It wasn't so much the realisation that America could kill a terrorist responsible for thousands of deaths and then declare that justice had been done that impressed me, nor was it the fact that Obama's speech was sombre, yet heartfelt, without shrill overtones of jingoism. 

Instead, it was the sense that these two opposites were equally true, without moral quarrels: to kill a man and to do justice. Here a truth was being expressed that had become unsayable or even unthinkable in Europe: that doing justice and killing a man are not always oppositional.

Walking down Fifth Avenue, I suddenly remembered a conversation I had overheard in my newly adopted home on the other side of the Atlantic, about how "the Americans" could dare to kill someone who was "a human being after all". I thought of the hushed, earnest and somewhat dour voices, and Berlin and New York, the Old and the New, seemed more than a world apart.