past shared many of the same views as Mr. Krauthammer’s. In the January 2000 issue of Commentary magazine, Mr. Krauthammer – in a critique of America’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo – praised Mr. Fukuyama for warning about the dangers of military action without clear objectives.
While the clash between the two prominent intellectuals startled conservatives, it shows little sign of spreading into a wide rift among neoconservatives, who generally have sustained their vigorous support for America’s war in Iraq.
However, some, including William Kristol of the Weekly Standard and Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and columnist at the Washington Post, have criticized the Bush administration for not increasing American troop levels to combat the insurgency or properly training Iraqi security forces.
Mr. Fukuyama said no neoconservative has spoken out publicly in favor of his critique, but he said he has gotten “private messages” expressing support.
His opponents in the debate, he said, are “never going to admit they are wrong about anything.”
A resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Joshua Muravchik, said the debate between Mr. Krauthammer and Mr. Fukuyama “won’t really matter” if “things come together in Iraq.”
But if the insurgency grows and Mr. Bush’s goals in Iraq are not met, “then this will just be the first small chapter in a vigorous debate,” leading to “self-examination and recrimination” among the neoconservative faithful.
Mr. Krauthammer scoffed at the idea of Mr. Fukuyama’s essay sparking a wider argument. “This does not represent a larger debate,” he said. “It’s Fukuyama freelancing.”
Mr. Fukuyama’s central argument in his National Interest essay this summer was that neoconservatives who advocated removing Saddam Hussein have overestimated America’s ability to “control events around the world” and wrongly dismissed the need for America to preserve international legitimacy if it is to win the war on terror. Mr. Krauthammer’s view of how America should exercise its power in the post-September 11 world is “strangely disconnected from reality,” he said.
Mr. Fukuyama was responding to Mr. Krauthammer’s February 2004 lecture in which he summarized different schools of foreign policy. In his speech, he called for a “democratic realist” approach that favors an aggressive promotion of democracy but limits American military interventions to situations that are critical to defeating Islamic radicalism, which he believes poses an existential threat.
In his rejoinder, Mr. Krauthammer said Mr. Fukuyama has dangerously downplayed America’s vulnerability in the war against radical Islam and questions his motives.
“Fukuyama, of course, has a stake in denying the obvious nature of the threat, having made his reputation proclaiming the ‘end of history,’ which, if it means anything, means an end to precisely this kind of ideological existential threat,” he wrote. He concludes by saying that Mr. Fukuyama fails to offer an alternative to the “democratic realist” strategy he is recommending.
Mr. Fukuyama is not simply breaking ranks with neoconservatives but said he plans to stake out new territory. Speaking to the Sun, Mr. Fukuyama said he plans to unveil what he describes as a new foreign policy vision for America at a series of lectures at Yale University in April. He said he will propose the creation of new multilateral institutions that will encourage more interaction between America and other countries and for the strengthening of the Community of Democracies, an association of more than 100 emerging and established democracies founded in Warsaw, Poland, in June 2000 and whose principal backer was Madeleine Albright.
“If you don’t like the United Nations, come up with something else,” he said.