Fukuyama recants, turns apostate about Neoconservatism

Interview: Sarah Baxter meets Francis Fukuyama
I was a neocon. I was wrong.

When Francis Fukuyama was a young policy geek working at the State Department in Washington in his thirties, he came up with a theory and a catchphrase that transformed him into an intellectual rock star. He wrote a remarkably prescient article called "The End of History?" in a small-circulation journal which electrified the academic world.

“What we are witnessing,” he wrote boldly, “is not just the end of the cold war, or a passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

It was the summer of 1989 and the Berlin Wall was soon to fall. The velvet revolutions of eastern Europe followed in short order and the Soviet titan itself went on to collapse. Fukuyama was given a generous advance to turn his musings into a book, which became a global bestseller.

With his Japanese-American background and international take on the world, Fukuyama was the perfect vehicle for his own theory. “End of history? Beginning of nonsense,” Margaret Thatcher is supposed to have said, but it was exhilarating to see the chips fall his way.

It is more or less what President George W Bush keeps telling the recalcitrant Iraqis, but despite a couple of inspiring elections they are not with the programme yet. Nor is Fukuyama, who has come to believe the Iraq war was a colossal mistake.

(The rest, from the UK Sunday Times, is here.)