Presentation by Francis Fukuyama on May 23 at the American Committees on Foreign Relations:

"…The visionary founders of the postwar order were institution-builders, who created not just the much-maligned UN system, but the Bretton Woods institutions, NATO, the U.S.-Japan and U.S.-Korea alliances, the GATT, the WTO, and a host of other international organizations. Institution-building is not something that has occupied the time of officials in the Bush Administration, but it should. If the United States does not like the fact that the UN is dominated by non-democratic regimes, then it should invest in an effort to build up other institutions, like NATO or the Community of Democracies founded during the Clinton Administration, that are based on norms and values we share. The Community of Democracies initiative, which the French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine tried to strangle at its birth, was never taken seriously by the Republicans, for, I assume, "not invented here" reasons. But such a global alliance of democracies, led by newer ones in eastern Europe and Latin America, could play a legitimizing function around the world in a way that NATO cannot.”

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