There is a pattern in modern history that deserves more attention than it gets. Whenever a statesman stands before his nation and reaches for the word great, not as a passing compliment but as a vision, a promise, a territorial claim, something terrible tends to follow. "Great" is not merely an adjective in these moments. It is a signal. It tells you that a leader has decided his country's present condition is an insult, that history owes his people something, and that he/she is the man/woman to collect the debt. Germany went to war. America turned on itself. Israel bombed its neighbours into rubble and India dreamt aloud of swallowing the subcontinent. The word operates like a pressure gauge: by the time a leader says it in public, the needle is already in the red. 

The clearest and most lethal example is Germany. It spent the early decades of the twentieth century constructing its own version of greatness with considerably precision. Adolf Hitler did not merely speak of a greater Germany; he institutionalised the concept. When he convened his parliament in January 1939 to address what he called the events of 1938, the chamber itself had been renamed: it was now formally the Greater German Reichstag. The renaming was deliberate. The Anschluss of Austria and the annexation of the Sudetenland were not diplomatic accidents but the opening acts of a programme that had been announced in the vocabulary long before it was carried out in blood. Hitler opened with the words "first Reichstag in Greater Germany" and closed with the same words. He was not being rhetorical. Fifty million deaths later, the word had kept its promise.

The American case is more recent and therefore easier to dismiss, but the pattern holds. Ronald Reagan did not invent the phrase “Make America Great Again”; it emerged from a specific historical anxiety,........

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