The events following 9/11 created an "empire" industry — millions of words written by pundits claiming that by intervening in Afghanistan and Iraq America was now a hegemon. The charge was that we are a world bully of sorts, intent on controlling the globe and ignoring the admonitions of more sober folk like the Europeans.

Yet even as university professors and consultants cling to such regurgitated and discredited postcolonial theories and Chomskyite drivel, the American profile abroad has made such conventional exegesis obsolete. In fact, we are adopting a radically new world role that defies conventional analysis as either imperialist or isolationist.

During this entire crisis tired voices of convention have misunderstood the nature of this war and the temporary presence of Americans in exotic places like the Asiatic provinces of the former Soviet Union, the Gulf, or Kurdistan. Instead of seeing such deployments in their proper context of ad hoc military efficacy and reaction to 9/11, they have instead shrilly alleged some sinister conspiracy to harness the world's oil through the use of permanent military deployment abroad and perpetual war.

Fools! The real danger is not that we are interventionists, but rather are on the verge of a weird insularity not seen since the 1920s — a paradox of still being engaged abroad but not in the usual manner of the past. The American Street is in a strangely revolutionary — read "fed-up" — mood. It is growing distant from Europe. It is angry with the Arab world especially, and it is tired with South Korea — and most whiny nations that either take billions of dollars in direct American aid or ankle-bite under the aegis of American arms.

The result is while hothouse analysts in Paris and spoiled teenagers in Seoul with Reeboks and football jerseys damn America the imperialist, the United States they knew is changing right before their eyes in ways that they might not like in the next decade — but that will in fact relieve most Americans.