FRANCIS Fukuyama was the intellectual posterboy of US neoconservatism with his book 'The End of History', which attested to America's global dominance. But that was before Iraq. Now he wants his old ally Donald Rumsfeld to resign.
Among the signatories to a statement of principles issued in 1997 by a neoconservative outfit called the Project for the New American Century, four names today leap out: Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
A fifth also draws attention to itself. It belongs to Francis Fukuyama, a sometime State Department official and author of the heroically optimistic bestseller of 1992, 'The End of History' and the 'Last Man', a book that seemed to attest that history had come to a full stop with the fall of the Berlin Wall, leaving America Top Nation and the rest of the world panting to emulate its paradigm.
Seven years later history continues on its usual bloody course. Jeb, despite a little local difficulty in Florida, is still George Dubya's beloved brother, Cheney is Vice-President of the US, Rumsfeld is Defence Secretary and Wolfowitz his deputy.
Fukuyama, meanwhile, works at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, writing books that set cats among pigeons on issues as diverse as cloning and the disintegration of the family.
His great subject, however, is foreign affairs and on these he is no longer of a mind with his co-signatories. For Iraq, Fukuyma thinks, Rumsfeld should resign and he will not be voting for Bush. Although its argument, as he will uncomplainingly explain, was widely misunderstood, 'The End of History' concluded that there was no alternative to the liberal, capitalist democratic model.
But if you will the end and Fukuyama used "end" in the sense of goal perhaps you must will the means and this is exactly what the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) set out to do. Its aim was to "rally support for American global leadership" as it shaped the 21st century into something favourable to its principles and interests. In particular, defence spending needed to increase "significantly" in order to "challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values."
In other words, Fukuyama was almost right: the end of history was nigh. Now America needed to hurry it along. The PNAC hawks finally got their chance in the mayhem after September 11 when they persuaded their President to "challenge" the regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Fukuyama should have been cheering - or been as near to cheering as a softly spoken professor of 51, short and slight, allows himself to get. Instead, as US troops went into Iraq, he quietly prophesied doom. At the time he was working on a book, State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First Century, whose premise was that building strong states was a noble aim but extremely difficult to achieve. Now just published here, it enumerates the US's involvement in 18 nation-building projects since its conquest of the Philippines in 1899, and counts just three a success: Germany, South Korea and Japan. Even in Bosnia, where peace has returned and the economy revived, there is still, he says, no sign of the emergence of a democratic, self-supporting state.
"State building is extremely difficult," he tells me at a hotel in Clerkenwell, London, "and we don't know nearly as much about it as we think we do, which means we have got to be very careful where we try to do it. It would have been better if the Bush Administration had thought that through before the Iraq war."
Unlike the White House, Fukuyama stuck to his pre-9/11 pragmatism, believing (wrongly) that Saddam had chemical and biological arms but still thinking he could be contained.
"And I thought the cost of managing the postwar thing would be insupportable. If in a hypothetical situation I thought we could have handled the postwar easily, well . . . "
Then he might have been pro-invasion? "Yeah, but I guess what I find a little hard to understand is that so many neoconservatives had spent the previous generation arguing against ambitious social engineering on the grounds that nobody can control unanticipated consequences. I found it surprising that they all tended to believe that the democratisation of Iraq would be a relatively straightforward thing."
Fukuyama, in fact, corrects me when I refer to Rumsfeld as neocon. Indeed, Iraq might now be doing better if he truly had been one.
"He was one of the people that was not happy about nation building. He wanted to go in and out quickly. There was a marriage between those conservatives and the neoconservatives prior to the war, where they agreed on the need to get rid of Saddam. I think one of the reasons that there was such a lack of preparation was that Rumsfeld didn't anticipate having to stay there." But US troops were greeted with guns, not roses.
Last month Paul Bremer, the departing American administrator, left the Iraqi people with 97 new laws (one demanded that they keep both hands on the steering wheel when driving) and the strong possibility, Fukuyama believes, that their country will disintegrate into civil war and mulch into a breeding ground for terrorism.
So Rumsfeld should go? "I think that given the degree to which he was responsible for the failure to prepare, that would be an honourable thing to do. One of the things that is infuriating to a lot of people is the unwillingness of anyone in the administration to admit that they did anything wrong or that anything was unexpected. I think the reason that that's happened is it's an election year and if they admit that they were wrong it would just become fodder for the other party. But I don't think it's a good situation."
It is not simply a bad situation for Iraq; it is bad for the proactive version of the End of History project that he signed up to in 1997. Pre-emptive, nation-building America is at bay, he thinks.
Even his friend Paul Wolfowitz, who as director of National Planning tempted Fukuyama out of a right-wing think-tank, the Rand Corporation, into a job in Reagan's State Department in 1981, must be having doubts. "Of all the people in the administration I think that he's one of the most reflective and so I think it would be very unlikely that he has not had all sorts of second thoughts," he says, although he has spoken to him only briefly.
"I think it's safe to say that Iraq has become such a black hole it has sucked in all the other dimensions of US foreign policy. The likelihood of this happening again in the near future is probably low.
"And that's not really a good thing because it may be necessary for the US to act decisively in some future crisis and it won't do so because of this experience."
Instead, controversy still dogs The End of History. It started out as lecture delivered in Chicago in 1988 while he was working once more for the Rand Corporation.
By the time he had rewritten it over the winter as an essay for the right-wing magazine, The National Interest, he had re-entered the State Department under the first President Bush.
Understandably, it was read as an insight into the new President's mind. When the Berlin Wall fell six months later, it seemed incredibly prescient. The book deal followed.
But not everyone was convinced. Mrs Thatcher muttered: "The end of history? The beginning of nonsense." (© The Times, London)
Among the signatories to a statement of principles issued in 1997 by a neoconservative outfit called the Project for the New American Century, four names today leap out: Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
A fifth also draws attention to itself. It belongs to Francis Fukuyama, a sometime State Department official and author of the heroically optimistic bestseller of 1992, 'The End of History' and the 'Last Man', a book that seemed to attest that history had come to a full stop with the fall of the Berlin Wall, leaving America Top Nation and the rest of the world panting to emulate its paradigm.
Seven years later history continues on its usual bloody course. Jeb, despite a little local difficulty in Florida, is still George Dubya's beloved brother, Cheney is Vice-President of the US, Rumsfeld is Defence Secretary and Wolfowitz his deputy.
Fukuyama, meanwhile, works at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, writing books that set cats among pigeons on issues as diverse as cloning and the disintegration of the family.
His great subject, however, is foreign affairs and on these he is no longer of a mind with his co-signatories. For Iraq, Fukuyma thinks, Rumsfeld should resign and he will not be voting for Bush. Although its argument, as he will uncomplainingly explain, was widely misunderstood, 'The End of History' concluded that there was no alternative to the liberal, capitalist democratic model.
But if you will the end and Fukuyama used "end" in the sense of goal perhaps you must will the means and this is exactly what the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) set out to do. Its aim was to "rally support for American global leadership" as it shaped the 21st century into something favourable to its principles and interests. In particular, defence spending needed to increase "significantly" in order to "challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values."
In other words, Fukuyama was almost right: the end of history was nigh. Now America needed to hurry it along. The PNAC hawks finally got their chance in the mayhem after September 11 when they persuaded their President to "challenge" the regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Fukuyama should have been cheering - or been as near to cheering as a softly spoken professor of 51, short and slight, allows himself to get. Instead, as US troops went into Iraq, he quietly prophesied doom. At the time he was working on a book, State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First Century, whose premise was that building strong states was a noble aim but extremely difficult to achieve. Now just published here, it enumerates the US's involvement in 18 nation-building projects since its conquest of the Philippines in 1899, and counts just three a success: Germany, South Korea and Japan. Even in Bosnia, where peace has returned and the economy revived, there is still, he says, no sign of the emergence of a democratic, self-supporting state.
"State building is extremely difficult," he tells me at a hotel in Clerkenwell, London, "and we don't know nearly as much about it as we think we do, which means we have got to be very careful where we try to do it. It would have been better if the Bush Administration had thought that through before the Iraq war."
Unlike the White House, Fukuyama stuck to his pre-9/11 pragmatism, believing (wrongly) that Saddam had chemical and biological arms but still thinking he could be contained.
"And I thought the cost of managing the postwar thing would be insupportable. If in a hypothetical situation I thought we could have handled the postwar easily, well . . . "
Then he might have been pro-invasion? "Yeah, but I guess what I find a little hard to understand is that so many neoconservatives had spent the previous generation arguing against ambitious social engineering on the grounds that nobody can control unanticipated consequences. I found it surprising that they all tended to believe that the democratisation of Iraq would be a relatively straightforward thing."
Fukuyama, in fact, corrects me when I refer to Rumsfeld as neocon. Indeed, Iraq might now be doing better if he truly had been one.
"He was one of the people that was not happy about nation building. He wanted to go in and out quickly. There was a marriage between those conservatives and the neoconservatives prior to the war, where they agreed on the need to get rid of Saddam. I think one of the reasons that there was such a lack of preparation was that Rumsfeld didn't anticipate having to stay there." But US troops were greeted with guns, not roses.
Last month Paul Bremer, the departing American administrator, left the Iraqi people with 97 new laws (one demanded that they keep both hands on the steering wheel when driving) and the strong possibility, Fukuyama believes, that their country will disintegrate into civil war and mulch into a breeding ground for terrorism.
So Rumsfeld should go? "I think that given the degree to which he was responsible for the failure to prepare, that would be an honourable thing to do. One of the things that is infuriating to a lot of people is the unwillingness of anyone in the administration to admit that they did anything wrong or that anything was unexpected. I think the reason that that's happened is it's an election year and if they admit that they were wrong it would just become fodder for the other party. But I don't think it's a good situation."
It is not simply a bad situation for Iraq; it is bad for the proactive version of the End of History project that he signed up to in 1997. Pre-emptive, nation-building America is at bay, he thinks.
Even his friend Paul Wolfowitz, who as director of National Planning tempted Fukuyama out of a right-wing think-tank, the Rand Corporation, into a job in Reagan's State Department in 1981, must be having doubts. "Of all the people in the administration I think that he's one of the most reflective and so I think it would be very unlikely that he has not had all sorts of second thoughts," he says, although he has spoken to him only briefly.
"I think it's safe to say that Iraq has become such a black hole it has sucked in all the other dimensions of US foreign policy. The likelihood of this happening again in the near future is probably low.
"And that's not really a good thing because it may be necessary for the US to act decisively in some future crisis and it won't do so because of this experience."
Instead, controversy still dogs The End of History. It started out as lecture delivered in Chicago in 1988 while he was working once more for the Rand Corporation.
By the time he had rewritten it over the winter as an essay for the right-wing magazine, The National Interest, he had re-entered the State Department under the first President Bush.
Understandably, it was read as an insight into the new President's mind. When the Berlin Wall fell six months later, it seemed incredibly prescient. The book deal followed.
But not everyone was convinced. Mrs Thatcher muttered: "The end of history? The beginning of nonsense." (© The Times, London)
( except in the original it's liberal who's been mugged by reality).
