Confessions dans le New-York Times :

Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support

A la place, il redécouvre, en ne l'avouant qu'à demi-mots, les charmes de la realpolitik:

A Wilsonian policy that pays attention to how rulers treat their citizens is therefore right, but it needs to be informed by a certain realism that was missing from the thinking of the Bush administration in its first term and of its neoconservative allies.

Est-ce à dire qu'il renonce à la fin de l'histoire libérale-démocrate ? Pas du tout. Il est à la démocratie libérale ce que Marx était au communisme, tandis que les néoconservateurs tiennent plutôt du Leninisme :

"The End of History," (...) presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States.