Five centuries ago, Niccolo Machiavelli identified the same values in one person, the cunning Cesare Borgia, Duke of Valentine and the arch hero of his seminal piece 'The Prince'.

The smooth operating 'neocons', the neo-conservative core of the American right in the Bush administration, skillfully laid control in just two years to the foreign policy of the world's only superpower, inventing new conflicts and unsettling old ties.

But their true genius lies not in their ascension but in the full range of changes they introduced to Washington's international relations that no coming administration -- no matter how ideologically different -- will dare undo in full without hurting America's standing.

Washington's insider politics are also a lesson in the danger of unemployed power. There is no point in having absolute power without doing anything with it. America's liberals, in the Clinton administration, demonstrated inability to use that power to further their own agenda.

Clinton wavered on the Balkan wars, the African conflicts, and played to the grandstand in his last days in trying to move Middle East policy. He helped Russia stand back on its feet after the initial liberalisation chaos and achieved tactical progress on North Korea's nuclear program, but his slipshod attempt at promoting liberal democracy resulted in a cold spell in relations with old allies Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Indonesia, and in infuriating China. He helped shape an emerging alliance with India but wasted crucial years of the first decade since the end of the cold war without answering the most important American foreign policy question: What to do with America's overwhelming power?

The neocons stepped in, and no one can blame them. A policy of unilateral preemption articulated by the neocons is comparably far more focused than anything else available in the intellectual market of Washington think tanks. It is also more diverse than what it initially appears to be. For example, the policy favours Israel's Arial Sharon and seems to be taking on Israel's enemies. Yet it also rejuvenated America's time-tested alliances, keeping in mind that many of the neocons were former Cold Warriors. Thus ties were restored with countries like Pakistan and Indonesia; brakes were applied on the march to demonise China, and moderation was introduced into the rosy visions about India.

However, the most interesting aspect of Washington's foreign policy since 9/11 is the extensive use of doublespeak, disinformation and naked lies to further strategic interests. And that's just what has come to the open. What remains unknown is how much of those tactics were used by the neocons against each other inside the highly divided Bush administration. Richard Murphy, the former assistant secretary of state for Middle East, alluded to this last week when he suggested that Pentagon neocon-hawk Richard Perle and his cohorts kept President Bush in the dark about Baghdad's feverish last-minute attempts through intermediaries to avert war.

A flare for chaos

US foreign policy after 9/11 adopted the neocon theory of 'securing the realm', essentially meaning that no nation will be allowed to challenge the power of the United States. Interestingly, pundits all over the world focused on Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan as the principal manifestations of this policy. Europe, in fact, became one of the first victims of this doctrine.

A united and prosperous Europe was emerging as a real challenge for the United States. Franco-German leadership of this political and economic colossus, imbibed with Scandinavian liberalism, threatened to sideline the traditional Anglo-American hegemony over the continent.

The Washington neocons seized on the normal diplomatic tussles over Iraq in the Security Council to attempt to divide Europe along fake ideological lines. Having sidelined the pragmatist State Department and CIA, the neocons pursued the vilification of France and Germany with unusual vigour. Second-tier European powers, such as Spain and Italy, and third-rate nonpowers such as Latvia and Lithuania, were propped up as the 'new Europe' that deserved US patronage as opposed to the 'Old Europe' dominated by assertive Germany and France. This cunning gamesmanship has resulted in a permanent dent in the European cohesion, creating a fault line that can be used in the future to undermine the European union.

Washington's neocons seem to have applied the same policy of 'stage-managed chaos' in the rest of the world. Divisions in Europe ensured unchallenged US supremacy. The same is true on the international scene. The world order that emerged during the 1990s was fairly operational and organised despite the thirty or so low-intensity conflicts that raged throughout the globe. There was a universal acceptance of a set of rules and laws that preserved the rights of nations big and small. But whereas those rules were good for Bahrain, for example, because they guaranteed its sovereignty, they were bad for an unusually powerful United States interested in securing interests that lie in the realm of other nations.

Instead of facing a world united in opposing a powerful US, it was clear that throwing the world order back into chaos was the most appropriate environment for the pursuance of US interests. From Washington's standpoint, anarchy seemed eerily useful to creating new alliances, destroying existing ones that can pose a threat, and using overwhelming power. Unilaterally attacking Afghanistan and Iraq dealt a serious blow to the international system. The ensuing mess is obvious. On Oct. 9, Russian president Vladimir Putin and his defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, appeared at a press conference and boldly expanded what Russians know as the 'Putin doctrine': Moscow, they said, reserves the right to settle any disputes in its neighbouring states with military force, and to maintain oil and gas pipelines running from Central Asia and the Caucasus to the West, "even," said Putin, "those parts of the system that are beyond Russia's borders."

Australia has been emboldened to play the role of 'Asia's sheriff'. Israel attacked Syria with impunity, and India unsuccessfully tried to realise its own delusions of power by coercing Pakistan into submission on Kashmir. In all of this, Washington has unleashed unprecedented uncertainty on the world stage, a situation that allows it to divide and rule the world from a position of strength.

Shakedown

In the Middle East, Washington's creative approach seems to be shaking down the main regimes into compliance with the American-Israeli vision of a New Middle East focused on business and trade more than ideological rivalry.

In this context, the current noise about democracy in the region seems to be more a negotiating tactic rather than an inflexible goal. After all, the US has achieved most of its goals in the area. It controls the oil-rich Gulf, is physically occupying Iraq, and -- bar a few cultural outposts in North Africa and maybe Lebanon -- faces no British or French political influence in the region.

Washington does, however, face two problems in the Middle East. One is Israel's isolation, and the second is the rigid regimes. The solution for both is not to overthrow these regimes, but to coax them into accepting some reforms that deflate widespread discontent and allow for structural and mostly administrative and economic reforms that can go along a future region-wide economic zone.

President Bush hinted at this unspoken strategy in his Nov. 6 speech in Washington that his supporters touted as a landmark policy pointer on the Middle East. Interestingly, the following paragraph from the address was not given the importance it deserves in subsequent media coverage:

"As we watch and encourage reforms in the region, we are mindful that modernization is not the same as Westernization. Representative governments in the Middle East will reflect their own cultures. They will not, and should not, look like us. Democratic nations may be constitutional monarchies, federal republics, or parliamentary systems. And working democracies always need time to develop -- as did our own. We've taken a 200-year journey toward inclusion and justice -- and this makes us patient and understanding as other nations are at different stages of this journey."

So reforms that lead to softening on Israel, some economic liberalisation and some form of political participation are enough to make the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt acceptable to the US. Syria is a case in point. All pressure so far on Damascus has focused on expelling Palestinian opposition groups and ceasing support for Hizbollah. Should Damascus yield in, president Bashar Assad will suddenly become the acceptable face of Syrian reform, which he actually is, only internally embattled because of his late father's entrenched comrades.

This does not preclude the possibility that the US may indeed want to pursue full-fledged democratisation in the region. But in an area pressured by immense historical baggage, weak nation-states, and deep ethnic and religious problems, full democracy will result in compartmentalising the region, hopefully resulting not in civil strife but considerably weakened states. This outcome is certainly favoured by one school of policy in Israel.

Alternatives

Last week, a 'Washington Post' columnist offered this interesting observation on president Bush's gullibility before his neocon supporters:

"George Bush is not a dumb man. But before he decided to seek the presidency, he was willfully ignorant of international affairs -- or at least strangely incurious. How many Americans of his age, opportunity, means and family connection hadn't visited even London, Rome or Paris? His mind became a blank slate for a set of neocon ideologues, whose audacious goal was to reshape the geography of the Middle East."

A relevant question that arises now that the damage has been done is: What chances the United States has to break the neocon spell?

Another relevant question is: What is to become of the neocon cabal inside the Bush administration should things really get out of hand in Iraq and Afghanistan?

For America watchers, finding answers to these two questions will be the most interesting part of studying America in the weeks and months ahead.

Policy alternatives in Washington are not encouraging. Part of the neocon genius has been to introduce such radical changes in foreign policy that no successive administration will be able to roll back without jeopardizing America's global prestige.

The Republicans will almost certainly continue Bush policies. Democratic candidates for next year's presidential elections have failed so far to offer a credible foreign policy alternative other than simply rejecting all precepts of Bush policy. The American public, having grown concerned about the war on terror, do not accept this.

One new attempt to make the Democratic platform more acceptable to the American public involved 15 former Clinton administration officials unveiling last week a policy of 'progressive internationalism'. This is basically the same as Bush policy with only two differences: rebuilding of America's international alliances and ceasing the Bush policy of coddling undemocratic regimes for tactical gains.

None of the main Democratic candidates who have built a reputation for opposing the Bush doctrine has yet endorsed this platform.

The neocons seem to be in a tight spot as the situation worsens in Iraq and shows no signs of major improvement in Afghanistan. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, trying to admit the harsh reality without losing face by doing it in a pressroom, chose to write and then leak an internal memo where he warned that Washington was stuck in Iraq 'for a long, hard slog.'

Theoretically, one important guideline for those pursuing audacious politics that involve doublespeak, disinformation and lies is: if you are going to inflict pain on men, do it once and for all so that they won't come back haunting you later. The neocons did inflict pain, lie, and do lots of wrong, but in some cases they failed to be decisive. Big mistake. For example, they decided to exact revenge on ambassador Joseph Nelson, the man picked by President Bush to lie to the media about the Niger uranium claim who instead exposed the truth. The neocon decided to punish him by blowing the cover of his wife, a clandestine CIA agent, thus endangering American interests abroad and inviting an embarrassing inquiry at home that could blow up in their faces in the future.

Another example is the Lebanese-American businessman, Emad el Haj, who might ruin the political career of Richard Perle and associates in the future simply because the neocons failed to silence Haj when they could, knowing he was a scandal waiting to happen.

Haj recently confirmed that he brokered a last-minute Iraqi offer to Washington to meet all its demands, except for the regime change (which is unacceptable in international law anyway). The offer was enough to avert war, but Perle, who was contacted by Haj with the Iraqi peace proposal, seems to have 'killed' the initiative. Allegations are swirling in Washington that the neocons did not even bother to inform the president of the Iraqi offer.