Another consideration, however, has certainly been more important. It was a trip to Europe in summer 2003, Fukuyama has explained, that opened his eyes to the dismay felt by many of even America's staunchest admirers at the unilateralism of the Bush presidency. The disappointment expressed by such a pillar of Atlanticism as the editor of the Financial Times was sobering. Could a foreign policy that so alienated our closest allies be really worth it? Unlike Israel, which after Fukuyama's initial disclaimer scarcely figures in America at the Crossroads, Europe looms large. Fukuyama voices the utmost alarm about its reactions to the Bush Administration. The rift caused by the war in Iraq is no mere passing quarrel, he believes. It is a "tectonic shift" in the Western alliance. With millions on the streets, "Europe had never before appeared as spontaneously unified around a single issue as this one, which is why former French finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn labeled the demonstrations the 'birth of the European nation.'" Anti-Americanism is rampaging across the Atlantic, and placing the unity of the West at risk.

Though such fears are now widespread, they bear little relation to reality. European hostility to the war is broad but not deep. The invasion was widely opposed, but once consummated has not given rise to much further protest. Demonstrations against the occupation have been few and far between, in stark contrast with the global wave of protest sparked by the war in Vietnam. The British government that joined in the American attack has not been punished at the polls. The German government that opposed the invasion was soon helping out behind the scenes, providing information on targets in Baghdad and assistance with CIA renditions. The French government, taxed by Fukuyama with double-crossing the United States in the Security Council, in fact told the White House to go ahead without a new resolution, and has worked closely with Washington to install suitable regimes in Haiti and Lebanon. All stand united on Iran. European hostility to the current presidency is more pique than conniption. What has grated is indifference to diplomatic niceties, and insufficient homage of acceptable vice to ostensible virtue. Elites and masses alike are attached to the veils that have traditionally draped compliance with American will and resent a government that has discarded them. Grievances of this kind, a matter of style rather than substance, will pass with a return to decorum. A Clinton restoration would no doubt see a swift and rapt reunion of the Old World with the New.

Here Krauthammer was more clear-eyed than his critic. Dismissing Fukuyama's anxiety that US foreign policy is in jeopardy because it has lost international legitimacy, he remarked with justice that what threatens it is not any lack of EU certificates or UN resolutions--it has plenty of such rubber stamps, as he notes--but the Iraqi insurgency. It is the will of the resistance that threatens the Bush Doctrine. The rest is weak ripple effect. Without the maquis, European opinion would be no more troubled by the seizure of Iraq than it was by that of Panama.

Fukuyama's misreading of European sentiments is now conventional. His view of Islamic fundamentalism, on the other hand, is refreshingly unconventional, at variance with both his own milieu and mainstream wisdom. Compared with the great historic antagonists of capitalist democracy, Fascism and Communism, Al Qaeda and its affiliates are a minuscule force. Other than by somehow getting hold of weapons of mass destruction, they have no chance of inflicting serious damage on American society, let alone becoming a global threat to liberal civilization. Proclaiming a generalized "war against terrorism" is a pointless inflation of the punctual operations needed to stamp out the handful of fanatics who dream of a new Caliphate. Panicking over this relatively minor threat risks major miscalculations and is to be avoided, above all by Americans, who since 9/11 risk further attacks less than do Europeans, with their larger enclaves of Muslim immigrants.

This is a belated lucidity, after so much crying of havoc in the open letters, but it is one more typical of the note struck in Fukuyama's writing, whose tone is generally cool and unruffled. Its judgment takes us back to the logic of his larger work as a whole. The celebrated argument of The End of History and the Last Man was that with the defeat of Communism, following that of Fascism, no improvement on liberal capitalism as a form of society was any longer imaginable. The world was still full of conflicts, which would continue to generate unexpected events, but they would not alter this verdict. There was no guarantee of a rapid voyage of humanity from every corner of the earth to the destination of a prosperous, peaceful democracy based on private property, free markets and regular elections, but these institutions were the terminus of historical development. The closure of social evolution now in view could not be regarded as altogether a blessing. For with it would inevitably come a lowering of ideal tension, perhaps even a certain tedium vitae. Nostalgia for more hazardous and heroic times could be foreseen.

The philosophical basis of this construction came, as Fukuyama explained, from the reworking of Hegel's dialectic of recognition by a Russian exile in France, Alexandre Kojève, for whom centuries of struggles between masters and slaves--social classes--were on the brink of issuing into a definitive condition of equality, a "universal and homogeneous state" that would bring history to a halt: a conception he identified with socialism, and later with capitalism, if always with an inscrutable irony. Fukuyama adopted this narrative structure but grounded it in an ontology of human nature, quite alien to Kojève, that was derived from Plato and came--along with a much more conservative outlook--from his Straussian formation. Kojève and Strauss had valued each other as interlocutors and shared many intellectual reference points, but politically--as well as metaphysically--they were very distant. Strauss, an unyielding thinker of the right, had no time for Hegel, let alone Marx. In his eyes, Kojève's deduction from their conceptions of liberty and equality could only presage a leveling, planetary tyranny. He believed in particular regimes and natural hierarchy.

There was, as a consequence, always a tension in Fukuyama's synthesis of his two sources. In the final years of the cold war, when his joining of them took shape, this could remain hidden, because the universal interests of democratic capitalism were consensually guarded, without significant strain, by a Pax Americana. Americana: There was no significant contradiction between the free world and US hegemony. But once Communism had been eradicated in Russia and neutered in China, a new situation arose. On the one hand, there was no longer a common enemy to compel other capitalist states to disciplined acceptance of US command. But at the same time, the disappearance of the USSR increased the global reach of the American state enormously. Thus, just when the hegemon was objectively less essential for the system as a whole, subjectively it was bound to become more ambitious than ever before, as now the world's single superpower. In these conditions, it was inevitable that the general requirements of the system would at some point diverge from the operations of the singular nation-state at its head. This is the context in which America at the Crossroads should be understood. For Fukuyama's break with neoconservatism has occurred at the fault line between the two. At the center of the book is an extended attack on American "exceptionalism," by which he means the doctrine that "the United States is different from other countries and can be trusted to use its military power justly and wisely in ways that other powers could not." This is the delusion broadcast by Kristol and Kagan, he argues, that has antagonized allies and led to the overweening errors of the war in Iraq.

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