WE TRUST THEIR PEOPLE EVEN WHEN THEY DON'T TRUST THEMSELVES:

Beyond burger imperialism: A confident, values-conscious US is the only hope of the West as Europe succumbs to the pressures of Islamisation (Mark Steyn, February 10, 2007, The Australian)

IN 2003, Tony Blair spoke to the US Congress. "As Britain knows," he said, "all predominant power seems for a time invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: what do you leave behind?"

An excellent question. Today, three of the Group of Seven major world economies are nations of British descent. Of the 20 economies with the highest gross domestic product per capita, no fewer than 11 are current or former realms of Her Britannic Majesty. And if you protest that most of those are pinprick colonial tax havens - Bermuda, the Caymans - okay, eliminate all territories with populations lower than 20 million and the top four is an Anglosphere sweep: the US, Britain, Canada and Australia.

The key regional players in almost every corner of the globe are British-derived - South Africa, India - and, even among the lesser players, as a general rule you're better off for having been exposed to British rule than not: try doing business in Indonesia rather than Malaysia, or Haiti rather than StLucia.

And, of course, the pre-eminent power of the age derives its political character from 18th-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing to go. As for the allegedly inevitable superpower of the coming century, if China ever does achieve that status, it will be because the people's republic learned more from British Hong Kong than Hong Kong ever did from the Little Red Book. John Cowperthwaite, the colony's transformative financial secretary in the 1960s, can stake a better claim as the father of modern China than Chairman Mao, and, if Beijing weren't so twitchy about these things, his would be the face they'd plaster over all the banners in Tiananmen Square.

Britain was never an unrivalled colossus, even at its zenith. Yet today, in language, law, politics, business and the wider culture, there is simply nothing comparable in scale or endurance to the Britannic inheritance.

We now live in the American moment. And, even if nobody's planning on leaving, the "what do you leave behind?" question is worth asking. How does the US want to use its moment? What does it wish to bequeath the world?

Even to present the question in those terms feels vaguely un-American. The US has an unmatched dominance that the British never enjoyed and that is historically unprecedented. Yet it remains a paradox: the non-imperial superpower. For good or ill, the American people don't have an imperialist bone in their body...