IT WAS PROBABLY FATED from a long time ago [that I’d be an academic], because my grandfather on my mother’s side and my father both were. It was just sort of a family tradition.

IN COLLEGE, I COULDN’T DECIDE ON A MAJOR. I spent half a year in France studying with Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes and people of that ilk before I decided that it was all nonsense. That was [when] I switched over to political science.

I WAS ON A BOOK TOUR IN EUROPE in the spring of 2002, and I expected to talk about biotechnology. Instead, I ended up arguing with everyone about American foreign policy. Being put in a position of trying to defend what the [Bush] administration was doing made me realize that a lot of their arguments [on Iraq] actually weren’t that powerful.

I REMEMBER BEING AT A LUNCHEON [after the fall of Baghdad] for a visiting foreign minister and [I said to] one prominent neoconservative who shall go unnamed, ‘Well it looks like we're going to be [there] for quite a while.’ And this person said, ‘That’s just nonsense. We’ll be completely out of the country within a year.’

I ALWAYS [SEE] PEOPLE IN THE IMMIGRATION LINE AT DULLES [Airport]. And there, a friend of mine who was just coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan in June 2003 said to me, ‘I think we’ll have this wrapped up in another two or three weeks.’ It was just that sort of thing that started me thinking that these people were seriously out of touch with the war.

WHATEVER THE RIGHTS AND WRONGS of the decision to go to war itself, the next big mistake was the failure to accept [Donald] Rumsfeld’s resignation after Abu Ghraib. If you had put new leadership in at that point, I think you could have adjusted to the insurgency and saved a couple years on what happened subsequently.

AS A SOURCE OF LEGITIMACY, there really isn’t anything out there that can compete [with liberal democracy]. And I think that’s still largely true. It’s still the case that neither Russia nor China has a coherent set of ideas underlying their legitimacy.

EVERYBODY HAS TO DEAL WITH UNCERTAINTY. But the unwillingness to adjust to real facts as they emerge [is] a dangerous thing.

WHEN I WAS IN GRADUATE SCHOOL in the 1970s, we read a book by Irving Janis called Groupthink. It made this psychological argument about the self-reinforcing nature of small groups, and I remember thinking, this is complete nonsense. But watching the Bush administration makes me think that this simple-minded psychological explanation really has more oomph to it than I was willing to admit 30 years ago.

I THINK THAT FAREED ZAKARIA has gotten it about right. The United States is not in long-term decline, but we’re laboring under a lot of self-imposed constraints.

THE THING WE GET THE MOST WRONG ABOUT CHINA is that many of its problems today actually have to do with the weaknesses, and not the strengths, of its central government. The problem in China is corruption and incompetence at the level of local governments and village enterprises. They are the ones harming ordinary Chinese—taking away their land, polluting rivers, getting privileges for their children in unfair ways. The government doesn’t really have the resources or capacity to control [it].

THE THING [OBAMA] HAS GOT TO REMEMBER is what it is that made people interested in him in the first place. It’s a different way of speaking about American politics.

Francis Fukuyama is Bernard L. Schwartz professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

• For the original Epiphanies interview that appeared in the September/October 2008 issue of FP, click here.