Fukuyama: Is America Ready for a Post-American World?

For a guy who declared the 'end of history' nearly 20 years ago, political scientist Francis Fukuyama has a lot to say about the rapidly changing geopolitical landscape. In a recent NPQ article, Fukuyama describes the decline in U.S. hegemonic power and the rise of the 'weak-state world.' He writes,

This weak-state world has a lot of implications for American power. We need to consider this very perplexing fact: The US spends as much on its military as virtually the entire rest of the world combined. And yet it is now five years and counting since the US invaded and occupied Iraq, and to this day we have not succeeded in pacifying it fully. That is because of the changing nature of power itself. We are trying to use an instrument—hard military power—that we used in the 20th century world of Great Powers and centralized states in a weak-state world. You cannot use hard power to create legitimate institutions, to build nations, to consolidate politics and all of the other things that are necessary for political stability in this part of the world.

Fukuyama comes up with three prescriptions to deal with declining U.S. influence: 1) address the diminishing capacity of the U.S. public sector, 2) overcome the complacency on the part of Americans about understanding the world from a perspective other than that of the U.S., and 3) rejig the polarized political system that is "incapable of even discussing solutions to these problems."

Fukuyama writes,

After Sputnik in the late 1950s, the US responded to the Soviet challenge by making massive investments in basic science and technology. This proved to be a very successful set of investments that reaffirmed American technological leadership. After 9/11, we could have reacted in a similar way, by making large investments in our ability to understand complex parts of the world that we did not understand very well, like the Middle East. It is a scandal that in this monstrous new embassy we’ve created in Baghdad, we only have a handful of fluent Arabic speakers.

So interesting to watch Fukuyama remove himself further and further away from the hawkish neoconservative bulwark he helped to construct under the Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies.

Now if he'd only retract his rather over-stated claim that transhumanism is the world's most dangerous idea...

Bailey on Fukuyama's 'eugenics'

Looks like I'm not the only one who interprets over-the-top regulation of human biotech as a form of eugenics. Reason science correspondent Ronald Bailey has penned a piece in which he warns, "Francis Fukuyama wants to control your reproductive decisions."

In the article, titled "Medievalizing Biotech Regulation," Bailey describes Fukuyama's recent initiative to create a regulatory agency in the United States that would be modeled after the British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HEFA). This new agency would regulate the safety and efficacy of new biotechnologies and rule on their ethical merits. Fukuyama argues that it's time for "social control."

More specifically,

Fukuyama explained that the new agency would regulate anything having to do with assisted reproduction techniques (ART). This would include IVF, ooplasm transfer, sex selection either by pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) or sperm sorting. The agency would also regulate research involving human reproductive tissues including all embryonic stem cell research and anything dealing with human developmental biology....

Fukuyama would completely ban human reproductive cloning, the creation of human animal chimeras for the purpose of reproduction, germline genetic modifications, any procedure that would alter the genetic relationship of parents to children, and the patenting of human embryos.

I'm not opposed to regulatory agencies in principle; institutions such as these are both necessary and fairly inevitable. What concerns me, however, is when extreme bioconservatives like Fukuyama take the initiative. These regulatory precedents are dangerously constrictive. It is Fukuyama, after all, who has made it painfully clear that he is opposed to not just human enhancement, but life extending technologies as well.

As Bailey points out in his article, these regulatory bodies often function as bureaucratic obstructions to research and development. Moreover, when given too much political clout, and if guided by anachronistic notions of human reproduction and biology, these agencies may also act in a way that's reminiscent of 20th century eugenics.

Ultimately, Fukuyama's agency will work to enforce a preconceived, non-normative and state imposed vision of human reproduction and health in general.