Now they are about to find out that they are wrong to think of the US Administration as a monolithic force.

Like ducks paddling furiously below the surface, there is ferment beneath the serene countenance of US conservatism. Indeed it is proving no less fissiparous than its British counterpart, though with vastly better election results.The ructions are summed up in the phrase “unipolar moment”.

In the Cold War, the international order was “bipolar”, with power divided between competing superpowers. Then communism collapsed.

A popular thesis of the time held that this heralded the decline of an economically stretched United States too. It didn’t turn out that way. The US is dominant, economically and militarily. Its prime foreign policy concern is not with other major powers but with smaller aggressive states and terrorist groups. Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist, anticipated this. In 1990 he wrote of a “unipolar moment” in international affairs. He urged the US not to dissipate its dominance by placing reliance on treaties and international institutions.

This year, Krauthammer revisited his argument. He maintained that in a unipolar order, “America should neither defer nor contract out decision-making”. It was perfectly pitched for Guardian letter writers. The unipolar moment was an “Aha! moment”: it meant unapologetic advocacy of US unilateralism.

But then the script ran out. Another neoconservative theorist, Francis Fukuyama, charged Krauthammer with being “strangely disconnected from reality”. Krauthammer, Fukuyama maintained, did not take account of the limits to US power. Fukuyama proposed a new foreign policy that emphasised coalition-building.

Krauthammer was dismissive. Fukuyama had failed to grasp the difference between a grandiose democratic universalism and Krauthammer’s position of democratic realism. Democratic realism seeks regime change, but only in regions strategically vital to the US: Afghanistan but not Haiti; Iraq but not North Korea. Coalition-building is desirable; but nation-building — to combat aggressive tyranny and theocratic terrorism — is essential.

Disagreements over nation-building and coalition-building will recur in the second Bush Administration. Perhaps alone among European liberals, I hope Krauthammer’s view prevails. America’s historic tolerance of autocracy in the Arab world merely fomented Islamist extremism. Regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq offers the chance of addressing this, the genuine “root cause” of terrorism.

And I don’t expect Lady Antonia to become my pen-friend for saying so.

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