Free Republic

Given American policymakers' ignorance of Islam, "I am just worried about people like me running around with big theories trying to set foreign policy," stated famed intellectual historian Francis Fukuyama in Washington, D.C. His confession occurred at "Democracy in the Arab World: The Obama Legacy and Beyond," a recent conference that did little to alleviate the knowledge deficit among hackneyed Islamism apologists. Fukuyama's luncheon address at the downtown JW Marriot luxury hotel focused on the cultural factors that aided the development of modern societies. While China benefited from the appearance 2,300 years ago of the "first modern, relatively impersonal state,"...

There is a dangerous philosophy emerging in our fast-paced, technology-driven world of which most people are totally unaware. And yet, when Francis Fukuyama, economist at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, was asked what idea posed the "greatest threat to the welfare of humanity," his answer was this philosophy.  And yet I'm positive most Catholics have never heard of it. Catholics certainly do not realize that they are being fed a steady diet of images in popular media that play right to the more seductive aspects of this ideology. What is it? It is transhumanism. "What is that?"...

When I was asked by the editors of the Financial Times to contribute to a series on the future of conservatism, I hesitated because it seemed to me that in both the US and Europe what was most needed was not a new form of conservatism but rather a reinvention of the left. For more than a generation we have been under the sway of conservative ideas, against which there has been little serious competition. In the wake of the financial crisis and the rise of massive inequality, there should be an upsurge of left-wing populism, and yet some of...

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...