I imagine the article by Francis Fukuyama, "After Neoconservatism," from yesterday’s NYT will be the talk of the internet today (the Duck notieced it).  Let me add a couple of quick comments, loosely based on an ancient Chinese philosophical sensibility.

    1. In discussing the debacle of the Iraq War, Fukuyama argues:

The war’s supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of
default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of
coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of
institution-building and reform. While they now assert that they knew
all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and
hard, they were clearly taken by surprise.

     The neocons were too caught up in the web of their own ideology, blindly asserting that everything would work out fine in Iraq after the regime change, that the US would be welcome as liberators and could essentially pull out in less than a year.  Confucius comes to mind here:

The Master said: "The noble-minded are all-encompassing, not stuck in doctrines.  Little people are stuck in doctrines (2.14)

The Master said: "Devote yourself to strange doctrines and principles, and there’s sure to be pain and suffering. (2.16)

 2. Fukuyama points out the internal contradiction between two core neocon ideas: that the US can intervene aggressively and extensively in the affairs of other countries because of its supposedly unique moral authority; and that we should always be skeptical of claims for extensive government intervention anywhere because of the unexpected consequences such intervention often creates within complex social and political contexts.  In Iraq the first impulse obviously overwhelmed the second, to bad, bad effect.  In violating that second principle, not only did the neocons contradict their conservative roots in the most fundamental way, they also set themselves up for a Taoist "I told you so."  Remember this from the Tao Te Ching (29):

Longing to take hold of all beneath heaven and improve it..

I have seen such dreams invariably fail.  All beneath heaven is a sacred vessel, something beyond all improvement.  Try to improve it and you ruin it.  Try to hold it and you lose it.

 There is a certain affinity between Taoism’s hesitancy toward concerted effort to change the world, and the Burkean and Oakeshottian strand of conservative thought.  Too bad the neocons ignored both.