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Will 2022 turn out be a hinge year, as a moment when long-standing trends in geopolitics suddenly shifted in a different direction? This week, two important writers, one a long-established and prolific historian, the other a provocative presence on the internet, have argued persuasively that the answer is yes. But there's one other interesting point in common: Neither sees the United States as having played a decisive role in the sudden shift. Over the years, Niall Ferguson has written admiringly about the 19th-century Rothschilds and the 20th century’s Henry Kissinger and has highlighted the positive achievements of Britain’s empire and...

There is a fine balance to promoting tolerance UNFASHIONABLE as it may seem, the Cronulla riots provide a useful reminder of the inherent risks of civil decline when the political class strays too far from grass-roots expectations on a nation's sense of self. The issue is not confined to Australia and is felt more in Europe than the US, where nationhood is more aggressively founded on a binding loyalty to a defined set of core values. Elsewhere in the West, a renewed clamour for national identity is a predictable and overdue response to the permissive extremes of the decades-long embrace...

A radical and a neoconservative change their political stripes.America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, by Francis Fukuyama, New Haven: Yale University Press, 226 pages, $25 Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath, by Paul Berman, Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 311 pages, $23.95The 20th century produced a glut of political converts, St. Pauls in search of ideological roads previously untaken. Even today, in an allegedly post-ideological age, converts are plentiful.Two recent books, Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads and Paul Berman's Power and the Idealists, describe parallel progressions. Fukuyama, once a...

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,...

1. Khamenei: Iran Will Have Bomb in April April 8, 2006 could turn out to be an ominous date in history - that's the day Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei says that Iran will have a nuclear weapon. Late last year Khamenei gathered his top advisers for a strategy meeting and told them "it has been promised that by April 8, we will be in a position to show the entire world that we are members of the club." This presumably refers to nuclear weapons, according to National Review Online Contributing Editor Michael Ledeen, who offered an inside look at...

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...

  29 April - 5 May 2004 Issue No. 688Interview Current issuePrevious issueSite map Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 Recommend  Comment  Printer-friendly Open-ended history Francis Fukuyama, of "End of History" renown, speaks to Ezzat Ibrahim, in Washington, of his views on the Bush administration's Middle East policy and the American tendency to confuse universalism with self-interest You support the "preventive war" doctrine as a way to defend US national interests, but at the same time you believe ideological hostility to multilateralism within the US is a problem. Is there an inconsistency here?It is impossible to rule...

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...

The Delusion of Darwinian Natural Law Marc D. GuerraIn a short, inconspicuous paragraph in the conclusion to the first edition of On the Origin of Species, Darwin speculates that "in the distant future … psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation." One hundred and forty years later, Darwin's eerie prediction about the revolutionary effect of his work on human beings' self-understanding seems all too prophetic. After a century of dissemination, the once-novel theory of evolution is widely accepted as established scientific fact. Given the quasi-religious hold...