The 1980s for the US was a decade of uncertainty and confusion over its future as the dominant world power. In spite of the evident deterioration in the socialist bloc led by the USSR, certain theories began to gain currency regarding the decline of the US's international status and its inevitable collapse. In the midst of that hazy and pessimistic climate, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, an American strategic researcher called for the creation of a new US strategic theory founded on philosophical concepts. Within two years Francis Fukuyama produced the “End of History” theory. He read the collapse of the Soviet Union as the end of history in terms of the conflict of ideas. History was no longer a battleground between Marxist thought and Western liberal democracy, now that the latter had been victorious. According to the American political scientist, liberal democracy had emerged as mankind's undisputed choice as the best of the two alternatives. Fukuyama's “end of history” signified the triumph of good over evil, and predicted that the modern era would not deviate from the Western liberal horizon. Political ideological evolution had come to an end and thus history, as a process of becoming, had ground to a halt. But history has not ended. Liberal democracy has not triumphed everywhere and dictatorships still have a bright future. In fact, while Fukuyama's theory heralded the end of universal ideologies, it was actually a new ideological claim to a monopoly on absolute truth. What could be more dogmatic than the assertion that all ideological conflict had been settled? In fact, in an article in Newsweek on 25 December 2001, Fukuyama argued exactly the opposite, saying that the ideological conflict was continuing. Under the title, “Their Target: The Modern World,” he attempted to draw Western attention to the looming danger of an enemy that had put Western civilisation in its crosshairs. As he wrote: “Islam is the only major civilisation in the world that can arguably be said to have basic issues with modernism.” Not that Fukuyama came up with anything original here. Well before that, Samuel Huntington, in his The Clash of Civilisations, developed a pilot civilisational confrontation model to take the place of the Cold War model. The intent was to redirect or clone Western attitudes toward communism by creating a new threat to the West (an imagined enemy). This threat was Islamic civilisation or, more specifically, the terror of the Islamic-Confucian alliance in reference to Chinese and North Korean arms sales to Islamic nations such as Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria, as well as to Chinese and Iranian cooperation in the field of nuclear technology. Since US experience depends on a perpetual dichotomy, fearful that a form of political or ideological lassitude might set in, Fukuyama hastened to impart a new dimension to the struggle: a new enemy called China. In his latest book, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalisation of Democracy, he fleshes out a new myth in order to compel US society to stick together in the face of an outside peril. At the centre of that myth resides the Chinese ogre, identified as such because of its growing military and economic might and its aversion to the Western democratic model. To Fukuyama, “political decay” is the product of a state of perceptual rigidity that sets in when a set of institutions that emerged under certain conditions proved unable to adapt when faced with new conditions and circumstances. He believes that this phenomenon has come to affect American political elites. He argues that the US has undergone its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression in the 1930s. Yet, not only did that not trigger radical change, people still entertained ideas that were out of step with the times. In other words, Americans refuse to believe that they have begun to lag behind others. Because of that blindness they have not undertaken the necessary changes to sustain their competitive edge. You cannot solve a problem if you refuse to see it. Fukuyama also attributes the current condition of the US political order to a complacency that has set in because of the absence of shocks to the system. After decades of peace and stability since World War II, US society began to grow passive and, as a result, its international appeal and allure began to fail. Consequently, it now needs something to jolt it awake. Fukuyama tries to market his ideas through generalities, without revealing the deeper interests and leaving it to the reader to do the analysis and to deconstruct his discourse. So we are compelled to ask, why now when the US is at the peak of plenty? Apparently, there are rising threats and these threats need to be identified and defined. Fukuyama obliges by drawing attention to China, which rejects the Western model of democracy and rule of law. He then proceeds to pose the question of whether it will be Westerners or the Chinese who will shape the future over the next five decades. If China is the least transparent of the Asian powers and is governed by the most dictatorial methods, and in the strictest adherence to national aims, there is nothing to suggest that it will be less of a threat to the West if it becomes more pluralistic and democratic. The reason that China appears more threatening today is because its reforms in the realm of the market economy have been successful. Fukuyama thus points to a marked increase in China's economic prowess and military strength and observes a gradual shift in the global economic centre of gravity in the direction of China, which is increasingly poised to become the world's new economic leader, whether everyone likes it or not. He tries to alert US society to this looming danger. Although Fukuyama does not explicitly call for war against China, it is well known that tensions pave the way to confrontations and clashes in international relations, which is what Chinese leaders themselves anticipate. The crux of the issue for Fukuyama is safeguarding the US's international hegemony and leadership by stimulating the US's economic might to ensure the perpetuation of American strength and prosperity and, simultaneously, obstruct the rise of a power that could challenge the West economically. That challenge is not far away. According to a 2003 report on economic trends by Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies: “There is no doubt that the rising growth rates in China, which exceed 13 per cent, have caused the US to fear for its future, because if China can sustain these growth rates until 2015 it will be able to vie with the US for world leadership in its capacity as a new economic power.” This assessment was reaffirmed by a report issued by the World Bank's International Comparison Programme in April 2014, which stated that there is a possibility that China will surpass the US as the largest economy in the world by no later than the end of this year, bringing an end to 125 years of uninterrupted US control over the global economy. Not surprisingly, therefore, the US sought to use the ASEAN Summit on 13 November as a platform for forging an economic structure for the Asia-Pacific region tailored to US interests. It also tried to steer proceedings in a direction intended to isolate China and force it to accept Washington's dictates. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's proposal of a “Friendship Treaty” has failed to alleviate the tensions between his country and the US. But if the US feels so threatened by China's emergent economic superiority, is the solution to engage in modern wars to destroy the other or to encircle and marginalise the enemy? Cato writes: “Economic superiority requires the destruction of a foreign city.” Apparently this is Fukuyama's guiding maxim, for everything he mentions about Chinese economic superiority and its rejection of Western democracy seems geared towards firing a spirit of belligerency in the American mindset so as to force US society and political elites to wake up and pull themselves together. This is a mindset that, in Fukuyama's opinion, only functions in the framework of the “I” versus the “other” dichotomy, and whose very being is contingent on perpetually organising its life around the notion of an external threat as a means to reaffirm its identity and perpetuate its hegemony. Nevertheless, according to this perception the incentive to act is extrinsic, not intrinsic. This can be dangerous. It requires a constant state of alert and preparation. As long as the spectre of a threat is there then there is a constant justification for the production of the means for destruction. The economy that conforms to military requirements provides an easier life for a larger number of people. Otherwise put, war and conflict stimulate the economy. In his attempt to goad the US into action, Fukuyama resorts to an old ruse: fearmongering. He creates a fictitious evil creature bent on destroying that society. But the very need to resort to such a ruse betrays a certain psychological bankruptcy or lack of self-confidence. A lack of self-confidence can give rise to an exaggerated sense of the need for a mission using muscle. When a country that has considerable military might lacks self-confidence there is a good chance that it will act in ways that are harmful to itself as well as others. Out of the need to prove what is already clear to others, it begins to confuse great power with infinite power and great responsibility with complete responsibility, and proceeds to try to win every round in every battle, no matter how insignificant. In sum, Fukuyama realises the depth of the American economic, military and cultural crisis. He senses the internal disintegration and stagnation that can lead to decline and he simultaneously acknowledges the emergence of a new centre of gravity that cannot be confronted militarily. Nevertheless, to Fukuyama the business of encircling and restraining that emergent power presents an opportunity to galvanise the US into recovering and reasserting its missing sense of self and identity. But it is an identity gripped by a superiority complex, an arrogance derived from the US's global hegemony and a sense of entitlement that believes that the sun should never set on its empire. Fukuyama's ideas ultimately boil down to an attempt to reassert or to prove the US's exclusive right to international mastery. The writer is a researcher at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
