Samuel Huntington’s now infamous new book argues that America is losing its sense of itself. This is an idea full of flaws, as Huntington articulates it. “Why isn’t internationalism, as a number of writers have recently argued, a powerful resource for Americans? The United States doesn’t have an exclusive interest in opposing and containing the forces of intolerance, superstition, and fanaticism; the whole world has an interest in opposing and containing those things. On September 12, 2001, the world was with us. Because of our government’s mad conviction that it was our way of life that was under attack, not the way of life of civilized human beings everywhere, and that only we knew what was best to do about it, we squandered our chance to be with the world. The observation is now so obvious as to be banal. That does not make it less painful.”