FROM THE NEW YORKER: BREAKING AWAY by LOUIS MENAND Francis Fukuyama and the neoconservatives. Issue of 2006-03-27 Posted 2006-03-20

On February 10, 2004, the columnist Charles Krauthammer gave the annual Irving Kristol address at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington. The lecture was called “Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World.” It defended the Bush Administration’s policies of unilateralism and preëmption, and proposed that their application be defined by means of a doctrine: “We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity—meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.” The new “existential enemy,” Krauthammer said, is “Arab-Islamic totalitarianism,” and he compared the war that the United States should fight against this entity to the war against Fascist Germany and Japan—a war committed to the eradication of a deadly and evil culture.

Francis Fukuyama was in the audience, and he could not believe the approval with which Krauthammer’s speech was greeted. It seemed to Fukuyama that by the winter of 2004 the policies of unilateralism and preëmption might have been ripe for some reconsideration—they clearly had not performed well in Iraq—but, all around him, people were applauding enthusiastically. Fukuyama had always regarded himself as a neoconservative. He had had close relations with many of the leading figures associated with neoconservatism: Paul Wolfowitz, Albert Wohlstetter, Allan Bloom, Irving and William Kristol. Now he began to wonder if he still shared the world view of neoconservatives who, like Krauthammer, supported the Bush Administration’s war on terror. The day after the lecture, Fukuyama ran into John O’Sullivan, then the editor of the National Interest (a journal founded by Irving Kristol), and told him that he would be writing a response to Krauthammer. That article ran in the summer, 2004, issue. It was called “The Neoconservative Moment,” and in it Fukuyama announced that neoconservatism had evolved into a set of views that he could no longer support. Krauthammer published a response to Fukuyama’s response (“In Defense of Democratic Realism”) in the fall issue of the National Interest. Last spring, Fukuyama delivered the Castle Lectures, at Yale, in which he responded to Krauthammer’s response to his response to Krauthammer’s speech, and expanded his criticism of the Bush Administration. He proposed a new approach to foreign policy, which he called “realistic Wilsonianism.” Those lectures have been expanded, in turn, and published as “America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy” (Yale; $25).

Fukuyama argues that neoconservatism was founded on four principles….

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