The United States is caught in a trap of its own making. It wants to preserve its unique position in world politics, while at the same time freeing itself from the growing burden that this position imposes. Yet Washington hasn’t found any way to do so except by insisting, ever more loudly, on its own superiority so the result is that America clings more tightly to the very role it should have consciously begun to abandon long ago. There’s an old story from ‘Uncle Remus’s Tales’, the famous collection by the American writer Joel Chandler Harris, in which Br’er Fox sets a black doll made of tar and turpentine by the roadside to trap Br’er Rabbit. The rabbit greets the doll, mistakes its silence for rudeness, grows angry and strikes it. His paw sticks so he strikes again, and the other paw sticks and the more furiously he fights, the more completely he is trapped. This is increasingly what American policy looks like in its struggle to preserve hegemony. The US has become stuck to its own global role.…