European disdain for the United States is centuries old, of course.
But over the course of decades of traveling in the U.K. and on the continent,
I have never gotten the sense that I got on a recently completed three-week trip to Italy, Greece, Turkey, and the Black Sea.
America is no longer admired, imitated, or feared.
We remain—for now—a safe haven for dollars
(of which there are too many in the world).
But we increasingly are seen less as a model or as an empire than as a cautionary tale of national neglect and decline.