Not long after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Francis Fukuyama was just a green 27-year-old researcher at the RAND Corporation, the military-focused think tank. His assignment? Gin up a strategy to counter Moscow’s aggression. Fresh from filing his dissertation on Soviet foreign policy at Harvard, he quickly faced the unsettling fact that Washington knew next to nothing about South Asia. So he picked up the phone.
“Next thing I know, the ISI was offering me a two-week tour of the North-West Frontier province,” Fukuyama recalls, referring to Pakistan’s intelligence service and the treacherous border the country shares with Afghanistan. The ambitious scholar jumped on a plane and was soon interviewing Afghan refugees and dining with soldiers at the Khyber Pass. As proof, there’s a grainy snapshot of Fukuyama, wearing a wide smile and a pair of hip sunglasses, eating a mango beside a Pakistani colonel. He drafted a report on his return, “just a little note,” he says, “arguing the U.S. should support the mujahedin.” Soon after, the Reagan administration was shipping F-16s to Pakistan. Fukuyama denies his analysis served as a catalyst. But New Delhi didn’t think so: “I became one of the most hated people in India,” he says.
Either way, the bold undertaking was the first clear evidence of the way Fukuyama’s intellectual instincts hard-wire him into the most geopolitically strategic—not to mention dangerous—corners of the world.
Fast-forward more than two decades and Fukuyama, now 58 and the Freeman Spogli senior fellow at Stanford University, has aged enviably little. It’s early on a rainy Monday morning in March, immediately following the weekend President Barack Obama and NATO allies opened a bombing campaign in Libya. He’s sitting at his cherry kitchen table in his new California home. Gone are the sunglasses and the South Asian spies, but the intellectual hunger remains.
A one-page letter sits on the kitchen table and Fukuyama’s leaning back in his chair, avoiding it. It is from the Foreign Policy Initiative, the latest avatar of America’s neoconservative movement, comprising people like William Kristol, John Podhoretz, and Max Boot—men who advocate the use of American military might to set the world order straight. The communiqué—Fukuyama didn’t even reach to read it—demanded that President Obama unleash airstrikes on Libya. Once upon a time, Fukuyama would have been part of the gang. After all, his name stood out at the bottom of the notorious letter from the Project for the New American Century (a previous neocon-policy arm) to President Bill Clinton in 1998, calling for the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
So why is Fukuyama’s name absent today? “That presumes I want to be a member of that club,” he says abruptly. In a pressed, blue button-down shirt and pleated dark slacks, he cracks open pistachios, contemplative but cagey. The brusqueness is unusual. For Fukuyama—a man with the ready confidence of, say, a principal on the National Security Council—is never lost for words. It is as if no question is a surprise, so no answer is ever offered entirely off the cuff, whether it be about the future of democracy in Cairo or the longevity of the Communist Party in Beijing. Which is not to say that he is bland. On present-day Republicans, in fact, he is downright caustic: “All of the Kissinger-era realists have gone away, like Robert Zoellick, James Baker, and Brent Scowcroft. Today, the party is just a wasteland. They are total amateurs on foreign policy.”
[ Newsweek.com ]
