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Sometime in May 2003, shortly after U.S. forces had taken Baghdad and President Bush landed on an aircraft carrier under the banner "Mission Accomplished," an old friend remarked that he thought the war was going pretty well so far. I shook my head and said I thought we were in for trouble. I bet him that day that Iraq would be a mess in five years' time, a mess being defined as "you'll know it when you see it." I mentioned this bet to Bret Stephens three years later. He'd reviewed my book, "America at the Crossroads" in this newspaper,...

The Mullahs' Voice By Kenneth R. Timmerman FrontPageMagazine.com February 23, 2007 Iran’s ruling clerics have a new unofficial spokesman in Washington, who can talk circles around their official ambassadors. His name is Trita Parsi, and he is a protégé of Francis Fukayama, the policy heavy-weight who has now turned against the Bush agenda of promoting freedom in the Middle East as an antidote to terror. In a remarkable round-up of official Iranian government views, presented as “objective” analysis on C-SPAN this past Saturday, Feb. 17, Parsi urged the United States government to “open up diplomacy and dialogue” with Iran’s rulers...

Many Americans are being lulled into assuming that democracy is inevitable. This is a favorite theme of President Bush’s beating on the same drumhead used by President Clinton, President Wilson, and other notable demagogues. But the fact that politicians agree does not make something true. Since Woodrow Wilson proclaimed that democracy was the destiny of humanity, more than 100 democratic governments have crashed and burned around the globe, replaced by dictators, juntas, or foreign conquerors. Yet we continue to be assured that democracies are inevitable and that universalizing democracy will solve almost all of the world’s political problems. The current...

Early on in Hugo Chávez's political career, the Venezuelan president attacked my notion that liberal democracy together with a market economy represents the ultimate evolutionary direction for modern societies -- the "end of history." When asked what lay beyond the end of history, he offered a one-word reply: "Chavismo." The idea that contemporary Venezuela represents a social model superior to liberal democracy is absurd. In his eight years as president, Chávez has capitalized on his country's oil wealth to take control of congress, the courts, trade unions, electoral commissions and the state oil company. Proposed legislation that would limit foreign...

Early on in Hugo Chávez's political career, the Venezuelan president attacked my notion that liberal democracy together with a market economy represents the ultimate evolutionary direction for modern societies -- the "end of history." When asked what lay beyond the end of history, he offered a one-word reply: "Chavismo." More at the Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/04/AR2006080401768_pf.html

July 31, 2006, 7:15 a.m. Fukuyama's Second ThoughtsAt a Crossroads. By Jonah Goldberg When Samuel P. Huntington, author of the famous “clash of civilizations� thesis, was accused of being too simplistic, he pled guilty as charged. But, he countered, any serious attempt to explain complex phenomena — never mind the grand sweep of world history — would have to be simplistic. “When people think seriously,� he said, “they think abstractly; they conjure up simplified pictures of reality called concepts, theories, models, paradigms. Without such intellectual constructs, there is, William James said, only ‘a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.’� Since the end...

SEVEN WEEKS AGO, I published my case against the Iraq war. I wrote that although I had originally advocated military intervention in Iraq, and had even signed a letter to that effect shortly after the 9/11 attacks, I had since changed my mind. But apparently this kind of honest acknowledgment is verboten. In the weeks since my book came out, I've been challenged, attacked and vilified from both ends of the ideological spectrum. From the right, columnist Charles Krauthammer has accused me of being an opportunistic traitor to the neoconservative cause — and a coward to boot. From the left,...

A small group of current and former conservatives--including George Will, William F. Buckley Jr. and Francis Fukuyama--have become harsh critics of the Iraq war. They have declared, or clearly implied, that it is a failure and the president's effort to promote liberty in the Middle East is dead--and dead for a perfectly predictable reason: Iraq, like the Arab Middle East more broadly, lacks the democratic culture that is necessary for freedom to take root. And so for cultural reasons, this effort was flawed from the outset. Or so the argument goes.Let me address each of these charges in turn. The...

WASHINGTON -- It was, as the hero tells it, his Road to Damascus moment. There he is, in a hall of 1,500 people he has long considered to be his allies, hearing the speaker treat the Iraq War, nearing the end of its first year, as ``a virtually unqualified success.'' He gasps as the audience enthusiastically applauds. Aghast to discover himself in a sea of comrades so deluded by ideology as to have lost touch with reality, he decides he can no longer be one of them.And thus did Francis Fukuyama become the world's most celebrated ex-neoconservative, a well-timed metamorphosis...

Many opponents of the Iraq war both in the US and Europe have felt a not-so-secret sense of schadenfreude at the developing chaos in Iraq. While many might intellectually support the emergence of a stable, democratic, pro-western government in Baghdad, "success" in this matter would be seen as a vindication of all of the baggage that the Bush administration loaded on to this project, including its unilateralism, use of force and incompetent execution of the war's aftermath. Many would therefore be happy seeing Washington suffer a setback, to deter such interventions in the future. But people should be careful what...

That's some feud between the White House and Francis Fukuyama, the Johns Hopkins professor and author of "The End of History and the Last Man." Here's Mr. Fukuyama writing in or quoted in the New York Times sniping at the Bush administration, and there's the White House firing back by e-mail quoting Mr. Fukuyama's past statements in contrast to his current ones. This is, of course, painful for those of us who have been friendly with both sides. I don't think, at this point, reconciliation is possible. It would probably ease tensions to some degree if Mr. Fukuyama presented his...

Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads argues that the United States made the mistake of going into Iraq without preparing for a hostile occupation because of the flawed foreign-policy thinking of a small group of people called neoconservatives. ...[snip] While he remains sympathetic to the democracy-spreading mission, Fukuyama castigates the unilateral and militaristic turns that gave us such concepts as "preventive war," "benevolent hegemony," and "regime change." Neoconservatives, he contends, have abandoned their fundamental political insight, namely that ambitious schemes to remake societies are doomed to disappointment, failure, and unintended consequences. "Opposition to utopian social engineering," Fukuyama writes "… is...

"NEOCONSERVATISM has failed the United States and needs to be replaced by a more realistic foreign policy agenda, according to one of its prime architects. Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the best-selling book The End of History and was a member of the neoconservative project, now says that, both as a political symbol and a body of thought, it has "evolved into something I can no longer support". He says it should be discarded on to history's pile of discredited ideologies. " "In an extract from his forthcoming book, America at the Crossroads, Mr Fukuyama declares that the doctrine "is now...

George Bush has squandered the public mandate he received after the September 11 attacks, writes Francis Fukuyama. As we mark four years since September 11, 2001, one way to organise a review of what has happened in US foreign policy since that terrible day is with a question: to what extent has that policy flowed from the wellspring of American politics and culture, and to what extent has it flowed from the particularities of this President and this Administration? It is tempting to see continuity with the American character and foreign policy tradition in the Bush Administration's response to September...

AS we mark four years since Sept. 11, 2001, one way to organize a review of what has happened in American foreign policy since that terrible day is with a question: To what extent has that policy flowed from the wellspring of American politics and culture, and to what extent has it flowed from the particularities of this president and this administration? It is tempting to see continuity with the American character and foreign policy tradition in the Bush administration's response to 9/11, and many have done so. We have tended toward the forcefully unilateral when we have felt ourselves...

FOR the decade since its founding by the neoconservative thinker Irving Kristol, The National Interest has been a central forum for the most influential conservative foreign policy thinkers of all stripes to hash out their differences. It launched ideas that entered the public policy vernacular, like "the end of history," "the West and the rest," and "geo-economics," and for the last six months it has played host to a closely watched intramural conservative debate over the wisdom of the war in Iraq. Now, however, a philosophical disagreement within its editorial board has put its future in turmoil. On Friday, 10...

The strong mandate that the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush received from the American people on Nov. 2 raises the question of how it will use its new political capital in the foreign policy arena. The fact that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was removed from power and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointedly ask to stay on suggests that the administration does not intend to turn in a more conciliatory direction, and is likely to keep up its hard-nosed relationship with the rest of the world. There will be at least four areas of policy in which...

HEADLINE: CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; How Books Have Shaped U.S. Policy BYLINE: By MICHIKO KAKUTANI BODY: President Bush has never been known as a bookworm. An instinctive politician who goes with his gut, he has usually left the heavy reading in the family to his wife, Laura, a former librarian. He is "often uncurious and as a result ill informed," his former speechwriter, David Frum, wrote in a memoir this year, adding that "conspicuous intelligence seemed actively unwelcome in the Bush White House." It is curious then that books by historians, philosophers and policy analysts have played a significant role in shaping...

Francis Fukuyama shocked the world with his 'End of History' thesis that the market would take over the role of mighty nations. But 9/11 changed all that. Now, in this exclusive article, the world's foremost economic philosopher argues that our very survival depends on stronger government The death of Ronald Reagan last month and the moving tribute paid to him by Margaret Thatcher remind us that we still live in their shadow, in an era in which the chief impulse of politics has been to reduce the size of the state. That agenda was critical in its time, for it...

Q. What are your expectations for the next US presidential elections? A. I think George W Bush could lose the November elections because he is going to be faced with a lot of disadvantages. For example, if Iraq continues to be a big mess by the time of the elections it could cost him the White House. Q. Do you trust John Kerry? A. Not particularly. I do not know for whom I am going to vote this time around.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Shimon Peres, and Francis Fukuyama come together to discuss the end of history in Israel. Tel Aviv FAMOUSLY, Zionism founding father Theodor Herzl proclaimed that the aim of the Jewish state should be to permit Jews to live as a nation like other all other nations. A century later, contradicting his hopes in ways that might have made Herzl proud, Israel continues to distinguish itself. Witness the remarkable gathering of 1,200 Israelis at Tel Aviv University last Monday evening, along with foreign diplomats, from, among other countries, Switzerland, South Africa, Guyana, and Egypt. Under the auspices of the...

Fifteen years after his controversial end-of-history thesis celebrated liberalism's victory over communism, political thinker Francis Fukuyama probes terror's challenge to the world. Many and varied are the critics of US policy in Iraq - both of Washington's decision to go to war, and the way the US has handled matters since "victory" was declared. What makes Francis Fukuyama's criticism of the US policy different - a policy heavily influenced in the Pentagon and White House by such neo-conservatives as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Lewis Libby, John Bolton and Elliott Abrams - is that Fukuyama is a fellow "neocon."...

he transformation of George W. Bush from a presidential candidate opposed to nation-building into a President committed to writing the history of an entire troubled part of the world is one of the most dramatic illustrations we have of how the September 11 terrorist attacks changed American politics. Under Bush's presidency the United States has taken responsibility for the stability and political development of two Muslim countries—Afghanistan and Iraq. A lot now rides on our ability not just to win wars but to help create self-sustaining democratic political institutions and robust market-oriented economies, and not only in these two countries...

<p>We have seen demonstrations all over Europe and the Middle East to protest the French government's proposed prohibition of Muslim girls from wearing headscarves in public schools. This ban is part of a larger struggle taking place throughout Europe over the continent's cultural identity. France and other European countries are host to Muslim minorities that constitute upward of 10% of their populations, minorities that are becoming increasingly active politically. European Muslims are primarily responsible for the rise in anti-Semitic incidents over the past three years, and their perceptions heavily color European media reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This demographic shift has already affected foreign policy: the French government's stance against the Iraq war and U.S. foreign policy more generally seeks in part to appease Muslim opinion.</p>

A new ideological challenge to liberal democracy 'transnational progressivism' is emerging from inside rather than outside Western civilisation. Three weeks after the September 11 attacks on the United States, Francis Fukuyama stated in an article in the Wall Street Journal that his 'end of history' thesis1 remained valid 12 years after he first presented it, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama's core argument was that after the defeat of communism and National Socialism, no serious ideological competitor to Western-style liberal democracy was likely to emerge in the future. Thus, in terms of political philosophy, liberal democracy is...

Writing as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Francis Fukuyama famously announced the “End of History.” The world, he argued, was fast approaching the final stage of its political evolution. Western democratic capitalism had proved itself superior to all its historical rivals and now would find acceptance across the globe. Here were the communist regimes dropping into the dustbin of history, Fukuyama noted, while dictatorships and statist economies in Asia and South America were toppling too. A new world consumer class was evolving, leaving behind such retrograde notions as nationhood and national honor. As a result, war would grow rare...

<p>After enduring criticism from much of the world for embarking on Operation Iraqi Freedom, Americans have been justly celebrating the downfall of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship and the fact that the war was neither as protracted nor as morally ambiguous as many had feared. Once again the U.S. military has shown itself to be the best in the world by any conceivable measure.</p>

Democracy in Arabia An unexpected home. By Amir Taheri When Iraq's opposition leaders gathered last month to discuss the future of their country, one of the few words they agreed on wasn't even of Arab origin. The word is dimuqratiah (democracy) which was first introduced to the Arabic political lexicon in the mid-19th century as the Nahda (Awakening) movement spread in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The word had entered other Islamic languages, including Persian and Turkish, slightly earlier in the form of demokrasi. It was the magic word that inspired the constitutional movements in the Ottoman Empire...

How could someone seriously be in favor of early death, disease, and disability? Ask Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and author of Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. "Early death, disease, disability: pro or con?" is how Fukuyama characterized what was at stake in our recent debate on the ethics of dramatically extending human lifespans. (The debate was sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Alliance for Aging Research in Washington, D.C., as part of their Science of Aging Crossroads policy forum....

VH1's upcoming special, One Hit Wonders, calls to mind popular tunes by long-forgotten artists known only for one song (link2). Who can forget catchy hits like "99 Luftballoons" by Nena, "Tainted Love" (Soft Cell), "Play That Funky Music" (Wild Cherry), and "Hot Child In The City" (Nick Gilder)? But try to name another song by these groups, and you’ll be stumped. But – how's this for a segue? – one-hit wonders are not restricted to the world of pop. They populate the neocon world too, though their hits are not as memorable. Case in point is Francis Fukuyama, the obscure...

Libertarian Thought at the Dawn of the Third Millennium: A Reply to Fukuyama by David DietemanOn May 2, 2002, "libertarianism" mistakenly appeared in a rather official-sounding obituary.Francis Fukuyama, who has previously written of "the end of history" (it was quite some time ago), now claims that: the liberal revolution of the 1980s and ‘90s, having morphed from classical liberalism to libertarianism, [has] crested and now [is] on the defensive. Today, the 103rd anniversary of the birth of Nobel prize-winning Austrian economist F.A. Hayek, it must be observed that Professor Fukuyama is completely wrong.Like the silver-tongued Saruman in Tolkien’s Lord of...

<p>Sept. 11 might have also brought down a political movement.</p> <p>The great free-market revolution that began with the coming to power of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan at the close of the 1970s has finally reached its Thermidor, or point of reversal. Like the French evolution, it derived its energy from a simple idea of liberty, to wit, that the modern welfare state had grown toolarge, and that individuals were excessively regulated. The truth of this idea was vindicated by the sudden and unexpected collapse of Communism in 1989, as well as by the performance of the American and British economies in the 1990s.</p>

It Could Have Been the German Century by Francis Fukuyama My nominee for man of the century is considerably less well known than Time's choice, Albert Einstein, even though his actions arguably left a much greater imprint on the century. He is Alexander von Kluck, the hapless general commanding the German First Army as it swung around the French right while dashing toward Paris in September 1914. The French line miraculously held, and von Kluck lost the first battle of the Marne. The German drive was stalemated, and the two sides then settled down for four horrible years of trench...