But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point. ~Francis Fukuyama, The New York Times

As the world’s first “post-neoconservative,” Fukuyama has some interesting things to say on the final discrediting of the old dispensation and presents a short history of the neocons that should establish, pace Max Boot and other such intellectual giants, that they do actually exist. Of course, Fukuyama has a forthcoming book, After the Neocons, to promote, so the more he can poke his former colleagues in the eye the better it will be for sales.

In fact, Fukuyama is surprisingly forthcoming and honest about the many different parts of neocon history: the old Trotskyites, the Straussian connection, the Wohlstetter disciples, and so on. Fukuyama also points up the irony (or irrational internal contradiction–I choose the latter) that it was the old skeptics of social engineering, who belittled “root causes” arguments in social policy, who wound up pushing the Mother of All Root Causes: the lack of democracy in the Near East.

Via Jonah “Lie For a Just Cause” Goldberg at The Corner.

Here is a nice shot at the neocons’ faith in the democratic state of nature:

This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration’s incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war’s supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform.

In another surprising dose of honesty (after the dissimulations of the WSJ and the Standard, neocon self-confessions are strangely interesting), Fukuyama explains his own (he claims misunderstood) work The End of History and draws a completely appropriate Menshevik-Bolshevik analogy between neocons such as he was and the neocons of the Kristol/Kagan school:

“The End of History,” in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.

When a now ex-neocon can so readily admit the similarities between the “second-stage” neoconservatism and Bolshevism, and sets up his own neocon theory in terms of dialectical historical materialism, many a paleoconservative can take some consolation in seeing their enemies revealed for what they are by one of their own.

But in some respects a post-neocon like Fukuyama is now more dangerous to this country than the neocons have already been. For starters, the post-neocon does not have the tremendous credibility problem that his former colleagues have now, and he appears all the more reasonable because he has stepped away from the excesses of the neocons. His bland-sounding phrases about the need for “adequate mechanisms of horizontal accountability among states” is none-too-subtle code for encouraging the rise of transnational organisations with their respective military arms used to enforce “accountability” on unwilling members. He invokes Kosovo for this kind of “accountability,” and in his continued embrace of the “universality of human rights” retains the rhetoric with which that war of aggression was justified. The players remain the same–only the names change.