Last spring, Fukuyama delivered the Castle Lectures, at Yale, in which he responded to Krauthammer’s response to his response to Krauthammer’s speech, and expanded his criticism of the Bush Administration. Krauthammer published a response to Fukuyama’s response (“In Defense of Democratic Realism”) in the fall issue of the National Interest. It was called “The Neoconservative Moment,” and in it Fukuyama announced that neoconservatism had evolved into a set of views that he could no longer support. That article ran in the summer, 2004, issue. The day after the lecture, Fukuyama ran into John O’Sullivan, then the editor of the National Interest (a journal founded by Irving Kristol), and told him that he would be writing a response to Krauthammer. Now he began to wonder if he still shared the world view of neoconservatives who, like Krauthammer, supported the Bush Administration’s war on terror. He had had close relations with many of the leading figures associated with neoconservatism: Paul Wolfowitz, Albert Wohlstetter, Allan Bloom, Irving and William Kristol. Fukuyama had always regarded himself as a neoconservative. It seemed to Fukuyama that by the winter of 2004 the policies of unilateralism and preëmption might have been ripe for some reconsideration-they clearly had not performed well in Iraq-but, all around him, people were applauding enthusiastically. The lecture was called “Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World.” It defended the Bush Administration’s policies of unilateralism and preëmption, and proposed that their application be defined by means of a doctrine: “ We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity-meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.” The new “existential enemy,” Krauthammer said, is “Arab-Islamic totalitarianism,” and he compared the war that the United States should fight against this entity to the war against Fascist Germany and Japan-a war committed to the eradication of a deadly and evil culture.įrancis Fukuyama was in the audience, and he could not believe the approval with which Krauthammer’s speech was greeted.

On February 10, 2004, the columnist Charles Krauthammer gave the annual Irving Kristol address at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington.

Wilsonian moment definition