Francis Fukuyama has been hailed in Britain and the US as a supporter of the Iraq war who has now courageously defected to the anti-war camp and shredded the neoconservative arguments justifying it. If that were so, it would be quite a coup.

The American philosopher and political economist made his name in 1992 with his influential bestseller The End of History and the Last Man, written after the cold war and fall of the Berlin Wall, in which he argued that wars of ideology had ended in the permanent triumph of democratic capitalism. An early neoconservative, at 53 Fukuyama is the nearest thing to a seer in America's foreign policy establishment. He would be a powerful recruit to the "realists", liberal internationalists or other Washington factions that are hostile to neoconservatism.