The United States, it is said, has been violently inducted into membership of the rest of the world. Some commentators have noted with satisfaction that at last US decision-makers will appreciate the experience of-depending on their sympathies-Israelis, Belgraders, Nicaraguans or the residents of Baghdad. Kinder commentators reflected that terrorism is a fact of life in Britain, India, Turkey and elsewhere and that Americans would have had to lose the illusion of invulnerability sooner or later-if not so suddenly and horribly. But the response to the attacks was just as much a reminder that Americans are not alone in believing themselves special. Americans in countries wracked by violence much more severe than New York’s, described outpourings of sympathy even from ordinarily chary hosts. The “World Trade Centre” was no hubristic misnomer. The building that burned and collapsed stood not just on an island along one edge of north America but in the homeland of the global imagination, representing power, boundless possibility and a curious kind of innocence.

Yet as the US leads the world’s countries into a campaign against Islamist terrorism, the country still awaits a reckoning on its place in the world. This has nothing to do with the opportunistic score-settling that formed the most distasteful response to the attacks. The fact remains, however, that the new conflict takes place in a world deeply marked by new forms of US power and new resentments against them. The more a newly aggressive and focused US foreign policy disregards these in favour of cold war-vintage verities, the less likely it is to succeed.

For several years now, there have been worldwide rumblings about an alleged American empire. Frontline, an Indian weekly magazine, called a 1999 cover article on US foreign policy, “Ways of Imperialism.” A South African journalist writes of living in “the outer provinces of the empire” and an Arab scholar refers matter-of-factly and without venom to Egypt’s incorporation into “the American imperium.” The French, with special insistence, lament that “we are being globalised by the Americans.” These are not the voices of the far left, residues of the cold war, or the mouthpieces of governments nursing grudges. They express a perception that the US writ reaches everywhere-not to govern the world, but to set the terms on which the governance of the next century will take place. Here is what they have in mind. American economists supervise the policies of poor nations in debt to the IMF, and the US economy every year presses its ethic of entrepreneurship and creative destruction deeper into Europe, east Asia and India. US academics write constitutions for new governments in Africa and central Asia, and Americans from financier George Soros’s Open Society Institute fund the creation of local civil society. English is the world’s second language: 350m people are native speakers, but more than a billion have learned enough to strike a bargain or argue about a basketball game. American culture is the other global second language-a shared patois whose vocabulary includes Michael Jordan’s face, the ragged beats of hip-hop music and Baywatch, the world’s most popular television programme. Immigrants arrive in US airports having already lived much of their imaginary lives between New York and Los Angeles. What are we to call this, other than empire?

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