By Doug Bandow

After its disastrous election loss, the Republican Party is in disarray. The American conservative movement must rethink its future, rededicating itself to promoting limited government at home and abroad.

Eight years ago George W. Bush was elected America's president after promising to implement a more ``humble'' foreign policy.

He reacted against the Clinton administration's preference to intervene militarily when there were no conceivable American interests at stake ― Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo ― and advocated a more traditional and limited U.S. role in the world.

However, 9/11 provided neoconservatives, who manned many of the administration's top foreign and military policy posts, with an opportunity to implement one of the most aggressive international agendas ever.

President Bush proved to be an open door for the ``war at every opportunity'' crowd. Much of the conservative movement signed on, trading its soul for a mess of pottage.

The administration attempted social engineering abroad that it knew could not work at home, as if naive and ignorant American policymakers could transcend history, tradition, ethnicity, religion, geography, and culture to remake foreign societies.

In Iraq the United States paid a terrible price with thousands of dead and tens of thousands of wounded and maimed Americans, and hundreds of billions of dollars wasted.

Even greater was the cost to Iraqis: tens or hundreds of thousands killed, more injured, and millions displaced from their homes, as well as a devastated society.

For the neocon true believers, however, the problem was too few, not too many, wars. Invasions of Iran and Syria should have followed that of Iraq. North Korea deserved a few bombing runs.

Washington should have stood up to Russia over Georgia, whatever the cost. There were abundant targets for humanitarian intervention, such as Darfur.

Sen. John McCain embodied the neocon hopes of a war on every continent. And the Republican Party, battered on the economic front, attempted to win the election by focusing on foreign policy.

GOP apparatchiks warned that the world was dangerous even as they campaigned for a candidate determined to put Americans at risk around the globe.

Now the neocon dream lies in ruins. The Republican Party brand stands for needless war abroad, as well as big government, wasteful overspending, corporate bailouts, executive abuses, and economic failure at home.

With the election behind them, the conservative movement and its Republican Party allies must decide on their future. They have much to atone for on domestic policy. Wild spending and exorbitant and unconditional corporate bailouts.

The Bush administration, with the enthusiastic support of Republicans in and out of Congress, also trashed the U.S. Constitution and sacrificed civil liberties, even when doing so made Americans no safer.

Conservatives need to rediscover their tradition of resisting government encroachments on individual liberty and executive branch encroachments on the legislature.

Finally, genuine American conservatives must toss overboard Wilsonian war-mongering dressed up as democracy promotion by the neocons.

Early American leaders vigorously defended America, but they envisioned no glorious crusades with other people's money and other people's lives, harbored no illusions that America could fix the problems of the world, and intended no sacrifice of republican values in pursuit of imperial ends.

Conservatives once understood that war is the ultimate big government program, the ``health of the state,'' as Randolph Bourne put it. They opposed high military spending, large military establishments, pervasive government secrecy, and foreign entanglements.

They were nothing like today's neocons, who believe in perpetual war on behalf of global empire, ever higher military outlays at a time when America already spends as much as every other power on earth combined, and stationing hundreds of thousands of American military personnel on hundreds of bases around the world.

Big government conservatism in all of its manifestations is a perversion of American conservatism's historic tradition. If conservatives do not return to this tradition, they deserve to long wander in the political wilderness.

Given the current ascendancy of liberals within the Democratic Party, foreign policy offers an opportunity for the Right. President-elect Obama risks creating the third Clinton administration. Conservatives should offer a genuine alternative: republican noninterventionism.

Defend America, but turn military responsibilities over to rich allies in Asia and Europe and avoid involvement in tragic but irrelevant Third World conflicts. Stand for the Constitution and defend republic over empire against Wilsonians on the Left and Right.

Could a party have more deserved electoral disaster than the GOP? None of its mistakes was more important than foolishly and frivolously inaugurating a wholly unnecessary war in Iraq.

Never again, the Republican Party should say. Otherwise it deserves to be kicked into history's great trash heap.

Doug Bandow is a Robert A. Taft fellow at the American Conservative Defense Alliance. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of ``Foreign Follies: America's Global Empire'' (Xulon). He can be reached at ChessSet@aol.com.