As a victim/veteran of the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam 1970-1972) I cannot take seriously any discussion of America's role in the world that does not proceed from Barbara Tuchman's classic definition of it: namely, "Folly," or "the pursuit of policy contrary to self interest."

Two iron laws of mindless bureaucratic growth explain how President Eisenhower's quaint "Military-Industrial Complex" has essentially self-inflated to the point of consuming America's capacity for rational self-government and effective policy-making. The ludicrous and completely unforced American reprise of Vietnam II in today's middle-eastern Bay of Goats only adds the insult of historical amnesia to the self-injury of vapid, venal vainglory. Expressed as a simple algebraic formula, American domestic/foreign "policy" amounts to this:

PARKINSON'S LAW + THE PETER PRINCIPLE = LUNATIC LEVIATHAN.

Or, the (unnecessary, made-up) "work" will expand to fill the (endless) time alloted for its (non) completion, while people in the hidebound hierarchy rise to their level of incompetence, producing nothing of value but only debilitating Warfare Welfare and Makework Militarism.

Or, as the Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swindburne wrote at the conclusion of "A Forsaken Garden":

Here now in his triumph, when all things falter Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, Death lies dead.

Bluntly but fairly: America has crawled up its own constipated "conservative" asshole and nearly died -- again.

In fact, crypto-fascist domestic religious-politics reign supreme in America and have since at least since America's evangelical missionaries drove the so-called "Open Door" (i.e., equal colonial rights in subjugated China) policy at the begining of the twentieth century. Professor Tuchman accurately observed (at the end of her book Stillwell and the American Experience in China) that a half-century later, "China went her own way as if the Americans had never come." Ditto for Southeast Asia a quarter century after that. Ditto for Iraq and Afghanistan soon.

In fact, as Professor Tuchman stated in her classic The March of Folly, the American government reacts mainly to "intimidation by the rabid right at home" which proceeds from the social and psychological instigation and exploitation of various-and-nebulous public dreads like "Monolithic World Communism" or today's favorite closet monster, "Global World Terrorism." When Gore Vidal called Americans "among the most easily frightened people on earth," he did not exaggerate our tawdry temerity. We Americans "go to war" by going shopping on our posterity's already-overdrawn credit card. What sentient carbon-based life form above the level of the amaoeba could possibly consider us as anything but dangerously crazy?

Anyone who could dignify America's fascist-consumed Orwellian self-destruction by assuming it "thought out" or "reality based" needs their indidual and/or collective heads examined. Intimidation by the rabid right at home explains everything one needs to understand about the "conservative" American government from President Harry Truman through Dick Cheney's puerile propaganda-catapult, Deputy Dubya Bush. Attempting to cloak crass institutional credulity in the melliflously modulated mush of delicate doublethink fails to disguise the truth of what we drafted or bullied-into-enlisting types said back in the day in Southeast Asia: namely, that ...

"We are the unwilling led by the unqualified to do the unnecessary for the ungrateful."

"We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here."

"We lost the day we started. We win the day we stop."

Updated to today's cliche-spewing rendition of the same madness:

"The tipping point will soon turn the corner and begin connecting the dots on the ink-stained flypaper dominoes in the tunnel at the end of the light."

Americans most need to discuss mental illness -- their own -- and cease presuming to understand what happens in other countries who most often go their own way as if us bungling, meddling Americans had never come.

FDR's foreign policy appeared to be different in that it stressed state sovereignty as written which was written in the Atlantic Charter of 1941. Elzabeth Borgwardt's describes Roosevelt's foreign policy in her book A New Deal for the World, which details how Roosevelt believed that we are all citizens of the world and human rights must be respected. However state sovereignty has to be respected and the United States can only act multilaterally and with the consent of the UN in order to enforce international norms. However this view was quicky discarded once Henry Truman came into office and started helping the European colonial powers, especially the French in Vietnam, to retain their possessions in order to expand American influence.

Neoconservatism as defined by the PNAC-nuts has been proved illconceived. It would take too much space, but all neoconservatism can or has been shown to be idiotic. It has no answers. It is idealogically barren. It doesn't mean the neocons will give up. They will hang on like the remnants of Italian or German fascism, or Yugoslav, Albanian or Soviet Communism, or Chinese aparatchiks now, for a couple of generations. Or more.

Much as the US likes to point its finger critically at the traditional imperialist, colonialist nations -- Germany, France, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and, of course, Great Britain -- and their slow release of bad habits, she is herself the ultimate imperialist. And with the rise of neoconservative doctrine, resurgent in this role.

As a group of colonialist white boys, they split from their mother countries and then proceed to dominate the continent and hemisphere by absolute racial differentiation, using slavery, ethnic cleansing, expropriation, concentration (reservations), genocide, war, purchase and blackmail. There's little any West European colonialist has done that the USA didn't match on its own doorstep.

The conflict for identity we are witnessing, a Jekyll and Hyde dualism, is one that seems inured to US national character, and her history is rich with it. From the enlightenment of the founding fathers to their blindness to racism despite their direct language. The need to survive as a nation leading to decisions that compromise principles. The momentous 1917 decision to intervene in Europe. From the repetition of the barons of the early 20th century to today's wealth grab. The 1930s change of direction to a more social -- rather than frontier -- society, leading through WWII to all the cooperative world institutions and levers established today, and the USA's close cooperation with a broad alliance of Western nations, plus a number in the Far East.

An extraordinary change of direction.

The kick-back came not with VietNam, but because of the failure, and with Reagan and following. He defined a need to reestablish US confidence and self belief, resulting, ultimately and unfortunately, in a a hubristic expression of hegemony in the worst and most embarrassing way.

George W. Bush will go down as being the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

No god involved here.

It's to be seen if the US can recover in a mature, sensible and constructive manner, embracing her partners and the world, or needs to re-express her(!) testosterone in the disasterous manner of this immature, inexperienced and delusional administration.

So, is neoconservatism the mainstream? Within a certain faction of the right, yes! Among a certain proportion of Ramboesque citizenry, yes!

Overall, just part of the US personality that needs resolving within a greater whole.

NEO- CONSERVATIVES, MAINSTREAM? THESE PEOPLE ARE A THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES AND SHOULD BE LISTED AS SO. THEIR LOYALTY LIES WITH ISRAEL AND MOST AMERICANS KNOW THAT NOW. IT SHOULD BE NOTED THAT MOST OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN THE US AS WELL AS ISRAEL DO NOT APPOVE OF THEIR WAR MONGERING POLICES.

Is it neoconservatives we need to be worried about? What about those who are making free speech illegal? see http://www.silencingchristians.com and then tell me that neoconservatives are in control.

Jim Anderson
http://www.thetruthaboutcredit.com

The inescapable and singularly most formative element of U.S. foreign policy in a post WWII era has been what is good for U.S. corporate interests. Not only is this true but the condition has grown more flagrant over time and shows no sign of abating. This matches precisely domestic policy where the interests of the majority working class and consumer has suffered decidedly one-sided legislative defeats too numerous to count.

The ruling political and financial elite of this nation have usurped and abused power in every way possible. At the heart of this is total financial control of the entire U.S. economic unit. Virtually everything congress does is about centralization of U.S., and where possible, global economic power. Because of this the U.S. bears little or no resemblance to the U.S. of 1950.

However we are fast approaching a global economic reckoning that I suspect will soundly and uncomfortably rebuke the manner in which our government has improperly conducted itself in this regard. It is one thing to do this to an unsuspecting and all too trusting (stupid) American public. That won't work anymore on a global scale. Do you really think the price of oil is about anything more than the fact that the Bush WH has pissed off most, if not all, Arab states? Do you think China is going to stand idly by while Americans trash Chinese manufacturers without acknowledging that U.S. corporate interests willingly play a part in the production of substandard products?

Wake up America!!! It's just not possible to look down our noses at the rest of the world without there being some consequence.

In answer to the question title. I sure as hell hope not. 'Cause if neoconservatism is the mainstream America is doomed.