I guess i was surprised to see this from Fukuyama ("After Neoconservatism," New York Times Magazine, 19 February 2006).

It seems like he's gotten more defensive on the whole "end of history" thing as he's gotten older, so he seems more fixated on these camp arguments that I think, over the course of time, will be considered rather overblown.

In the end, Bush is Bush just like Reagan was Reagan. W sees the world in rather stark terms of good and evil, and he believes in defending the good and attacking the evil. Dressing it all up with Leo Strauss and neocons and Paul Wolfowitz secretly running more of the universe than is normal for a DEPSECDEF is all cool, in that DC-who's-up-and-who's-down sort of way, but it's not actually very descriptive or particularly helpful to our understanding of where we've been or where we going.

9/11 gave us a strong sense of where we are in history right now, along with where globalization is right now as well as Islam adapting itself to its encroaching embrace of its predominantly traditional culures. Bush acted on that realization and forged a host of new rule sets that will not go away. Some want to chalk that all up to "neocons," but I honestly think it's a whole lot deeper than that.

So Bush got us in deep in the Middle East on the basis of his view on how to respond to 9/11, and we're somewhat stuck right now with what's already on our plate. So don't expect any major military interventions any time soon. Bush is probably done for his second term, and much will depend on who comes next.

But guess what? That next president will face the same basic international environment: same problems, possibly new solutions in addition to the ones we've tried so far, but unlikely to abandon the right and the propensity to use the same tools Bush tapped, to include the military. As I like to point out: the entire post-Cold War period has seen three presidents so far use the military a whole helluva lot. I don't see that essential dynamic, or what I call the military-market nexus, going away any time soon.

What innovations a new president should bring is a more flexible definition of who can be our allies in this process. You can call this whatever school of thought you want, and many names will inevitably be employed with little common sense (but academics have rarely required that in their works) and result in numerous goofy bestsellers that explain nothing that readers don't already know and simply want reinforced.

But in the end, much will depend on the person in the Oval Office. If I could get a Bill Clinton-like player on economics and a Bush-like guy on security, I might actually have the peanut butter-chocolate combo of my dreams, and the best packages on both sides right now are probably Hillary v. Hagel, although I think there are several on both sides who can grow into that understanding over the course of a very long campaign (Warner, Brownback, maybe Feingold, very possibly Bayh). Kerry and Rice are strangely attractrive long shots, made so primarily because it's hard to imagine the transformation from--respectively--past-losing candidate and single/rather closed-off personality who's never run for office. Then again, watching Hillary's trajectory makes one realize that such transformations are completely possible.

But again, what neocons-up-or-down has to do with any of that is rather amusing but pointless to consider.

But I guess it's okay for a period of navel gazing that the wonks and academics do so well.

I, however, will do my best to resist, because I think that scorecarding is the death to big think.