Back in that strange era after the Berlin Wall fell, but before people started flying planes into buildings, lots of people took Francis Fukuyama seriously. It's difficult to remember now, but the 1990s were a feel-good era for a lot of people: venture capitalists, management consultants, 22-year-old stoners with Web design and software writing skills. Of course there were others—Bosnian Muslims, Rwandan Tutsis, Liberians—for whom it wasn't such a walk in the park. But in Fukuyama's influential The End of History and the Last Man, those were just outliers, people caught up in events, not history. What's that? A death squad of meth'd-up 14-year-olds just hacked off grandma's arms at the elbows? Sorry, history's over! You just had yourself an event!

When Fukuyama talked about the end of history, he meant the end of ideology: The Cold War was over, ergo everyone (or everyone who mattered, at least) agreed that America's particular combo of representative democracy and market economics was the best way to do stuff, end of story.

Needless to say, the past few years have not been kind to this theory. And it gets worse: Neoconservatism, the ideology with which he most closely identifies, is now near-universally loathed and blamed for America's presence in Iraq, its record-breaking federal deficit and its declining international credibility. Hence America at the Crossroads (Yale University Press), Fukuyama's plucky but doomed attempt to distance himself from neoconservatism.

To be fair, Fukuyama publicly disagreed with the decision to invade Iraq. But to argue convincingly that practically all of the policy objectives that he and his fellow think-tankers supported up until that point didn't lead inevitably to the 2003 invasion—now that's going to require some fancy footwork. And Francis isn't much of a dancer. Neoconservatives believe that, as he puts it, "the internal character of regimes matters." On the surface, this seems pretty innocuous. But it's not. Whereas Henry Kissinger and the old guard of American foreign policy were content to do business with any old autocrat who came along, as long as he did what he was told, the neoconservatives felt that America ought to use its sole-superpower status to reshape such regimes as democracies, and shouldn't feel obligated to submit to international law when doing so. Sound familiar? How embarrassing! Will Fukuyama's reputation, and his speaking fees, recover? Run, Francis, run!