However, we are not the Puerto Rico of the North Atlantic. And America should get its own house in order before lecturing the rest of us.

For Washington’s foreign policy disasters in the past decade have made America almost universally loathed and somewhat reduced its credibility in matters of international diplomacy.

Its economy is limping and threatens to get worse because of Obama’s chronic inability to stop spending money his country doesn’t have.

Also, America is a society riddled with inequalities far worse than any seen in Europe, and with communities deeply divided by race as well as by income.

And, as we saw in the tragedy at Sandy Hook just before Christmas, when a deranged gunman murdered 20 children and some of their teachers, it is a nation with a vein of psychosis running very near its surface.