That most of the foreign and security strategy of the Bush administration lies in ruins is not open to serious question. In the Middle East, Bush's professions of bringing freedom and democracy have become an insult to the intelligence of the world. The destruction of the Lebanese state by Israel, with US support, comes only months after US leaders wowed to support and defend that country as a beacon of democracy and progress in the Middle East. Bush's remark to President Putin at the G8 about America advocating Iraqi-style democracy for Russia reveals a US leader with approximately the same levels of intelligence and connection to reality as Putin's Soviet predecessor Leonid Brezhnev in his dotage.

The element of Orwellian doublethink in US policy does not relate only to the sickening contrast between the language of democracy and the disasters in Iraq and Lebanon. Even more striking is that this public rhetoric is diametrically opposed to America's actual strategy in the Middle East, unstated publicly but admitted privately by many officials and in any case perfectly obvious.

In recent years, this strategy has reverted to the pre-9/11 norm: The US and Israel are relying on autocracies in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and elsewhere to hold down their own people, out of fear of US reprisal, Sunni radicalism, Iranian expansionism, or all three. Of course, this is exactly the old strategy which Bush and the neoconservatives insist was proved to be bankrupt by 9/11; and whose proponents have been dismissed by Bush as "racists" because they supposedly "don't believe that Muslims are capable of democracy". You don't get much more Orwellian than this combination.

America's pre-9/11 strategy was based on a commitment to maintain stability in the Middle East - a tenuous and unsatisfactory stability, but relative stability nonetheless. The problem is that this strategy is now combined with US and Israeli strategies which are in effect promoting anarchy. In the case of the latest Israeli attack on Lebanon, this was entirely deliberate. The intention was to put so much pressure on the Lebanese state that the Christians and Druze will launch a new civil war against Hizbollah, thereby "taking Lebanon back 20 years", as an Israeli general boasted.

In the case of the Bush administration, the thinking is much more confused and contradictory. Some leading neo-conservatives and their hangers-on speak openly of the need to cause 'creative destruction' in the Middle East by toppling existing states, but this is certainly not the policy of the administration as it stands. My fear is however that because the administration's existing strategy is so obviously bankrupt, it may sooner or later trap itself into a choice of either admitting that bankruptcy, or conducting what in German is called a flucht nach vorn - an "escape forwards".

In the US case, this would involve an attack on Iran, backing for Israel in an attack on Syria in an effort to topple the Baath regime there, or both. At the time of writing, this is a dilemma that is already facing the Israel government and military, as they face the fact that their offensive against Hizbollah failed, and try to decide whether to admit this fact and rethink their entire strategy, to plough on with existing approaches, or greatly to widen the conflict.

The bankruptcy of US strategy extends far beyond the Middle East. Largely because the Bush administration grossly neglected Afghanistan in order to attack Iran, the situation there is deteriorating, with the Taleban growing in strength. Incredibly, Osama bin Laden and the other planners of 9/11 are still at large on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier, and killing or capturing them no longer seems even a second-order interest of the Bush administration.

North Korea's nuclear missile plans have been hindered only by their own technological backwardness, and not in the least by US pressure. The plan to bring Ukraine and other former Soviet countries into NATO has collapsed while infuriating Moscow. All over Central America, also grossly neglected by Washington in recent years, democracies are crumbling or deeply troubled. And more than 2,500 US soldiers are dead in a war in Iraq which was launched on false pretenses and conducted with monstrous incompetence.

In the US public, there is indeed enormous dissatisfaction with what has happened. But most strangely in what is supposed to be a democracy, there is no formal foreign policy opposition in politics. Whatever they may claim, on the great majority of issues, the Democratic establishment stands squarely behind the official line of the Bush administration. A partial exception is the environment, where the Democrats (together with some Republican state governments) are pressing for much more substantial energy-saving measures than those adopted by the administration - though well short of those adopted in most of Europe.

There are two separate public oppositions to the present course of the Bush administration (apart from the neo-cons and the Cheney-Rumsfeld camp, who form a kind of internal opposition within the administration), but they are in opposition to their own party leaderships. The opposition among the Democrats consists of the old Left-liberals, who previously opposed the Vietnam War, and their descendants. They are the forces which last month combined to oust the liberal hawk Senator Joe Lieberman from his position as Democratic Senator for Connecticut, forcing him to run as a pro-Bush independent. The opposition within the Republican Party consists of the old-style moderate conservative realists, whose leading elder statesman is former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, and whose leading younger star is Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

The lack of real opposition from the mainstream Democrats has been disguised by the growing demands from within the party for early withdrawal from Iraq, represented by Lieberman's defeat; and the counter-attacks on this line both from within the Republican Party and from leading Democrats. This however could turn into something of a mock battle. In the first place, the growing Democrat calls for withdrawal play to public concerns about the chaos and the casualties (US casualties, that is) in Iraq, but the Democrats concerned have absolutely no idea of what strategy to follow in the Middle East after a US withdrawal - or if they do, dare not articulate it publicly in the face of threats from the Israel lobby.

Secondly, on this issue the Democrats over the two years to the next presidential elections may well find themselves pushing on an open door.

The overwhelming consensus among political analysts here is that well before November 2008 the Bush administration will in any case have withdrawn US troops, if not from Iraq altogether, then off the streets and into secure bases in the desert. The Republicans are not fools enough to run in the next elections while the headlines each day report more US deaths in Iraq.

As to the wider issues of US world strategy, the almost identical approach of the two party establishments is easy to demonstrate. One only has to read the speeches and statements of the two figures who at present seem most likely to be the contenders for the Presidency in November 2008, Senators John McCain and Hillary Clinton, and their closest associates.

Both Clinton and McCain advocate early NATO membership for Ukraine, and have expressed strong hostility to the Putin administration in Russia. On Iraq, they differ mostly over the degree to which Clinton - naturally - has been far more critical of the Bush record so far. But both oppose early or unconditional withdrawal. On the latest Middle East crisis their words might as well have been drafted by the same speechwriter. Clinton states that:

"I want us here in New York to imagine, if extremist terrorists were launching rocket attacks across the Mexican or Canadian border, would we stand by or would we defend America against these attacks from extremists?.. We will support [Israel's] efforts to send a message to Hamas, Hezbollah, to the Syrians, to the Iranians... They do not believe in human rights, they do not believe in democracy. They are totalitarians, they are the new totalitarians of the 21st century."

In McCain's words, "What would we do if somebody came across our borders and killed our soldiers and captured our soldiers? Do you think we would be exercising total restraint?.. Israel has neighbors on its borders that are bent on its extinction." Both Clinton and McCain call for negotiations with Iran, but only on condition of Iranian surrender to US wishes, and with the military option as a threat.

On spreading democracy in the Middle East McCain declares that: "The promotion of democracy and freedom is simply inseparable from the long term security of the United States." In Clinton's words, "human freedom and the quest for individuals to achieve their god-given potential must be at the heart of American approaches across the region".

The simplest and most commonly-cited explanation for this Democratic behaviour is domestic electoral calculation, based on the following very curious statistics, from the latest New York Times/CBS poll in July. According to this survey, as of this summer 54 per cent of Americans to 35 per cent disapproved of how Bush is handling foreign policy (and only 20 per cent approve of Bush's grey cardinal, Dick Cheney). Sixty two per cent disapproved of how the administration is handling Iraq.

Yet 51 per cent to 42 per cent continued to approve of how the administration is conducting the war on terror in general - as if there were no connection to Iraq! And this reflects repeated polls showing that while disapproving of the actual Republican record over security, most respondents continue to have more faith in the Republicans when it comes to security. On the crisis in the Middle East, while small majorities hold both Israel and Hizbollah responsible for the conflict and say that it would be better for the US not to take sides, 47 per cent to 27 per cent approved of how George Bush was responding to the conflict, even though he was doing exactly the opposite of what most said they wanted.

If the Democrats were simply reacting cautiously to these curious and contradictory figures by being tough on foreign policy issues, this would be reassuring, because it would suggest that if elected in 2008 they might in fact adopt a strategy very different from their present rhetoric - just as Richard Nixon after 1968 followed completely different strategies towards the Soviet Union, China, and even in the end Vietnam from the ones he had preached in his election campaign.

However, after almost seven years of interacting with intellectuals from the Democratic establishment (above all during my previous job at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, one of the centres of that establishment) I am afraid that while this electoral explanation is not untrue, it is only part of the truth. More important is the fact that if the bulk of the Democrat and Republican establishments speak the same way on foreign policy, it is because they think the same way. And of course the elites do not just react to popular views, they also profoundly shape them.

Firstly, both wings of the bipartisan establishment are American nationalists. They both believe passionately in the founding myths of American civic nationalism: of America as the world's greatest country, the world's greatest democracy, the natural, inevitable and irreplaceable representative of freedom and democracy in the world, and therefore by moral right the world's hegemon.

All this has been repeated again and again in Bush's speeches, but the two most famous expressions of it in recent years were by Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who called the US the "indispensable nation", and declared that "we stand tall, and therefore can see further into the future." These beliefs are drilled into Americans from their first interactions with organized society, whether in pre-school or church, just as similar beliefs about their nation's world role were drilled into European children before 1914. They form an ideological and cultural nexus so strong as to be largely impervious not only to argument but to evidence.

Thus Prospect readers who also read the Financial Times oped pages could read in August liberal hawk Lawrence Kaplan declaring that the greatest threat in the US is not more wars but future isolationism, and leading liberal Jacob Weisberg state that "Iraq was a badly chosen battlefield...in a war with totalitarianism that America has no choice but to pursue." These lines are indistinguishable from those of more moderate neo-conservatives. They are echoed throughout a recent collection of essays by leading Democrat intellectuals entitled With All Our Might, and featuring on the cover an iron-jawed Uncle Sam with an enormous American flag.

Secondly, and as this collection amply demonstrates, the bipartisan establishment is made up of American imperialists. The ideological underpinning of the imperial program stems from the aforementioned nationalist beliefs. Support for it is however immensely strengthened by the class interests of the American policy-making establishment, with its immense professional and individual stakes in America's global power. This power incidentally is not in itself bad. It has played an immensely positive role for humanity at certain points in the past, and could do so again.

At present, however, the US establishment is pursuing an extremely dangerous course. This is above all because, as Clinton's and McCain's statements indicate, the US is present everywhere, and thus impinges on the interests of every other major state in the world; but because of a mixture of overweening arrogance and a breakdown of strategic vision and moral courage in the US establishment, it is incapable of choosing between alternative strategies, establishing priorities, and taking domestically unpopular decisions.

This is true above all of the Middle East and the role of the Israel lobby. The third reason why the Republicans and Democrats sound so alike is that both identify so closely with Israel, whether out of genuine belief or fear of retaliation from the lobby. This was demonstrated by overwhelming of the Senate and House pledging unqualified support for Israel's offensive in Lebanon (410 votes to 8 in the case of the House).

Unfortunately, the power of the lobby, and of the affinity to Israel, has come to have a critical effect on US policy towards Syria, Iran, and indeed the Muslim world in general. Largely as a result, Iranian and Syrian help to the US after 9/11 was ignored in Washington, not only by the Bush administration, but by the media and the establishment in general; and several offers of compromise on wider issues were brushed aside.

If therefore both party establishments are wedded to the basic lines of the present US course, what are the chances of successful domestic revolt against this course? Since the present line is adhered to be the bipartisan establishment, it follows that any revolt against it would have to enjoy massive support from ordinary Americans, and in particular from the most important political constituency and political bellwether, the white middle classes of the "heartland". It would therefore have to appeal to the core traditions of this constituency. In this context, that means a mixture of intense nationalism with deep distrust of foreign entanglements - a mixture dubbed "isolationism" by the imperial elites, though by no means fairly.

The Left faces immense obstacles in appealing to the heartland. Its cosmopolitan traditions and above all its hostility to religion make it culturally very alien to the world of the suburbs and small towns of middle America. It is also wedded to its own version of liberal interventionism. If I have to listen to another American anti-Bush liberal damn the war in Iraq and then advocate US military intervention in Darfur I may eat my beard. This is both intellectual and electoral folly: intellectual, because there are no rational grounds for believing that a US military which has failed so badly in policing one bitterly-divided Muslim society would play a successful role in another.

Electoral, because you cannot successfully appeal to ordinary Americans to reject a war for which at least some justification could be manufactured in terms of defending America, and then ask them to support another war for which there is no argument from national interest at all.

A much more hopeful prospect in the long run lies in a combination between the moderate realists and a populist revolt in the heartland against the costs of empire. Indeed, this would seem to me virtually inevitable sooner or later. As soon as it becomes clearly apparent to the White middle classes that a continuation of present levels of military spending and foreign policy activism requires the abolition of key middle class entitlements - social security, Medicare, mortgage relief and so on - mass pressure for a withdrawal from present levels of engagement will become overwhelming. This will happen all the sooner in the context of an economic recession, or if another war makes the reintroduction of conscription a real possibility.

In the long run, therefore, I have great faith in the ability of a majority of the American people to return to rational and enlightened self-interest. My fear is that for this to happen, the US and the world will have to plunge into even greater disasters, largely caused by the United States itself; and that before America returns to sanity, America's hopelessly obedient and much more vulnerable British vassals will have been attacked a dozen times, and with increasing degrees of savagery.

Anatol Lieven is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington DC. His latest book, Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World, co-authored with John Hulsman, is published in September by Pantheon.

This is the original, longer version of an essay which appeared in the September issue of the British magazine Prospect, under the title "Bipartisan Disaster: Americans' growing unease at US foreign policy is not reflected by the two parties." It is reprinted here by permission of the author.