A few problems with this analysis.

1) Most every movie critic was in on the joke. Consider: We'd lived through Red Dawn. We'd lived through not just Iron Eagle but Iron Eagle II. Top Gun celebrates gloriously when Tom Cruise stops patting Val Kilmer's ass just long enough to provoke the Soviets more than the Cuban Missile Crisis (yay!). The baseline of INSANE JINGOISM was several meters above Verheuven's high water mark. A European audience might have been sensitive enough to register the satire^1 but c'mon - American audiences had seen Lea Thompson firing an M60 at a Soviet helicopter years before. Starship Troopers came out nine years after Red Scorpion, a movie so right wing it took Jack Abramoff to produce it ( I shit you not ).

2) The source material was not. Starship Troopers is a paean to war, always has been. If you like it, you're immune to satire. Joe Haldeman was so bothered by it he wrote The Forever War in response (now that's satire!). Verheuven's take with the material was seen as disrespectful by the true believers and half-hearted by the objectors. It was a disappointment after Robocop, which handled many of the same themes much less squeamishly. Hell, his treatment of the subject was weaker than Flesh and Blood from 15 years earlier.

3) The enemy in Starship Troopers is clearly, obviously, unconditionally hostile. The nuance necessary to paint anything like satire across the story is wiped out by the fact that "the bugs" are super-stupid-crazy bad. And the politics of the original book - and boy howdy, are there politics - are erased by the movie. Whereas the book was an exploration for the needs of totalitarianism, Starship Troopers is "America Fuck Yeah" with only the driest attempt at tongue-in-cheek. Not only that, but you have an un-nuanced director attempting to get satire out of Caspar Van Diem, Denise Richards, Jake Busey and Doogie Howser back when he was still in the closet. You give that script to Harold Ramis and cast John Cusack, Jaime Pressly, Adam Baldwin and - hey fuck it - Doogie Howser and you might just see the satire.

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(1) I have always found it amusing that Luc Besson created La Femme Nikita as a sendup of "american style" action films only to discover Americans were so clueless that they remade it as Point of No Return. And then La Femme Nikita. And then Nikita. Talk about beating a dead horse. Seriously? You think this is the audience that's going to get the joke? The audience you made this for?