Alan Bock Sr. editorial writer The Orange County Register abock@ocregister.com

The war in Iraq occurred and it still commands widespread though diminishing emotional support. Thus there is still a place for a book like "America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order," a critique of foreign policy under Bush - and much more - from a principled conservative perspective.

The authors are both veteran cold warriors with long-term diplomatic experience. Stefan Halper, now a fellow of Magdalene College at Cambridge, was a White House and State Department official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations, and is a contributing editor at the American Spectator. Jonathan Clarke, now at the Cato Institute, served in the British foreign service, with assignments in Germany, Zimbabwe and the United States.

The two argue that part of the reason the West prevailed in the Cold War was that the United States, for the most part, retained superior moral authority vis-à-vis the Soviet empire. In the post-Soviet era, however, "its moral authority is at risk. That is because the policies adopted in response to the catastrophic horror of Sept. 11, 2001 have rested on a series of critically flawed premises, namely that the challenges we face are essentially military in character and that military power alone can deliver victory. And while that may be true when barbarian fights barbarian for strips of territory, it is a profound mistake when civilization hopes to emerge triumphant."

How did America arrive at a condition in which, as the authors put it "we have convinced ourselves (with a massive assist from cable news and talk radio) that, as Americans, our natural state is war - war that has no dimensions, with elusive enemies who may be equally residents of Damascus or Detroit and with no definition of what constitutes victory and thus with no end in sight"? In a word, it's the neoconservatives, stupid.

Halper and Clarke's analysis is much more subtle and fair-minded than that. They take us back to the 1960s when left-leaning intellectuals who, as Irving Kristol put it, had been "mugged by reality" and started questioning liberal social and welfare programs, as well as a faltering opposition to totalitarian communism. Over time, especially with the demise of communism, neocon interests narrowed to focus on foreign policy almost exclusively, and on the use of military force as the preeminent instrument of foreign policy.

A valuable chapter reminds us that neoconservatives have little legitimate claim to the mantle of Ronald Reagan. They note that for all his rhetorical flourishes, Reagan executed policy pragmatically, leading to intense disillusionment from the neoconservatives and neocon forebears of the 1980s. "Within four years, [Norman] Podhoretz had published articles with such titles as 'The Reagan Road to Detente,' 'The Neoconservative Anguish over Reagan's Foreign Policy' and 'Mistaken Identity.' Irving Kristol had written 'The Muddle in Foreign Policy,' and Robert Tucker had published 'The Middle East: Carterism without Carter.'"

The most important difference between Reagan and the neoconservatives is that Reagan was both temperamentally and politically an optimist, convinced that freedom would eventually triumph. The neoconservativeimpulse - read the more substantive stuff - is deeply pessimistic, Hobbesian, seeing perils everywhere and turning to an ever-enlarging state apparatus to protect the clueless citizens.

This book advocates a return to traditional conservative internationalism, with a balance among trade, diplomacy, alliances, unilateral action where appropriate and war only as a last resort. I would have preferred a less interventionist new paradigm, but the book is still rewarding.