Summer 1999 — I remember it fondly. On the stump before the GOP’s Iowa straw poll stood a man who wanted to put America first after years of Clinton malaise. George W. Bush, you say? Hardly. It was Pat Buchanan.

In the staunch conservative’s new book “Where the Right Went Wrong,” the three-time presidential candidate assails the Bush administration on essentially all of its policies.

I feel his pain.

The reflex-action of pundits has been to immediately reject Buchanan’s opinions on the basis of his steely rhetoric and entrenchment within the culture wars. This time we ought to listen.

He leaves most of his jabs for the neoconservative hawks who cooked up the invasion of Iraq. Despite a quick military victory, the current occupation has only led to more rage within the terrorist networks.

Buchanan, who bolted Republican ranks for the Reform Party in 2000, goes so far as to call terrorism “the price of empire.”

This is not how the Right used to be.

What attracted me to the Right was its belief that the United States was not the world’s policeman. Buchanan and conservatives of his mold believe firmly in a strong and large military — but a military whose sole purpose is to defend America’s borders, not to remake the world in some wishy-washy Wilsonian scheme.

Our meddlesome hubris has made us the new Rome, alienating our old allies and exacerbating the divide between Islam and the West. The terrorists see our military force and the force of globalization as threats to their way of life. We cannot keep trying to impose our way of life, our morals and mores, onto the greater Middle East. There’s no convincing the terrorists they’re wrong. Let us be vigilant against any provocation, but let us return to being the humble nation candidate Bush promised four years ago.

Terrorists don’t hate America because I have the freedom to write this column or because American women have the right to live their lives freely. They hate the idea of that culture overtaking theirs. We are right, but it is not our job to force the world to be right along with us.

It might be good for the ego to boot a brutal dictator, but what do Americans get in return? A mammoth bill and more than 1,000 casualties.

It doesn’t stop at foreign affairs.