One can downplay it, but culture matters—a lot.

I walked by a light rail station the other day and noted a lot of verbiage on the ground. “Stand Here.” “Let Passengers Exit Here.” I asked my son and he told me that a friend’s supervisor had been in Japan and saw similar things there on the subway system. So he decided to import the street graffiti to Jerusalem and place them at each train station. As we spoke, a train rolled in and parked about two meters from the designated landing spot. The people miraculously exited and entered the train without the instructions on the ground to safely guide them to success. Japan is a highly precise society, and if a train conductor stops at the wrong spot, he would probably be shamed into retirement. Israel is a seat-of-the-pants culture, and the fact that the train stopped at all was cause for celebration.

Differences in culture matter, and this concept is by no means new. The Battle of Britain was won by the Brits for several reasons. A major one was Goering’s mistake of stopping his bombing campaign of RAF bases and moving toward blitzing London and other cities. Another factor was RAF victories in the air. The Germans lost more planes than did the RAF. Ultimately, Hitler moved on from his plan to invade England as his Russian timetable demanded forces in the East. One point noted at the time was that the much more battle-experienced Luftwaffe pilots were required to fly according to very rigid rules, whereas the Oxford/Cambridge-trained British fliers were more open to freelancing their air attacks. The German culture expected planes to stay in formation, even when attacked, and there were fixed protocols of engagement. The British flyboys were more flexible in their approach and attacked targets of opportunity as they became available. Nearly 1,000 Germans were taken prisoner after they were shot down or crashed.

The enormous success of the United States over the past 250 years has been in part due........

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