Krauthammer on Fukuyama; 'This Changes Everything'; Library of America - New York Times

Krauthammer on Fukuyama; 'This Changes Everything'; Library of America - New York Times: "Paul Berman's review of Francis Fukuyama's 'America at the Crossroads' (March 26) begins with the following assertion: 'In February 2004, Francis Fukuyama attended a neoconservative think-tank dinner in Washington and listened aghast as the featured speaker, the columnist Charles Krauthammer, attributed 'a virtually unqualified success' to America's efforts in Iraq.'

This is false.

And checkable. The speech — 'Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World' — was published by the American Enterprise Institute (and reproduced on its Web site at www.aei.org/publications/pubID.19912,filter.all/pub_detail.asp). As its title indicates, it was not even about Iraq. It was a fairly theoretical critique of the four schools of American foreign policy: isolationism, liberal internationalism, realism and neoconservatism. In that entire 6,000-word lecture, I said nothing about the course or conduct of the Iraq war. My only reference to the outcome of the war came toward the end. Far from calling it an unqualified success, virtual or otherwise, I said quite bluntly that 'it may be a bridge too far. Realists have been warning against the hubris of thinking we can transform an alien culture because of some postulated natural and universal human will to freedom. And they"