Here's how it works. The US sees itself as the paragon of Western - usually "white," "European," or "Anglo-Saxon" society. But it is constantly beset by enemies. These enemies are those that the US and its colonial antecedents had victimized in its effort to build a wealthy society. English didn't just land in virgin wilderness in Massachusetts; they arrived at a place thickly settled for centuries by other people. To build settlements, they had to steal resources from those native populations. When the Puritans settled a river valley, or raised pigs, or enclosed lands, they deprived natives of the basic resources they needed to survive.

In 1636 one such group, the Pequots, fought back, burning down the town of Mystic, Connecticut. What that did was merely validate the Puritan view that nonwhites inherently wanted to destroy their society. And so in response, they raised an army, and in 1637 nearly wiped out the Pequots. "We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings," one of the Puritan commanders succinctly explained.

Ever since, this pattern repeated itself as the United States of America was created not out of empty land but in a constant, centuries-long battle with nonwhites whose resources we coveted. Susan Faludi, in a new book The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America (link is to an LA Times review), explains this in great detail, though it's something we academic historians have long known. Faludi summarized her findings in this NYT column from a few weeks back.

Her point is mine: that Americans have always felt insecure about both their racial position and their economic status. And they often express that in the language of victimhood. "Those Indians want to kill all of us." "Black men want to rape our women." "Japanese are a fifth column." "Islamofascists want to blow us up."

How does this relate to the topic at hand? In the US strategic thinkers' view, America must dominate the world, or be dominated by those who are essentially barbarians: not white, not Christian, not democratic, and not interested in cutting the US elite a slice.

Virtually the entire US foreign policy set was convinced that the 1990s offered not an opportunity for a liberal democratic order, but instead for US dominance. Democrats and Republicans both felt this way. Clinton envisioned a post-Cold War world in which the US would lead, mostly benevolently but with military force when needed, and quasi-legal force in implementing the neoliberal Washington Consensus. The Cold War was not a victory for the UN or for multilateralism, it was a victory for the US itself and its vision of "the West" that Jerome described - a West built around the concept of American leadership.

Neocons are simply a wing that wanted American dominance to be asserted more militantly and more quickly (but their ideas have ALWAYS been widely accepted by that foreign policy establishment, and those ideas sprang from their common intellectual wellspring). This is partly because they saw the world not just in the stark dominator/dominated view, but in an inherently racialized view. It was in the '90s that Samuel Huntington published The Clash of Civilizations, a seminal work that argued "the West" was going to face off against China and Islam, in an inherently hostile and competitive encounter that the US HAD to win if it were not to be at the mercy of foreign, nonwhite peoples.

I also have to suspect that some neocons, more than others at the time, understood the looming resource problems, especially peak oil. Once again this was fodder for their Hobbesian view, that America had to take full advantage of its 1990s status as the sole superpower or else it would quickly be caught, and surpassed by, barbarians.

September 11 was merely an occasion by which their views could be given a widespread airing. The rapid adoption of their views by the entire US foreign policy establishment suggests how close the neocon view always was to the overall thrust of US policy, and how willing many in that establishment were to accept those ideas.

Now that their crisis has come - the crisis they both envisioned and then brought about - it simply serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy and grist for even further fear and conflict. The US, they can say, really IS facing a fundamental crisis, and that it's the fault of these barbarians who now control our resources and our wealth. It allows the US to yet again be painted as innocent victims of hateful nonwhites who hate us, hate everything about us, and want to see us destroyed.

It's never difficult for those in power to play upon that for their own ends. As long as Americans buy into the notion that American = dominant, America = #1, America = white and America = rich, US strategic thinking will continue to be dominated by fear.

NB: See also this comment of mine at DocuDharma about the inherent anti-democratic views of Huntington et al.

And the world will live as one