Of course, the neoconservatives retain well-known figures like Charles Krauthammer. But when it comes to true depth or originality of thought, Krauthammer and other neoconservatives like Richard Perle might also be described as straw hyenas -- prominent and strikingly vicious features of the American foreign policy ecology, but hardly intellectual lions. Fukuyama's strongest claim to have pursued for many years a trajectory quite different from the neoconservatives is provided by his best book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, published in 1996. This work is distinguished not just by its scholarship and sophistication, but by the breadth of its sympathy and understanding for a range of very different cultural, social and economic traditions.
As was said here years ago, and even now, Trust remains his best book. Truly deep and radical thought in the foreign-policy-oriented sections of US academia and think tanks is deadened both by the hegemony of American civic-nationalist ideology and by the interlacing of these institutions with the organs of government. As a result, too many formally independent American experts in fact tailor their every statement so that it can never be held against them by a possible political patron or at a Senate confirmation hearing.
The training in self-censorship starts, sensibly enough, with risque pictures on MySpace. It produces, decades later, the kind of silence that leads to violent insurgency halfway around the world. If Fukuyama wants to emerge as the great public figure that his intellect and learning qualify him to be, he needs to gamble: to risk short-term unpopularity and abuse in the belief that events ill eventually vindicate his stance. Breaking with the neoconservatives is controversial but "safe"; challenging the basic assumptions of the US foreign policy elite on Russia and other key issues is not safe at all. Western intellectuals and journalists instinctively turn to such liberal intellectuals, rather than either officials or ordinary people, for analysis of their societies. At best, this produces a copulation of illusions, with Westerners and their local interlocutors passionately misconceiving together. At worst, it lays us open to deliberate misinformation and manipulation by a range of would-be Chalabis.
This Anatol Lieven guy has a knack for phrases. I am compelled here to reference Alan Kay: If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?
The Two Fukuyamas | The National Interest | 
