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America, too, seems to be searching for a substitute for anti-communism, to justify global commitments that seem to have less and less to do with vital national interests.

Bush I spoke of building a “New World Order.” The phrase is now an epithet. George W. Bush declared America’s mission to be “ending tyranny in our world.” The new deity to which America seemed to want to convert mankind was the golden calf of democracy.

But when democracy—one man, one vote—produced Hamas in Palestine and the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, second thoughts and sudden apostasies began.

At the end of the Cold War Francis Fukuyama predicted that we were approaching the “End of History,” where liberal democracy would prove the final form of governance, embraced by all mankind.

Yet not only in Russia and China, but also in much of Europe and the Third World, democracy seems to be not so much an end in itself for peoples, but a means to advance a greater cause.

The call of tribe and nation appears more compelling. And the Western gospel that all religions, races, nations, and tribes are equal and should be treated equally, while paid lip service, is disbelieved.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called democracy a bus you get off of when it reaches your stop. His stop was a moderate Islamist state that conformed to his own and his party’s principles.

Understandably, countries all over the world want America to come fight their wars. But while that may be in their interest, is it any longer in ours?

The American imperium, the last of the great Western empires, may be about to come down with the suddenness of the other empires of the 20th century.