The intriguing but incomprehensible phrase 'the end of history' is back in the western media again. It was first made famous by former neoconservative thinker Francis Fukuyama in his once-famous book The End of History and the Last Man. The book came out after the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the cold war and the Soviet Union, and celebrated the triumphalism of the United States.
Now, his former comrade, the pre-eminent neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan, has come out with a new book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams. It is an expanded version of a long essay he published in the journal Policy Review. The title was obviously a snide wink to Dr Fukuyama, who has, since the debacle in Iraq, deserted the neoconservative fold.
Dr Kagan was one of the brains behind this great human catastrophe in the Middle East. Since his book is attracting a lot of attention, the idea about the end of history - or rather what he calls 'the end of the end of history' - is back in intellectual vogue.
If this was all an obscure debate among hyperintellectuals, it would not matter at all in this part of the world. But, in this debate, China is always in the background or foreground or, in Dr Kagan's case, right in the crosshairs of his belligerent foreign policy stance. And what he thinks matters, because he is a senior foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential hopeful John McCain. Dr Kagan is advocating, at best, containment against China; at worst, war or at least preparation for war - in all its ideological and material dimensions - against it.
Senator McCain's notion of a league of democracies is straight out of his adviser's playbook. The idea, as Dr Kagan spells out in his book and essay, is to gang up the world's democracies on the two great rising autocracies of our time, China and Russia. There is an inherent conflict between what he calls liberalism and absolutism, a fight for freedom against its suppression. Never mind that you don't really have absolutist rulers in Beijing and Moscow - Dr Kagan is into ideas, not empirical evidence, as we have all learned from his stance on Iraq.
But why all this 'end of history' phraseology? Well, China again, but also because of the peculiar intellectual pedigree of US neoconservatism. The phrase comes out of the philosophy of history of the 19th-century German thinker G.W.F. Hegel, for whom China stood at the beginning of history. He believed the goal of history progressed from slavery to freedom, which was achieved in Europe at the end of history - that is, after the Napoleonic era.