No doubt it has been said before that, in the neoconservative imagination, history represents God. “History will judge whether the decision to invade Iraq was a mistake,” say supporters of the Freedom Agenda. A feeble argument, a rhetorical last resort, and a non sequitur: history, being abstract, will not judge anything. It might be more accurate to say the future will judge a particular action, but that is equally absurd, and doesn’t convey the same sense of epic destiny. And destiny, or fate, is what really excites hawkish minds. For them, history, the invisible end point of destiny, becomes the great moral arbiter at the end of time, a God.

Not so long ago, though, there were some pro-war thinkers who said that history was finished, arguably in the same way that Nietzsche pronounced God dead. Now, Robert Kagan tells us, with his new book, that the past is back. The Resurrection!