Policy crossroads

ENAR

American intellectuals and foreign policy wonks have been engaged in a spirited exchange of late, not for the first time prompted by one of their own: the intellectual and former foreign policy wonk Francis Fukuyama. In the dying days of the Cold War, Fukuyama wrote an illustrious essay in the neoconservative journal The National Interest, which he later turned into a book. He made the case that the defeat of communism signaled an ideological “end of history.” As he described it, this “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” saw “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Debate Now Fukuyama is back, having published America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, an essay in which he no less illustriously, judging from the reaction, took to task American neoconservatives and the Bush administration for leading the country into a calamity in Iraq. Initially