If they don’t exactly feel like the end of the world, these days certainly feel like the end of something. American hegemony, perhaps, although, to be honest, I’m not sure what “hegemony” means. I would suggest perhaps it’s the end of American hubris, but that doesn’t seem right either because hubris is what we do. Without an overinflated sense of our own capabilities, what even are we?

Part of me roots for an American comeuppance, the same way I root for a snotty kid to get smacked across the head. Not because I think we’re “bad,” but because every Goliath needs to encounter a David now and again. Better if, unlike Goliath, we survive our encounter, but no nation ought to have the outsized impact on the globe as our own. And certainly no nation that has proven itself incapable of behaving responsibly. So much power concentrated in the hands of so few is, frankly, un-American.

When the Soviet Union fell, we celebrated “the end of history,” as the political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it. Western liberal democracy was supposed to take root and spread across the world as the endpoint of human........

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