America was always wearing a big smile when it strode into our living room in damp and ghostly England: Lucille Ball, the Beach Boys, a shining young president with two small kids, all stepped down from the screen in the days just before the convulsions of Vietnam, and summoned my Indian-born parents and me to the Land of Promise and Unending Sunshine.

It would never seem quite so rosy after we knew it off screen, but Ronald Reagan or Julia Roberts — even Bruce Springsteen, at times — ensured in later years that America still meant to the outside world possibility, freedom, the perpetual future tense. It was, everyone knew, the home of the Hollywood ending: the final clinch, justice restored by the lone hero, the dawning of a bright new day.

Or so, at least, ran the self-fulfilling myth of the last 100 years, rightly called the American century.

In 1890, as Fareed Zakaria points out, the US had only the 14th-largest army in the world, and its navy was one-eighth the size of Italy’s. By the late 1940s, it controlled 50 per cent of the world economy.

The growth of technology meant that the American dream got turned into a global cottage industry that everyone longed to feed on. It was the vision that drew millions of dreamers up from south of the border, from East Asia and my parents’ Bombay, and as these migrating dreamers raised the country to greater heights, they made it their business to tell their friends back home that you really could find new beginnings in America.

... contd.