HITCHENS: Do you remember what it was like? Don’t you remember what a hooligan atmosphere there was in American intellectual life for a long time because of the Cold War? Anyone who had any doubts that this war was worth fighting and worth the risk of a nuclear exchange was accused of being a dupe or a secret sympathizer or a fan of Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella or all these other things. People were constantly being crushed and coerced and derided and driven out of the argument. I wanted to put that down before people forget it.And of course, not only did people forget, they happily allowed the same f---in people to do the same f---in thing all over again. The Sadly story documents how they went in search of a new enemy after the Cold War, even going to far as to encourage Taiwan to declare its independence so that China would attack them and we could have a new conflict. Lovely.
Fukuyama:
Too right.I think that for some neoconservatives… In a sense, they wanted to have an enemy. The end of the Cold War was a tough time because they didn’t know who the enemy ought to be. I think in the case of Bill Kristol and The Weekly Standard there was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because I think that they felt that the Republican Party didn’t do as well if foreign policy wasn’t a big issue.
The late 1990s was the, you know, the period of the stock market bubble and Monica Lewinsky and they didn’t really have an issue in all of that, I thought, that they thought was particularly important or had much traction with the voters and with the public. I think they initially picked on China as their target — and I always thought right from the beginning that was a big mistake because, first of all, foreign policy shouldn’t be driven by the needs of the Republican Party...
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