But if America’s destiny is no longer manifest, Europe’s civilising mission is all but extinct. And in both cases, this has everything to do with the loss among our cultural elites of the ability to distinguish between the bellicosity of predator states and the ability of democracies to resist it. We need once again to cultivate the martial virtues, without which no civilisation is safe from barbarians. Things may have moved on in the decade since the great Harvard scholar Harvey Mansfield published a book devoted to these virtues entitled Manliness, when he was subjected to ridicule rather than serious argument. But even now the prevailing intellectual orthodoxy would reject the very idea that courage, for example, has anything to do with manliness or that the latter is even relevant in the contemporary world. The recent award of the Victoria Cross to Lance Corporal Joshua Leakey, whose incredible exploits in Afghanistan not only saved an American officer's life but inflicted a severe defeat on the Taliban, instantly prompted death threats and obliged the authorities to protect him and his family. We no longer know how to give such heroism its due.

Einstein was wrong about America's “military mentality” and in his day his call for a return to more pacific, if not indeed pacifist, values did not prevail. Today, it is a different story. Indeed, the arbiters of Western public opinion are so inclined to stigmatise heroism of the traditional kind that even when a film such as American Sniper (about the US Navy Seal Chris Kyle’s role in Iraq) proved to be the most successful war film in history, the reaction in Hollywood was a deafening silence. Clint Eastwood has been an ostracised figure there at least since his notorious “empty chair” speech endorsing the Republican candidate Mitt Romney, but the hostility of the glitterati has deeper roots. Eastwood is a symbol of everything that Obama’s America wants to put behind it: guns and religion, manliness and militarism, westerns and war. On both sides of the Atlantic, the only good war film is an anti-war film.

Yet this is not how Muslims see the world. There are many passages in the Koran that order Muslims to practise jihad, which can be interpreted both in the spiritual sense and in the military one. For example: “Those who believe fight in the way of God; and those who do not fight only for the powers of evil; so you should fight the allies of Satan.” The Koran is explicit about the rewards of martyrdom: “And We shall bestow on him who fights in the way of God, whether he is killed or is victorious, a glorious reward.”

For the avoidance of doubt, however, there are numerous sayings of the Prophet that make clear that he did indeed understand jihad primarily as holy war. For example, one of Muhammad’s companions, Abu Huraya, reported that he heard the Prophet say: “I have been commanded to fight against people until they testify the fact that there is no god but the God [Allah], and believe that I am the Messenger, and in all that I have brought [i.e. the Koran].” In short, Islam is anything but a pacifist faith, even if many Muslims are as reluctant to fight as anybody else. As the Koran says: “Enjoined on you is fighting, and this you abhor. You may dislike a thing, yet it is good for you.”