Once a prominent neoconservative, Francis Fukuyama breaks with his former political comrades by attacking the U.S. invasion of Iraq. With deep insight, this book begins by tracing the origins of neoconservatism in the 1930s, with a group of left-wing intellectuals. Over the pursuing decades, this group moved, to greater and lesser degrees, to the right of the political spectrum. Unlike traditional conservatives of the Nixon-Kissinger school, however, the early-neocons blended a desire for greater human rights and liberty, with a belief that U.S. power could be used for moral reasons. (The "realist" school of Kissinger, in contrast, saw geopolitics as primarily a struggle for power among states). With the rise of Reagan, Fukuyama argues, the neoconservative worldview was able to trump the "realist" politics of detente espoused by Kissinger, and help bring an end to the cold.
But with the rise of a unipolar world led by the United States, the neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration overreached, with the result that the U.S. got bogged down in Iraq at a huge military, human and political cost. Furthermore, in a case of political irony, the invasion of Iraq -- with its visions of nation building and spreading democracy across the Middle East -- was championed by a group of people who historically had been very critical of massive social engineering projects. Overall, this is a very smart book that provides insight into what went wrong in Iraq, and provides lessons on how the errors of the neocons can be avoided in the future.
3 1/2 out of 5 stars
