The neo-conservative project is crashing.  

The "unipolar moment," the post-Cold War unilateralist utopia imagined by neo-con pundit Charles Krauthammer; "hegemony," the ultimate goal projected by the September 2000 manifesto of the Project for the New American Century; an "empire" over lands that "today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets," fantasized by neo-con Max Boot in the Weekly Standard a month after Sept. 11, have instead produced unintended consequences of chaos and decline.  

Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's presumption that successful war would instil fear leading to absolute obedience and the suppression of potential rivalries and serious threats - the "dangerous nation" thesis of neo-con theorist Robert Kagan - has proved to be the greatest foreign policy miscalculation in U.S. history.  

The quest for absolute power has not forged an "empire" but provoked ever-widening chaos.  

The neo-cons have been present at the creation, all right. But this "creation" is not another American century, in emulation of the post-World War II order fashioned by the so-called wise men, such as Secretary of State Dean Acheson, a consummate realist, who Condoleezza Rice continues to insist is her model.  

Squandering the immense influence of the U.S. in such a short period has required monumental effort. Now the fog of war clears. On the ruin of the neo-cons' new world order emerges the old world disorder on steroids.  

Bush's Old World Disorder