| 8:26p |
Fuck you Kagan
Fukuyama vs. Kagan
August 3, 2008 by admin
Erstwhile neoconservative allies Frank Fukuyama and Bob Kagan go head to head in a new diavlog for Blogging Heads. Honestly, watching the two of them conversate, you get the feeling it was an uncomfortable and awkward hour of recording. Perhaps that’s because Fukuyama is no longer the comrade of the neoconservatives that he once was and Kagan’s new book is in many ways a rebutal to the work that Fukuyama is best known for.
The Fukuyama shift of the years has been interesting. In the early 90s, his The End of History and the Last Man was the intellectual rallying cry of the neocons’ assault on the U.S. foreign policy establishment, particularly its chapters lambasting the realist school of thought. He sided with them through the Clinton years, and was part of a group of outside scholars and pundits that argued repeatedly for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But Fukuyama later defected from the neoconservative camp once they ultimately got their way but saw the Iraq adventure not go quite as well as planned. He went so far as to suggest in an essay for the NYT Magazine that his former brothers in arms were Leninist in their desire for the application of American power. |