1.
 Triumphant internationalism gathers all doctrinary options which express continuity with the traditional foreign policy of the 1945-1989 period. A continuity which is - at least in some cases - modified by the urgency of "catching the favourable moment", exploiting the current position as the only world superpower. 
 A key concept in this way of thinking is the celebrated "New World Order" - first coined by president George Bush at the time of the Desert Storm campaign against Iraq in 1990, it came thereafter to define the new role and "responsibilities" of the US. This concept does not in itself express anything quite new with respect to the preceding phase: care for stability, preserving the statu quo, acknowledging US "global leadership". It is more interesting to assess the concrete meaning of the concept, as shown during the conflict in the Persian Gulf. Here one finds the justification of preemptive war as a means of preserving world order, but at the same time - being apparent in the gap between the deployed military power and its results, in terms of securing lastly peace - a divergence between military power and political responsibilities; a divergence - it has been asserted - that policies followed in Somalia and Bosnia fully confirm. 
 But if political leaders seem rather unable to substantiate the concept of NWO, military leaders supply with much enthusiasm! 
 In 1992, one of the many "guided scoops" brings to the publication on the New York Times of a "secret" report from the Pentagon (Defense Planning Guidance, whose directing editor is Paul Wolfowitz, defence undersecretary for political affairs) where "new world order" is interpreted as US will of preserving their status of only remaining  superpower mainly with the use of military force - even unilaterally, if necessary. In this view, NATO is the vehicle of US interests in Europe, and the major guarantor of European security. 
 We owe journalist Charles Krauthammer the significant concept of unipolar moment, describing the character both absolute and temporary of US supremacy: in two or three decades new rivals could be strong enough to challenge it. Unipolarity also implies concentricity around a single pole - so that at the centre of the world is a Western confederation (G7, the Group of Seven, being a sort of prefiguration), and at the centre of this, the US. A structure of concentrical circles, where the distance from the centre is proportional to loss of sovereignity. The final goal is the formation of the world common market suggested by Francis Fukuyama in his End of History. But the primary goal - and the first task to be completed - is unifying the economically advanced West. 
 A pioneer in this direction was Robert Strausz-Hupé. Since 1957 he had been championing the need to unify the world under the star-spangled banner "in the course of one generation" (!) and - a champion of mondialism ante litteram! - condemning the idea of "national State" as a hateful french ideological invention and "the most retrograde force in the twentieth century". Strausz-Hupé world federalist dream (with NATO as the founding block) invested the US with the mission of being "architects of an empire without imperialism" - where Anglo-saxon civilisation is the bridge between ancient civilisations and the new emerging world civilisation. Poor as it might seem, this doctrine still gains new zealotes; among these, Strobe Talbott, presently number two in Clinton's State Department. 
 Joseph Nye points instead at the "soft" side of internationalist thinking. It is clear from the Persian Gulf war that economic power is no substitute for military power. US primacy stems from being on top both in terms of hard power (coercition) and soft power (persuasion). This last aspect leads to the many transnational institutions which the US must exert a firm control upon - albeit as leaders of last resort: the World Trade Organization (former GATT), the IMF, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and so on. This "delirium of omnipotence" describes America's possible role as the world "great organizer", as comparable to England in the XVIII end XIX centuries, to Austria between 1812 and 1818, to the Pope in the XII and the XIII centuries, back to Athens before the Peloponnesian war. 
 There is a "spenglierian" echo - our apologies to Oswald Spengler! - in the appeal Ben Wattenberg (director of Radio Free Europe) sent to the American people to acknowledge his "new manifest destiny" in the challenge of promoting "American democracy" all over the world. Here culture has a primary function, and the US are best equipped even in this field: show business, mass media, english language, turism, university education (sic!) and informational systems - not forgetting the entertainment business. That is: Coca-Cola, Bill Gates & Pamela Anderson at the service of the US-dominated unipolar world. 
 Some others do not exitate in recycling terms nowadays being shunned by puritans obsessed with political correctness. Assault conservative Irving Kristol (Wall Street Journal, August 1997) hails the day when the American people will acquire full consciousness of being an imperial nation: a great power can be insensibly led to assume responsibilities even without explicitly committing itself. 

 2. 
 Greater soberness - at least at first sight - reigns among neo-isolationist thinkers. They seem to realise that America is not anymore capable of an efficient management of internationalist foreign policy, both economically and militarly. Among the factors standing against it: a defence budget next to 300 billion dollars in the 90's, growing domestic debt, a savings rate among the lowest in the world, a bankrupt educational system (praised be truthfulness!) and a scarce propensity to reinvest capital from the financial bubble back to production. 
 Still isolationism does note mean - and never in US history did mean - a willingness for isolation. As a political doctrine, it does not rule out developing rich economic relations with the outside world. It states, though, a preference for disengagement - for keeping America's hands untied on behalf of freedom of policy choice. 
 A traditional stronghold of Republican thinking, heightened after the defeat suffered in Vietnam, neo-isolationism acquires a "national-populist" taste with Patrick Buchanan. The once aidee of Nixon and Reagan pleads for a total withdrawal of US forces from Europe and from Asia, but stands against disarmament. US supremacy must be mainained at sea, on air and in space. Intervention is not excluded, as long as it does not imply war on land (such is the nature of the compromise reached with the Clinton administration in the case of US aggression against Jugoslavia). 
 This sort of re-edition of the Monroe doctrine is shared and even radicalised by Ted Carpenter, director of the Cato Institute. Carpenter favours an independent strategy, free from heavy and obsolete engagements; US "vital interests" must to be rigorously circumscribed and all-round (360 degrees) interventionism is to be rejected; local conflicts (including those in Europe) must not be regarded as a threat to the above mentioned "interests". 
 "What are America's vital interests?" asks Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation. He lists five criteria: safeguarding national security (territory, borders, airspace); preventing a threat from a competing power in Europe, in the Far East and in the Persian Gulf (with reference to Russia, North Korea and Iran and Iraq, respectively); preserving US accessibility to foreign markets; protecting American people from "terrorism and international crime"; preserving accessibility to strategic resources. 
 As a corollary to his theses, Carpenter prompts a clear judgement about US present alliances and about NATO -  a vestige from the past, to be ridden of quickly. Here "pessimism of reason" shows his hand: the unipolar moment is not going to last. 
 Barbara Conray, also from the Cato Institute, denies that pursuing political and military leadership should be the founding block of American foreign policy. If you want to play the World's Policeman, you will soon find that risks outweigh rewards. 
 This assumption is shared by a large number of authors who do not believe that US hegemony can outlive the Cold War. Not only no new superpowers will be born, but regional crises will lead to a growing fragmentation of power. The US must therefore act to "segment" this regional instability without any active intervention. Forty years of Cold War attributed too much importance to foreign policy, says former ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick: it is time for America to look after her own backyard. 
 Because today power essentially means economic power, and such will be the playground for the real game. The mondialist option will not be rewarded with a world united around American values. And America's sociocultural domestic troubles call for an urgent interior renewal.

•     the eventuality that US foreign policy interests could not coincide with those of the their traditional allies
•     the principle of preserving the status of first nuclear dissuasion pole 
•     the aim of preserving military supremacy (airforce and navy) against allies and others
•     the principle of selective and proportionate commitment to different forms of cooperation on a regional scale (NATO being a typical application). 

 This concept (later adopted by the Clinton administration) is associated with that of enlarging the so-called "liberal community". 
 Some authors related to this way of thinking have openly vindicated a primary role to economic supremacy, thus limiting the scope for the imperatives to national security and spreading American values (one may think about rapid restructuring of CIA - or at least of its "official" bodies - to economic and financial espionage). Cold War bipolarity would be replaced by a tripolarity  - US, Europe and Japan - of economic superpowers. This concept is functional to the need of keeping foreign markets open to US exporters and investors. Here promoting collective security systems - collective, but under firm US control - is a primary goal, in fault of which 
 Seecretary of state Warren Christopher said in 1992 that "economic security" is the primary goal of Clintonian foreign policy. Adjoint secretary Strobe Talbott in 1994 spoke about "diplomacy for globale competitiveness" - the meaning of which has been illustrated by Strobe Talbott himself: keep alert to prevent new economic regional groupings from formulating aims conflicting with those well known US primary interests. European Union beware! 
 America as a Big Corporation that must take advantage of a temporarily strong market position in order to shape it according to its purposes. This is what Richard Haas - maitre-à-penser of the Brookings Institution and former advisor to President Bush - seems to suggest in his The Reluctant Sheriff (1997). The goal of American foreign policy must be to cooperate with those who share their ideas in order to ensure a better functioning of the market and enforcing adherence to its fundamental rules. By persuasion, if possible, otherwise by coercition. So what we have here is not the World's Policemen - 24 hours a day engaged in fighting the many of Evil Empires - but the Sheriff, waiting for the situation to become intolerable and - then only - recruiting volunteers and mercenaries for the punishing expedition. 
 Sounds familiar, does not it? 

 4. 
 We deliberatley dedicate a full section to Samuel Huntington. His essay about The Clash of Civilizations? - question mark! - appeared in the summer '93 issue of Foreign Affairs. The follow-up (no more question mark!) came three years later with the book The Clash of Civilisations and the New World Order. The core of the argumentation - in relation to our theme - is explained at the beginning of chapter 7 : 
 “The new order built in the epoch of the Cold War was the result of the leadership of the two superpowers upon their own blocs and of their influence in the Third World. In the new emerging world order, the concept of superpower is obsolete, the global village being but a dream. No country, even the United States, can claim significant security interests on a global scale. The elements of the new international order have to be identified within the different civilisations, and in their interactions. Either the world will be orderer according to civilisations, or it will have no order at all. Leading States of each different civilisation will replace superpowers, will guarantee order within their own civilisation and also, though negotiations with the other leading States, in international relations .... A leading State can exert this role of preserving order, because other member States  recognise its cultural affinity. A civilisation is like a big family... Where they do exist, leading States represent the key elements of the new internarionale order based upon civilisations... ”
 Now comes the direct reference to Europe. What is "our" civilisation according to Huntington? 
 “ During the Cold War, the United States were at the centre of a wide and composite group of countries, bound together by the objective of preventing the further expansione of the Soviet Union. This group – known as “the Free Word”, or “the West”, or “the Allies” – included many, if not all Western countries, Turkey, Greece, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Israel... After the end of the Cold war, the West is slowly taking a new shape as a new grouping of countries, more or less coinciding with the Western civilisation.” 
 Huntington's violence upon geopolitics is functional to the annihilation of any difference between the Anglo-saxon world and the European civilisation into the concept of “Western civilisation”, where the latter disappears into the former. 
 Extavagant as it might seem, this analyis implies a very explicit theorisation of the hegemonic role of the US and their British ally over Europe.
 When Huntington tries to force reality into his schemes - then the most striking and interesting contradictions do emerge. 
 Having defined as fault-line conflicts those arising between border States which belong to different groups of civilisations living within the same State  - as opposed to conflicts between leading States, which involve the main States of the different civilisations - Huntington uses this key for a close examination of main conflicts in the 80s and 90s. 
 Let us have a look at the most interesting case: Bosnia. Huntington writes in 1996, still his conclusions perfectly apply to Kosovo. 
 In a fault-line conflict there are three kind of players. First level players (in the Bosnian case, Serbian and Croatian fighters, apart from Bosnians themselves), second level players (the three governments) and third level players, generally the leading countries of the differente civilisations involved  - in our case, we have Germany, Austria, the Vatican State, other european Catholic states and groups backing Croatia; Russia, Greece and other Orthodox countries and groups backing Serbia; and finally Islamic countries and  - surprise! - the US backing Bosnia. 
 Huntington admits it is a "partial exception", an "anomaly" - possibly a mistake of the Clinton administration, even too happy to bow to "strong pressures from his friends in the Islamist world". 
 A strange kind of anomaly indeed - since it repeats itself as a printed screenplay in the Anglo-American aggression against Serbia propitiated by the Kosovo crisis. 
 Such a curious theory is Huntington trying to sell us! - a quite strange theory which, unfortunately, ends up with demolishing its own bases… or perhaps? 
 Or perhaps there is again something that nobody was willing to disclose at the time - perhaps that infamous concept of a Third American Empire having in the Balkans their still contended territory - a concept openly stated by Michael Lind and Jacob Heilbrunn (Washington Post, January 1996). Then the picture becomes clear, and it seems reasonable for the US to act as "third level players" - or as mafia godfathers, plainly speaking - on behalf of a pseudo-Islamist entity which is given the task to act as a wedge, in order to prevent the reconstruction of a great European space. 

 4.
 A few words to sum up. It is high time we put reality back on his feet. Isolationism in US foreign policy never really existed: simply as it is, during the period between the two World Wars there was a preference for indirect methods based upon economic coercition and diplomatic manipulation. Therefore any reference to a supposed "neo-isolationism" is nothing but fiction.  Similarly, practical selective interventism cannot mean disengagement - when there is America's survival at stake, when chances of reversing a political, economic, diplomatic and miliray decline grow thinner. Behind America's mask as the guarantor of multilateral security and regional balance of powers,  hides the deliberate purpose of gobal destabilisation at any level - diplomatic, political, financial and military - starting from the "heart of the world", the Eurasian continent. 
 This is the historical meaning of war in Yugoslavia. 
 If a grain of truth is hidden in any lie, then we are debtors to Huntington of a precious lesson. In a coming world where the production of sense will stem from civilisations (in their mutual recognition, respect and cohexistence), as opposed to the nonsense of globalisation - there the US and their British allies are truly an anomaly bound to disappear.