Francis Fukuyama has been accused of being a pseudo-thinker and a sloppy academic — accusations that are not entirely without foundation. Harsh reviews from unforgiving critics however serve to dismiss his contribution to current popular political debate. Fukuyama is a populist historian and a commentator as much as he is a scholar. True, his historical analyses are often sweeping and at times overly simplistic, yet it is precisely this broad-brush approach that lends him weight. His discursive style and penchant for punchy book titles has opened him up to an audience outside of academia, and his previous career and personal friendships have given him one within the Whitehouse.

Fukuyama's After the Neocons is bound to be less controversial than his most famous work The End of History and the Last Man, a book with a radical, though widely disputed central premise. In that book Fukuyama proposed that the end of the Cold War evidenced the moral supremacy of liberal capitalist democracy, and proposed that democracy's growing ascendancy coupled with the fall of communism represented the final step in humanity's political evolution. This idea, though not necessarily original, captured the public imagination and catapulted Fukuyama onto the global stage.

Twenty years later he has found another eschatological moment to explore — the end of the neocons. Having been aligned with neoconservatism for much of his career, he wishes now to distance himself from it, mainly because he has come to believe war in Iraq was a mistake and history will not look kindly on it or, for that matter, any of the Bush administration's (and thus now neoconservatism's) forays into international politics. His defection must certainly be viewed as a moral victory for the anti-war movement, but considering Christopher Hitchens has moved in the other direction, this is not a watershed moment but rather, perhaps, a hostage exchange of pundits.

In After the Neocons, Fukuyama says that the Iraq war has galvanised the international community against the United States. Europe has busied itself with blocking US initiatives, Asia has begun forming cooperative organisations that exclude America, and Russia and China are growing in collaboration and mutual political sympathy. Fukuyama questions the Coalition of the Willing's justification for war and is critical of the conflation of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and Iraq into one single threat. 'As it turned out' he says, the United States 'overestimated the threat from Iraq specifically, and from nuclear terrorism more generally.'

Fukuyama is equally critical of the doctrine of pre-emptive or preventative war, and is more than aware of the dangers of this development in US foreign policy. However, he is reluctant to dismiss the doctrine altogether. As he says '(t)here are certain historical instances in which preventative war might retrospectively have saved the world a great deal of misery. The classic case cited by many was Hitler's remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936.'

Fukuyama's tacit refusal to condemn US foreign policy reveals the limits of his detachment from neoconservative philosophy. Indeed, he believes, 'the US cannot avoid provoking fear and resentment given its de facto power any more than Bizmarck's Germany could, but it can try to minimize the backlash by deliberately seeking ways to downplay its dominance'. He is, in spite of his own strongly argued critique of the neoconservatives' foreign policy failings, a believer in the potentially positive influence of American power, and implicitly, and at times explicitly, expresses his support of America's 'benevolent hegemony' over the world.

Fukuyama, in general, thinks that the weakness of the Bush administration is that it has failed to create durable political frameworks for 'long-term cooperation between like-minded nations'. He wants to see a set of international organisations come about which are both powerful and legitimate. Two things which he elsewhere says are mutually exclusive (and demonstrates with a table). Can we ever have a truly democratic international institution, he asks. He seems to think it is unlikely. What he advocates is an alliance of like-minded states, but 'the US should not be accountable to regimes that are not themselves accountable'.

In spite of Fukuyama's professed paradigmatic shift he is still, at heart, a believer in America's right to use its unique military, economic and cultural power to exert a form of moral authority upon the world. He remains critical of the United Nations for its inefficiency and advocates the development of 'multi-multilateralism' in which a number of organisations oversee international financial and social interaction. Is this though, a means through which the United States may cherry pick, and defer to the organisation of its choosing as new problems present themselves? He remains unclear. He identifies, rightly, that '(t)he hegemon has to be not just well-intentioned but also prudent and smart in its exercise of power', but does not address the issue of whether the world requires a hegemon in the first place.

What will come after the neocons? Former neocons it seems. If this is the case, and they fail to engage with Fukuyama's legitimate concerns over America's current political philosophical shortcomings, then as Fukuyama says himself, 'our unipolar world is in for a rough ride.'

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