Americans have been enjoined, as we approach our country’s 250th anniversary, to be a bit more grateful. Good advice. It is not just the freedom of speech and the purple mountains’ majesties we should be taking stock of. It is also our knack, in recent decades, for miseducating ourselves, failing to read the signs of the times, making wrong choices – and then profiting from the fallout.

In the global financial crisis that ran for a decade after 2008, blunders in American financial engineering, from complex derivatives to mortgage-backed securities, bankrupted debtor countries and cost several others their sovereignty, most notoriously Greece. The world’s investors responded with the so-called ‘flight to quality,’ pouring their national savings into American financial products and enriching the very bastards who broke the world economy. After 2019, the Covid epidemic arose in China from another foolish American idea, ‘gain-of-function’ research, which set scientists the task of making dangerous viruses more dangerous, the better to design vaccines for them. The pandemic killed millions and idled billions, but it will wind up earning trillions for the American biotech industry.

So, although it is a cause for worry, it is not necessarily a cause for despair that we are approaching our quarter-millennium mark under the shadow of the craziest foreign-policy error in American history. When a head of state, without ever laying out a coherent war aim, dresses himself up as the Prince of Peace while threatening to exterminate an entire civilisation… well, that does go beyond the predictable forms of hubris to which all empires are liable.

What makes the US great is a set of institutions, intuitions and cultural habits it inherited from England

What makes the US great is a set of institutions, intuitions and cultural habits it inherited from England

The Iran war will exact a high price for the United States if there’s any justice in international relations. Luckily for us, that remains a big ‘if’. Misreading situations has become a habit. As Haven Hamilton, the preposterously bespangled country-and-western crooner played by Henry Gibson in Robert Altman’s Nashville, sang in 1976, ‘We must be doing something right to last 200 years’ – but he didn’t know what that something was, and we have no clearer idea half a century later. We tend to think of the United States as the greatest common denominator of all the world’s virtues, particularly those involving freedom. ‘We think they’re American values,’ said Hillary Clinton in 2014 when she was........

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