If you had been in Trafalgar Square on Monday at noon, you would have seen a puzzling sight. A lot of people wearing black staged a "die-in" to protest against the war with Iraq. Iraq? Surely the war with Iraq lies in the distant past ten years ago, the last time a Bush was President. In fact, unbeknown to the majority of the British public, a low-level war of attrition has continued there almost unabated since the end of the Gulf War in 1990.

In the last 20 months, ever since the United States and Britain launched a Blitzkrieg on Iraqi targets following the collapse of the arms inspection mission, a total of 21,600 US and British planes have flown into Iraqi airspace, dropping bombs or firing missiles on average once every three days. The British alone have dropped 81 tons of bombs (150 weapons), a mere fraction of the overall amount. The total number of sorties flown in the decade since the end of the Gulf War is some 280,000. Between December 1998 and June 2000, the death toll from these attacks reached 294 people: one Iraqi killed every other day with nearly 1,000 wounded. Inevitably, a number of these have been civilians, the most notorious occasion being last year when 140 sheep and a family of shepherds were blown to kingdom come by one of our smart missiles. Yet bombing has now become so much part of our political culture in Britain that we seem no longer to care.

Iraq has now slumped into that category of post-modern wars which have characterised the New World Order, of which George Bush was the John the Baptist ten years ago and which has now been fulfilled by Bill Clinton. The key feature of such wars is that they are fought in a world without sovereignty and borders: because there are no longer any lines in the sand, nothing is ever defined or resolved. Wars slough off instead into interminable anonymous "processes." Whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of Saddam Hussein, Britain seems to have made a speciality of getting involved in strange distant wars which apparently lead nowhere.

When you ask the Ministry of Defence or the Foreign Office to explain this, the usual bromides are served up: the Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, insists that the bombing campaign in Iraq is "essentially based on the overwhelming humanitarian necessity of protecting people on the ground," i.e, Kurds in the North and Shi'ites in the South. One might have thought that the notion of a humanitarian bomb had taken something of a knock last spring but the British government ploughs on regardless and the Hoon Show's jingle ying-tongs away relentlessly to justify it. And yet how do you "protect" people by bombing them? How can you prevent a policeman committing a "human rights abuse" from a height of 20,000 feet? If the reason for patrolling the Southern no-fly zone is really to protect Shi'ites, what about the 3 million Shi'ites in Baghdad itself, over which our planes do not fly? What about the 50% of the Iraqi population which is Shia in the unpatrolled middle of the country? Why are we leaving them to Saddam's tender mercies and "protecting" only the ones in the South?

The real reason why we are bombing Iraq, of course, is that the Americans tell us to. The French having withdrawn from the anti-Iraq coalition in December 1998, leaving only the British and the Americans in the previously multi-national allied coalition of 1990, Iraq now epitomises the unwritten but dominant axiom upon which British foreign policy has rested for the last decade: whatever the Americans do, we do. This constant has remained in place – indeed, it may even have grown stronger – since the old imperatives of the Cold War for an Atlantic Schulterschluß disappeared. Iraq is only one in a string of British interventions in the last decade which are the military equivalent of "How high?" to the Americans' "Jump!" Whether it is over the latest plan for a US National Missile Defence system (a dime to a dollar Britain ends up supporting this), the Balkans, or bombing bedouins, Britain's national vocation now seems to be Distinguished Purveyor of Fine Fig-Leaves for Washington's military escapades. We who habitually snigger at the French for being poodles to the Germans look not entirely unlike lap-dogs ourselves. This sycophancy has even included both the Government and the Opposition applauding Bill Clinton when he bombed a pill factory in Sudan to distract attention from his dalliances with Monica Lewinsky.

At first sight, it seems surprising that the Left should have continued such a policy usually associated with the Right. In reality, the apparent continuity in British policy over masks a 180 degree change in American policy there. For if the key political phenomenon of the last eight years has been the enthusiasm with which the previously anti-American Left has embraced the United States, this change is not the result of any conversions by our own left-liberals but instead an indication of the seismic shift in America's own approach to the world.

This change in American policy can be named in a single word: globalism. In the Cold War, American power was harnessed to the noble project of defeating Communism and defending the liberty of nations. Now, by contrast, the structures which were used to achieve that aim have been hijacked from within and transmogrified, by Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, into instruments for the very opposite: the creation of a single global political system of limited national sovereignty. The internationalism for which left-wingers, especially old communists like Peter Mandelson, have spent their lives fighting, has now become the official policy of the White House and the State Department, while all the old nostrums which used to be the preserve of Marxists – internationalism, universal human rights, a world without borders, the withering away of the state – have now become explicit US and Western policy.

The foremost ideologue of American-led globalism is President Carter's former national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski is not only influential in his own right, and certainly not only among Democrats: his son works for the Republican Chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Jesse Helms, while his nephew writes for that source of all Republican wisdom, the Wall Street Journal in New York. The Brzezinski family network is, indeed, a good example of how the internationalist project of globalism piggy-backs, for the time being anyway, on right-wing American national pride. For Brzezinski's book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, is a bluntly straightforward plea for the establishment and consolidation of single world political system under American hegemony.

Brzezinski argues that American hegemony is unlike any previous hegemony because it is truly global. It is based on an unpredented mixture of military supremacy, ideological ascendancy, technological innovation and control of the world's financial system. Yet apart from these new elements, his theories are lifted straight from those of the pre-eminent theoretician of British imperial geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947). A Director of the London School of Economics and an MP, Mackinder formulated in 1904 the idea that Eurasia was "the geographical pivot of history" and that world domination lay in control of it. The key to such control lay in Central Asia. No one paid much attention to these rather barmy notions – world domination had hitherto been based on control of the sea, not the land – until Karl Haushofer, Rudolf Hess' teacher and a great influence on Adolf Hitler, took up the idea and developed it into the Nazi theory of geopolitics. Among other things, it gave rise to the concept of Lebensraum.

Brzezinski says quite clearly that if America wants to control the world, as she should, then she must establish domination over Eurasia, especially what he calls "its Western periphery" (i.e. the European Union) and also its Heartland, the Middle East, Central Asia and the oil resources which flow from there. "Special security arrangements in the Persian Gulf," writes Brzezinski, referring to the American bases dotted all over the region, "have made that economically vital region into an American military preserve." Quite so: the RAF flies five times more sorties in the Southern no-fly zone of Iraq than in the North, precisely because "allied" military effort is devoted overwhelmingly to policing the highly strategic area where the oil comes out and which straddles the key powers in the region. When such geo-political control is at stake, especially when being pursued in the name of globalism, it is very useful for the American eagle to have a Union Flag with which to cloak its actions. In the light of such overtly expressed geopolitical imperatives, and given that the protagonists of the policy – from Al Gore to both George Bushes and Dick Cheney (George W. Bush's running-mate and President Bush's national security adviser during the Gulf War) – are all men with huge personal financial interests in the oil industry, Mr. Hoon's prattlings about humanitarian protection for the Shi'ites sound rather amateurish by comparison.

Brzezinski is not alone. A whole host of armchair strategists in Washington DC, especially on the Right, regularly and openly opine on ways to ensure American global dominance. Their ruminations can be consulted any time in their in-house magazines, Foreign Affairs and National Interest. Meanwhile, the Assistant Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott, has long made no secret of his Marxist-Leninist view that nations are artificial arrangements which will shortly perish and give way to a single global system. Last October, indeed, Bill Clinton himself also finally came out as a globalist. Addressing a conference organised by the Forum of Federations, a body which promotes the federal union of the whole world, President Clinton trotted out all the arguments against national sovereignty with which we are so familiar in Europe. Ladling on the euro-shlock about "unity in diversity" and the "shrinking global village," he sounded just like a German when he said that the American experience of federalism should be extended to the whole planet. "We've become more of a federalist world," he said, and, in support of his view that "you will see more federalism rather than less in the years ahead," Clinton said, "I offer as Exhibit A the European Union." For Clinton, in other words, European integration shows the way forward for the whole planet.

This means that the favourite dichotomy of the British Eurosceptics – between European federalism and a liberating Atlantic world of free-trading sovereign states – is not on offer. Bill Clinton, like all American presidents since the Second World War, actively supports European integration, not least because he understands that it fits into the overall globalist project as a smaller Russian doll does into a larger one. Hopes that things will change if George W. Bush becomes President should be set against a realistic assessment of the State Department's ability to kill off any such volte-face in US policy. Indeed, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush's foreign policy adviser and his probable nominee for Secretary of State, hardly draws breath so often does she emphasise the importance of America's "global leadership."

To be sure, American hegemony may be preferable to Chinese hegemony or Russian. But the Right's uncritical acceptance of left-wing American leadership is bizarre in view of the incompatibility of globalism with the principles of national sovereignty and democracy. American primacy might be good for the world, but certainly not if it involves subjecting the world to a single regime based on politically correct notions of "universal human rights" and bogus "democracy" cooked up in the fashionable salons of Georgetown. The plan to create a unipolar world, which forms the backbone of present US policy, is incompatible with the very principles which make America great at home, namely the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances. And just as the Rome's passage from Republic to Empire led to the suppression of liberties there, a world ruled by US Federal employees may not be such a good idea for ordinary Americans either. We might expect people like Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson to sign up to a world in which the interfering instincts of left-liberal statists like the Clintons and Madeleine Albright, frustrated at home, are visited instead upon the rest of the world. But there is no reason why British supporters of national independence should join in. British conservatives should continue to support America – but the American Republic, not an Empire.