America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

The emergence of a Solidarity Prime Minister in Poland is only the latest they-said-it-couldn't-happen event in the Communist world. Confronted with so much that was so recently unthinkable, some Western intellectuals are showing signs of giddiness bordering on nuttiness.

The summer issue of the neoconservative quarterly National Interest carries an article titled "The End of History?" After 16 densely argued pages, the hedging question mark is all but forgotten, by reader and author alike. History, in the view of Francis Fukuyama, was a Manichaean struggle between ! the forces of light and darkness. The bad guys -- first fascists, now Communists -- have lost, the good guys have triumphed. But if the fight is over, so is the fun. The remainder of life on earth, frets Fukuyama, may be a bit of a bore. If there are no more world-class evils to inspire "daring, courage, imagination, and idealism," we could be reduced to fine-tuning economic prosperity and tinkering with "technical problems" and "environmental concerns."

The article has become a hot topic, partly because Fukuyama is deputy director of the State Department's in-house think tank, the policy-planning staff. His article is being studied for possible insights into the cerebral underpinnings of the Bush Administration. Forty-three years ago, the founding director of the policy-planning staff, George Kennan, wrote an article in another erudite quarterly, Foreign Affairs, on the need for the West to pursue a policy of "containment" against Soviet Communism. President Bush has spoken of moving "beyond containment." Fukuyama has gone his boss one better, proclaiming that we may be witnessing "not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

To his credit, Fukuyama is grappling with important and difficult ideas. But his boldness misfires. To ruminate about "the end of history" in the present tense is the philosophical equivalent of that cheerful banality "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." Fukuyama is not really addressing the subject of history at all. He is looking through the wrong end of the telescope at current events, at a period barely twice his age (he is 36). Whether it is dead, dying or merely having a bad decade, Communism, in the sense that Fukuyama and almost everyone else thinks about it, has been around for only 70-odd years. There were plenty of predatory tyrannies before Lenin arrived at the Finland Station, and there will be plenty more even if a Romanov is restored to a Kremlin throne. Genghis Khan and Caligula didn't need a course in dialectical materialism to make their periods of history interesting, and neither do today's bad actors -- or tomorrow's.

Fukuyama, like too many others in the Bush Administration, seems convinced that the reformist, liberalizing trends sweeping the Communist world are essentially irreversible, requiring little more than the applause of the West. Even if updated to take account of the massacre in Tiananmen Square and the Politburo warnings of a crackdown in the Baltics, Fukuyama's thesis will probably not persuade Lech Walesa that history has yet reached a happy ending in Poland.

Believing that the main event may be over, Fukuyama depicts whatever troubles lie ahead as little more than nuisances, devoid of ideological content and context, therefore lacking historical standing. That notion adds insult to the injuries of the masses starving in Africa and Asia, the basement dwellers of Beirut and the victims of narco-terror in Latin America. While the prospects for capitalism and democracy may look pretty good from Japan, Italy, Holland and France, where translations of Fukuyama's article will soon appear, they are less bright in places like Peru and Bangladesh -- and even Mexico and Israel.

Never mind, Fukuyama seems to say: "For our purposes, it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso, for we are interested in . . . the common ideological heritage of mankind." This passage, almost a throwaway line amid the references to Hegel and the main strands of Fukuyama's argument, stands out nonetheless. It will be particularly embarrassing when "post-history" produces its first ugly spectacular, whether it is a nuclear war between two backward and strange- thinking countries that never cared much for Karl Marx or Adam Smith, or an ecological disaster that is beyond the micromanagement of the technocrats who Fukuyama predicts will inherit the earth.

In one melancholy respect, there is nothing new in Fukuyama's pernicious nonsense. In the bad old days of Stalin and Brezhnev, too many Americans were preoccupied with the threat of Communism to attend adequately to Third World problems (overpopulation, underdevelopment, sectarian strife), as well as First World blights such as drugs and homelessness. Now, in the heady era of Gorbachev, some Western strategists may have redefined the challenge as coping with the decline of Communism, but their world view remains afflicted by a peculiar combination of arrogance and shortsightedness.