PLEASE FORGIVE MY BRIEF SELF-DOUBT; HISTORY IS INDEED AT AN END:

Battle Splits Conservative Magazine (DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, 3/13/05, NY Times)

On Friday, 10 well-known board members, including the conservatives Midge Decter, Samuel P. Huntington and Francis Fukuyama, announced their resignations, saying they disagreed with the narrowly realist foreign policy of [The National Interest's] new owner, the Nixon Center.

At issue is the perspective laid out in the most recent issue by Robert F. Ellsworth, vice chairman of the Nixon Center, a "realist" foreign policy research group that acquired sole control of the journal last year, and Dimitri K. Simes, president of the center and co-publisher of the journal. In an editorial headlined "Realism's Shining Morality," they wrote: "Overzealousness in the cause of democracy (along with a corresponding underestimation of the costs and dangers) has led to a dangerous overstretch in Iraq," arguing that United States interests may sometimes require cooperation with undemocratic regimes.

The mass resignation is the latest round in a fierce debate on the right over the invasion. It is also the latest high-profile fight picked by Mr. Fukuyama, a prominent neoconservative and the author of "The End of History."

Last fall, he helped set off that debate with an essay in The National Interest calling his fellow neoconservatives "strangely disconnected from reality" for their continued celebration of the Iraq occupation as a success. Foreign policy realists, who question the necessity of the war, cheered his apparent defection.

In leading the defections from The National Interest, however, Mr. Fukuyama is aiming in the other direction: he is accusing its publishers of squeezing out liberal or neoconservative arguments about the universal appeal of democracy and the importance of spreading democracy to America's self-interest.

Hey, wait, it turns out I was right after all!

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 13, 2005 9:33 PM