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One of the most well-known U.S. academics due in large measure to his famous "end of history" thesis, Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist based at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), an inside-the-Beltway graduate institute that has served as home base for a number of Fukuyama's neoconservative associates, including Eliot Cohen, Paul Wolfowitz, and Gary Schmitt. Fukuyama was also linked to these SAIS colleagues through his close association with the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a now largely defunct letterhead group founded in the late 1990s by ideologues based at the American Enterprise Institute in an effort to push for a "Reaganite" foreign policy that advocated an interventionist U.S. post-Cold War strategic posture.

During the lead up to the Iraq War, PNAC served as the vanguard in the neoconservative-led effort to forge public and official consensus around an aggressive war on terror, including invading Iraq. In its now-infamous September 20, 2001 letter to President George W. Bush—which Fukuyama signed along with Cohen, Schmitt, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and a host of neoconservative, social conservative, and Religious Right figures—PNAC endorsed what it termed Bush's "admirable commitment to 'lead the world to victory' in the war against terrorism." Calling for the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden, the isolation of the Palestinian Authority, and the targeting of Hezbollah and its supporters in Syria, the PNAC letter also argued that "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."

In an article for the Washington Post published on the one-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Fukuyama continued to champion the neoconservative line in foreign affairs, criticizing the growing rift between the United States and its allies, which he argued rested in part on differing views of international law. "Europeans argue that they are trying to build a rule-based international order, and they are horrified by the Bush administration's announcement of a virtually open-ended doctrine of preemption against terrorists or states that sponsor terrorists." But, he wrote, "Americans are right to insist that there is no such thing as an 'international community' in the abstract, and that nation-states must ultimately look out for themselves when it comes to critical matters of security." Regarding the International Criminal Court, he wrote that "instead of strengthening democracy on an international level, it tends to undermine democracy where it concretely lives, in nation-states" (Washington Post, September 11, 2002).

However, as the war in Iraq turned into an increasingly bloody counterinsurgency conflict by the end of 2003, Fukuyama became one of the most high-profile neoconservative turncoats, lambasting the ideas of some members of the political faction for being "strangely disconnected from reality." In a much quoted essay called "The Neoconservative Moment," Fukuyama argued that neoconservatives like Charles Krauthammer, columnist for the Washington Post who shortly after the end of the Cold War famously argued that the United States should seize the "unipolar moment" to unilaterally impose it priorities on the world, had lost touch with new "empirical facts" that had emerged in Iraq that demanded a dramatic change of course in U.S. foreign policy. These new facts, according to Fukuyama, included: "the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the virulent and steadily mounting anti-Americanism throughout the Middle East, the growing insurgency in Iraq, the fact that no strong democratic leadership had emerged there, the enormous financial and growing human cost of the war, the failure to leverage the war to make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front, and the fact that America's fellow democratic allies had by and large failed to fall in line and legitimate American actions ex post" (National Interest, January 2004).

He added: "The failure to step up to these facts is dangerous precisely to the neo-neoconservative position that Krauthammer has been seeking to define and justify. As the war in Iraq turns from triumphant liberation to grinding insurgency, other voices—either traditional realists like Brent Scowcroft, nationalist-isolationists like Patrick Buchanan, or liberal internationalists like John Kerry—will step forward as authoritative voices and will have far more influence in defining American post-Iraq War foreign policy. The poorly executed nation-building strategy in Iraq will poison the well for future such exercises, undercutting domestic political support for a generous and visionary internationalism, just as Vietnam did."

The pages of National Interest, a magazine founded by neocon trailblazer Irving Kristol that has served as a platform for both realist and neoconservative ideas, quickly turned into a battleground between those supportive of the Iraq War and a muscular U.S. overseas agenda and those who, like Fukuyama, began to see fatal cracks in the movement's ideological façade. In a letter to the editor, published after Krauthammer wrote a withering response to Fukuyama's "The Neoconservative Moment," the SAIS professor spelled out other aspects of neoconservatism that he felt required serious scrutiny. One such aspect was its connection to Israeli interests and "Israel's experience dealing with the Arabs"—a view shared by a number of observers of neoconservatism (see, for example, Jim Lobe, "What Is a Neoconservative Anyway?" Asia Times, August 13, 2003). Krauthammer responded by trying to change the subject, arguing that "Israel's experience is neither definitive nor particularly instructive. Having pursued both hard- and soft-line policies in dealing with its Arab enemies, Israel can hardly be a model for anyone—57 years of pursuing these policies have left it mired in conflict and subject to more terrorism than any country on earth." He added: "Does Fukuyama's attribution to me and to other neoconservatives of excessive and inappropriate identity with Israel amount to anti-Semitism? Fukuyama challenges me to answer the question. My answer is: I don't know and I don't care. I don't care what people feel. I care what they say. After speculating about my motives, he invites me to speculate about his. I decline. I do foreign policy, not psychiatry" (National Interest, Spring 2005).

Undaunted by the criticism from his erstwhile comrades, Fukuyama continued his critique of neoconservatism, publishing the 2006 book America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. In it he writes: "I have concluded that neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something that I can no longer support" (quoted in Washington Post, March 26, 2006). He also published articles on the subject in major media outlets. In February 2006, Fukuyama wrote: "Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism, and American hegemony. What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world—ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about" (New York Times Magazine, February 16, 2006).

More recently, Fukuyama has begun pushing ideas that directly challenge both his former views on the Middle East, as well as those of the neoconservatives, including advocating a more aggressive diplomatic strategy in global hotspots like the Middle East. Commenting on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent success in pushing a diplomatic approach with Iran, Fukuyama said in early March 2007: "If the only thing we're putting on the table is that we'll talk to you, it isn't going to work. What the Iranians have really wanted over a long period of time is the grand bargain: the [U.S.] forswearing régime change, accepting the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic, restoring Iran's regional status, full diplomatic relations" (quoted in the New York Times Magazine, March 5, 2007).

Although frequently identified with neoconservatism, Fukuyama has repeatedly staked idiosyncratic views and has never shied from critiquing the political faction. In a 2000 article for the neoconservative flagship journal Commentary, Fukuyama pointed to what he saw as a huge gap in neoconservative thinking about international affairs—its "failure to come to terms with the global economy or to say anything interesting about it" (Commentary, January 2000 ).

His association with this political faction arguably dates back to his days at Cornell University in the 1970s, when Fukuyama and a host of other future political big wigs—including Alan Keyes, the former Republican Party presidential hopeful, and Abram Shulsky, an intelligence specialist closely connected to efforts by the Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon to shape misleading intelligence on the Saddam Hussein regime during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq—came under the sway of Allan Bloom, an important follower of Leo Strauss who wrote the controversial best-selling 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. Some of these burgeoning Cornell Straussians, including Fukuyama, would later be reunited in the early 1980s in Paul Wolfowitz's hand-picked staff at the policy planning office of the Reagan State Department. According to James Mann, many of those chosen by Wolfowitz, a group that included I. Lewis Libby, would over the next two decades form "the heart of a new neoconservative network within the foreign policy bureaucracy" (Rise of the Vulcans, p. 113).

His ambivalent relationship to neoconservatism aside, Fukuyama is best known for his "end of history" thesis, which he first spelled out in 1989 in the pages of the National Interest and later developed into the 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. Adopting Hegelian ideas about history, in particular that history is a rational process unfolding toward a particular end, Fukuyama argued that with the demise of Soviet communism, liberal democracy had emerged as history's last great ideological principle. In an article for the Canadian Journal of Political Science that touched on a 1995 essay of Fukuyama's entitled "On the Possibility of Writing a Universal History," the scholar Jene Porter described Fukuyama's thesis thus: "Fukuyama addresses the question of whether we have not reached the end of history in the sense that liberal democracy with its ideals of equality and freedom has triumphed, concluding that conflict of a limited sort will no doubt continue but not regarding fundamental principles. So, Fukuyama contends, history has reached its destination. This is not a happy ending, however. The loss of great ideological conflicts will bring a consumer society, a universal homogenous state, bureaucratization, and 'centuries of boredom.' Even worse, Nietzsche's prediction may come true: we will become a civilization of last men—dull, satisfied customers—'without daring, courage, imagination, and idealism'" (Canadian Journal of Political Science, March 1996).

Fukuyama is also the author of Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995), The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (1999), Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002), and State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century (2004).

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.