For all of America’s mistakes over the last thirty years, I was struck by the unease, expressions of concern, and constant requests for predictions about the election’s result that I got from people around the world. By any measure, we had fallen from our position of hegemony, a superpower humbled by its own failings. And yet the question of what America was still mattered to people. They were watching—intently. What a strange and sprawling America they saw.
