The United States is no longer a model for other countries to envy, emulate, or admire. The pandemic, and the American government’s response to it, has laid bare a society marked by deep inequality and a state sapped of its basic capacity after decades of neoliberal reform.

As obvious as these facts appear now, it’s worth pausing to recall just how important the United States’s prior prestige was in the era before the coronavirus killed more than 180,000 Americans. The American way’s appeal exercised a centrifugal pull that was, for our empire, a key counterpart to the raw coercion exercised through wars or coups. A neocolonial empire, as Aziz Rana and Aslı Bâli write, cannot govern through direct intervention alone. And it has not: winning ideological support for American empire has been as important as the force of arms.

The American model has of course long been resented and distrusted by people everywhere struggling for freedom. What’s notable is that coronavirus has exposed not only the falseness of American virtue, but the limits of American power.