Francis Fukuyama wants you to know that he’s no longer associated with Neo-Conservatism. Nope, he’s done with it.
Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.
I appreciate the public disavowal of the movement. But Fukuyama still doesn’t get it. He imagines the intentions of the Neo-Conservatives were good, and that it was just dumb luck and inaccurate intelligence that doomed those intentions, and with them, the credibility of the movement.
But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the futureaccurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, whileAmerica’s perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before.
This is a convenient self-deception, that the shitty intelligence and the inaccurate predictions were unmotivated. Here’s Paul Pillar in Foreign Affairs, a journal I’d wager Fukuyama reads quite closely.