Francis Fukuyama

"By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, training ground, and operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The tenuous prewar connection between the Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the Ba'athists in Iraq has now grown into a full-scale alliance, fed by mutual resentment of the U.S. occupation."

--Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads,2006

BBC News last night featured an interview about Iran with a highly-presentable young specialist at Hopkins, Trita Parsi. The interview was startling to me for a word that Parsi used. Now that the neocon moment seems at last to be over, and the U.S. is working with European countries, he asked whether the period of American "isolation" has ended?

Parsi was describing the neocons as isolationists. Not isolationists in the old sense, of refusing engagement. But in isolating America from the world. A similar point is made in the wonderful dissection of neocons America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, co-authored by conservative thinktanker Jonathan Clarke.

The Parsi appearance is interesting for a couple of reasons. As head of the National Iranian-American Council, this scholar is a rising star. Parsi is even quoted in the Forward. He is highly critical of Israel, saying that it is using the crisis with Iran to seek to solidify its regional supremacy. And he is Francis Fukuyama's student. Fukuyama thanks Parsi in America at the Crossroads, his fine book about his apostasy from neoconservatism. Indeed, I wonder how much Parsi has influenced Fukuyama in his own distancing from Israel. Parsi, Fukuyama, Jonathan Clarke, Walt, Mearsheimer—they all are realists. I.e., conservatives. Their advantage over the left in opposing the horrifying Iraq war is that they have made it a point to distinguish America's interests from Israel's (while firmly standing up for Israel's existence). That has been important work. When will a politician show the guts to take them in?

In the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz today, NYU Professor Tony Judt argues that the publication of the now-famous essay on the Israel lobby may signal a real change in American foreign policy, away from our "umbilical" relationship to Israel.

The fact is that the disastrous Iraq invasion and its aftermath are beginning to engineer a sea-change in foreign policy debate here in the U.S. It is becoming clear to prominent thinkers across the political spectrum - from erstwhile neo-conservative interventionists like Francis Fukuyama to hard-nosed realists like Mearsheimer - that in recent years the United States has suffered a catastrophic loss of international political influence and an unprecedented degradation of its moral image. The country's foreign undertakings have been self-defeating and even irrational. There is going to be a long job of repair ahead, above all in Washington's dealings with economically and strategically vital communities and regions from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. And this reconstruction of the country's foreign image and influence cannot hope to succeed while U.S. foreign policy is tied by an umbilical cord to the needs and interests (if that is what they are) of one small Middle Eastern country of very little relevance to America's long-term concerns - a country that is, in the words of the Mearsheimer/Walt essay, a strategic burden: "A liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states." That essay is thus a straw in the wind - an indication of the likely direction of future domestic debate here in the U.S. about the country's peculiar ties to Israel.

As Bernard-Henri Lévy strolled along the edge of a field in Michigan abutting Highway 94, a p  read more »