role in creating the international institutions that shaped the postwar era, but fear of communism and the Soviet Union's expansionist ambitions enlisted them to what in truth was a liberal cause. With the evaporation of the communist threat, they are now free to revert to type.

The Republican refusal to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty is but the most recent and dramatic evidence of the American right's willingness to turn its back on the web of treaties and international organizations that frame the world's diplomatic, financial, and economic order. The United States cannot rely on any international, collective system of security or verification of nuclear weapon testing; it must rely on itself and its own nuclear stockpile to ensure its security. It is the same story across theat Risk, it is in part because globalization makes national controls so easy to avoid that deregulation worldwide has become easy to justify. Why continue with controls that are evaded? The conservative counterrevolution has been aided immeasurably by the way globalization has been allowed to develop.

Yet American conservatives barely tolerate globalization. And the United States is not comfortable acknowledging that, since the end of the Cold War, it has become not merely the sole superpower but the global hegemonic power at the center of what amounts to a world empire—whose architecture serves U.S. interests. There is still an element in the United States that conceives of the nation as a young republic committed to democracy and liberty, a challenger of empires and host to liberty-seekers, rather than an