Whatever patois comes out of his mouth when he starts speaking is bound to land him in trouble.

But I don't think it will be the traces of Home Counties English that will necessitate selfdefence training before entering the schoolyard;

rather the echoes of New York vowels flattened in Chicago.

That the American portion of his identity would be a burden for my son is something my family find hard to accept.

But as I mentioned in passing last week, the use of 'American' as an adjective has become an efficient term of abuse in Irish public discourse.

Three years into an Iraq war that I supported wholeheartedly and bullheadedly for what I still believe to have been the noble purpose of reversing the hypocrisy of six decades of US support for democracy in every place that did not happen to possess oil, but executed with a staggering political incompetence I still find difficult to comprehend, I can only hope that the fallout that will affect my son remains largely linguistic.

That will depend on whether Francis Fukuyama, the apostate neoconservative, has gotten it right the second time round in his After the Neocons, a book I've been reading in snatches between nappy changes. Fukuyama first came to worldwide notice in 1989, when he nicked "the end of history" from Hegel and Marx and turned it into an argument that liberal democracy had seen off all-comers as "the final form of human government."

His argument appeared just after the Tiananmen Square protests. Students had erected a 10-metre high 'Goddess of Democracy' statue that reminded many people of the Statue of Liberty. They quoted from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. But when on 4 June the Chinese government killed hundreds and injured perhaps 10,000 when tanks cleared the square, memorably delayed by a lone protester who held up tanks for half an hour, his prediction seemed pretty optimistic, even over the long term.

Fukuyama was hailed as a soothsayer when the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union imploded and most of the world outside of the Irish left celebrated these developments. But a simplistic and triumphal sense of global democratic inevitability. . . a misreading of Fukuyama's original argument . . . gave what became known as neoconservatism its political force and led directly to the United States' failure to approach the Iraq war with intellectual seriousness . . . both about the international legitimacy of the invasion and its aftermath on the ground.

It contributed to the arrogance that led Washington to believe it could literally ignore its traditional allies. Before the 1991 Gulf War, the US secretary of state made multiple trips to Europe and visited Turkey three times, gaining support for reversing the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. In the runup to this conflict, Colin Powell was virtually absent from Europe and made no visit to Turkey. Turkey denied the US use of its territory, a fact that historians may consider decisive in failing to secure Iraq after a deceptively quick conventional military victory.

I stand guilty of partaking in the arrogance and ignorance.

And their consequences were made clear when the Pew opinion poll last year revealed that more people in western Europe had a favourable opinion towards China than the United States. That is, more people here admire the government that in 1989 slaughtered its own students than the nation those students aspired to emulate.

History isn't closer to ending now than it was in 1989. But Fukuyama's new book offers a sober corrective to the idea he is most associated with.

The lesson of Iraq is that the US needs to rethink its global position, from benevolent hegemony to a more legitimate role, leading by persuasion and acting only with the broad support of the democratic world. Hopefully 17 years from now I won't have to explain to Fionn why we didn't learn from our mistakes.