Though I do like this line:

Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States.

We should send him a t-shirt: "I'm not with stupid."

I do not think that the creation of new legitimate/effective organizations should be our main task in the future. Strengthening of the old institutions is what I perceive a more reasonable (realistic, if you want) goal. Abandoning of the structures, in which so much has been invested, is not going to add to the legitimacy of a new international regime, thus lessening its effectiveness in the bringing about of peace.

Occasionally competing? What if this progresses into "occasionally conflicting"?

I am not too much into functionalism, by the way. [The disparities in the foreign policies of the major actors today preclude the possibility of a real collective action (legitimate and effective) on any security issue. Multiplicity of organizations that could address such issues is going to worsen the situation even further.] So this part of the argument doesn't resonate with me.

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government -- Edward Abbey

Are we so short of intelligent thinkers, or is it just that the print media is too lazy to cultivate new sources?

The guy was a shill for the neo-cons. He is still a shill for the neo-cons.

Policies not Politics
---- Daily Landscape

I do like the Lenin quote though.

I suspect US isolation may be involuntary to some extent. If the bubble bursts the US will be in no position to pretend that it's a superpower. This will come as a huge shock to many in the US, but considering the extent of denial that seems common it's likely the response will be - more denial, and a pretense that the choice is voluntary rather than enforced. It's possible the US establishment may rehabilitate Fukuyama when they need someone to peddle an argument like this.

But historically there doesn't seem anything novel or unusual about the neo-con project - it's the same old textbook empire building that's been popular since cities started appearing. Sooner or later empires always seem to breed a predatory ruling class that believes its own propaganda while systematically looting that empire's economic foundations. At that point the whole thing falls apart because there's nothing holding it together any more. Either the barbarians invade, or military positions are retrenched because there's no economic foundation to sustain them.

If this happens to the US, the aftermath is anyone's guess. I don't think the Euro angle is to wish for the demise of the US. The EU and US are natural allies against the rest of the world. (Welcome to Oceania...) But it's hard to read what the ambitions of China or Russia are. Without a US counterbalance they could become aggressively expansionist. Or they may have been infected with enough capitalism by osmosis that a trade empire is likely instead. It's impossible to game this without more information.

The underlying problem is that these are all just large-scale tribal squabbles. Tribes now have millions or billions instead of tens of members, but all the flag waving and military spending is just primate shrieking and stick waving on a bigger scale.

What would be useful at this point is another Enlightenment. The last one destroyed the monopoly of religiosity and replaced it with attempts at objectivity. If there were a science of democracy that put enlightened values on an objective footing - and they are in a sense, because one difference between progressives and conservatives is the time scale of the thinking - that might tame the primates and make the shrieking, fruit stealing and stick waving a little less destructive.

Or not. But we can dream...

Dealing with the text itself, there are several key themes that jump out at me.

1. I think Fukuyama lays out here what "official" "beltway" Washington knows - if it doesn't say often - about the reality of today's Iraq. That is essentially a failed state and a terrorist training ground, and won't be much better for years to come. I think you can detect this change in expectations especially in publications like the Washington Post , but have gotten considerably less bullish on its prospects in the last 6 to 9 months, starting last summer.  Fukuyama comes right out of the intellectual milieu from which neo-liberal/"soft neo-con" beltway Washington "consensus" thinkers like Anne Applebaum, Fred Hiatt, David Ignatius and Jackson Diehl are from as well. In many ways, Fukuyama is THE intellectual of this class, who are also centrally located in the foreign policy establishments of both parties as well.

2. His recognition/admission/acknowledgement that a good deal of the support the Iraq War has been able to attract and even much of the support it is still has (which is considerably less than it once had) has not been especially related to the neoconservatives visions, but rather to a more basic, gut "we need to kick ass to show the US means business after 9/11" thing, an impulse that is often called the Jacksonian one in US political culture. As such, it has little or nothing to do with democracy promotion, empire building, pax Americana, whatever, and much more to do with simple frontier mentality of showing stronger will, showing "toughness," and not backing down from terrorism. Thus, people may scoff when Bush speaks of "fighting them over here, so we don't have to fight them over here" but this is exactly the kind of logic that generates the broadest base of his political support for the war.

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