Read Goldberg's interview with Hillary Clinton before you read Goldberg's account of that interview

I've seen more than one tweet this morning to the effect that Hillary Clinton "threw Obama under an ISIS-driven Humvee" in a long, probing, interview with Jeffrey Goldberg.  I think that's a wrong impression created by Goldberg's introductory overview, which overstates her actual and implied criticisms of Obama.

It's no secret that Clinton advocated for early U.S. support of allegedly moderate factions in the Syrian opposition. And it's necessary and prudent for Hillary to distance herself from Obama, or position herself to do so, in that a) she genuinely is more interventionist, and b) the world could blow up on Obama and doom her chances if she's seen as a continuation. But it's also in Hillary's DNA to hedge, both from a desire to cover both sides and an ability to see complexity (except with regard to Israel, to which she pandered without inhibition). And in at least three instances, Goldberg emphasized just one side of her equation.

First, with regard to the Syrian intervention. Here's Goldberg:

In an interview with me earlier this week, she used her sharpest language yet to describe the "failure" that resulted from the decision to keep the U.S. on the sidelines during the first phase of the Syrian uprising.

“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.

And here's Hillary, in the interview:

Fuykuyama, whipping boy

Here we go again: another pundit taking a gratuitous swipe at Francis Fukuyama. This time it's Philip Stephens:

Then, of course, there was the famous claim that the collapse of communism marked the end of history. To my mind, recent times have felt rather more like the beginning of history, but Francis Fukuyama’s career has not suffered for predicting otherwise.

Fukuyama never said "the end of history" -- the universal triumph of democratic capitalism -- was upon us. He suggested that the world is trending toward it, because competitive pressures drive countries first to open their markets and then their political systems; the "end" was at hand only in the sense that with the collapse of communism there were no viable ideological alternatives.

Indeed, Stephens' own diagnosis of China's current conundrum is pure Fukuyama. Policymakers in Beijing, he writes,

are also aware that the autocracy and corruption on which the present system rests will not withstand the pressures of economic and social change.

Only the other day Mr Hu called for a “vigorous improvement” in democratic decision-making to help fight corruption within the ruling Communist party.

Read The End of History again, Mr. Stephens. The title may "shout a single message," as you complain serious books must do these days. But the content still provides a road map for the difficult course humanity is steering.

Revenge of the Communists

At the height of U.S.-Soviet collaboration during World War II, Franklin Roosevelt imagined a fusion of economic systems: 60% ours, 40% theirs. The collapse of the Berlin Wall and breakup of the Soviet Union would seem to have consigned this vision to the dustbin of history. But Yale's Jeffrey Garten, marking The unsettling zeitgeist of state capitalism in today's FT, suggests that "the era of free markets unleashed by Margaret Thatcher and reinforced by Ronald Reagan is fading away." Garten brings the surging growth of China, Russia and India into focus as a retooled statism that retains a strong tincture of communist aims and impulses.

While Garten acknowledges that "governments are reacting against the excesses of free markets" - citing "soaring income inequality," unsupervised product quality and poor financial risk management - he sees this turn of the wheel mainly as a negative:

The implications are worrying. While prudent regulation in selected areas can be justified, the new zeitgeist is likely to produce too much government intervention, too fast. We can expect less productivity, less innovation and less growth, since governments have many goals that the private sector does not. These include employment generation, income redistribution and the aggrandisement of political power. The expansion of regulation will also open up new possibilities for trade disruption. For example, countries may block the importation of goods that do not meet their precise national environmental standards.

Since Garten acknowledges "soaring income inequality" as an "excess," one might think he would acknowledge the need for a degree of income redistribution. And many would consider strict enforcement of national environmental standards a good thing. Most Americans, on the other hand, would regard the post-Communist mix of one-party dictatorship and state-controlled capitalism "worrying." But wherever one stands on the free market/state regulation spectrum, Garten has brought a really arresting global trend into sharp focus. He sees state intervention on the rise not only in the post-communist east, but in the US, the EU, China and the WTO.

Even during the Cold War, there was wide variation within the free world in the degree of state control over the economy; France, Japan and Korea achieved high growth rates in economies in which priorities and investment were heavily shaped by the government. It's true that for a long season, chronic economic woes in Japan and Europe seemed to auger a continuing shrinking of the welfare state, state ownership of economic resources, and state regulation. But now, Garten shows, the pendulum is swinging back toward governmental assertiveness. The EU is showing renewed competitive vigor vis-a-vis the U.S., and in the U.S. itself, a still-tentative but emerging confidence in the Democrats seems to point toward universal health coverage, stronger environmental regulation, and rollback of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Plainly, the end of economic history has been greatly exaggerated.