Reality, however, has a tendency to bounce back. The commonest mistake and illusion of people throughout history is the illusion of permanence — the mistake of thinking that what is ordinary for you has been the ordinary in the past and will be ordinary in the future. Those who think they live in post-history may be no more prone to this tendency than their ancestors, or any more aware of the fact. But the completeness of the presumption that they are beyond history is the surest signal of all that they are about to re-enter it at some point very soon.

British and European populations have been living under the umbrella of American security for more than a generation. There are people in old age who have never known anything else. Borrowed money has been used to finance a way of life which seems no longer willing to fight for its own survival. We love our rights, we love our comforts and we love ourselves. But we do not love these things enough to believe that anybody who seeks to take them away from us is an enemy to be dealt with in the traditional way. Because there are other people to do that for us. Or were.

States are only able to feel beyond history because there are other states, like Israel and America, who remain in it, who kill our enemies for us and keep us safe because we do not have the inclination, the time or the money to so distract ourselves from our pleasures. When that is the normal way of things to us, we expect the same behaviour of others. And of course we end up — as Britain now so surely has — turning on, and eventually hating, the very people who give us the security for which we will no longer take the responsibility ourselves. 

Within hours of crowds turning out on American streets in jubilation at the news of bin Laden's death we Europeans — and not just the chattering classes — were back to our new favourite game: anti-Americanism. And it turned out that even Barack Obama, the impossibly favoured American President, the man Europeans loved so much they said America would never vote for him — even that man cannot shield America from the hatred those it protects now feel for it.

How backward those American demonstrations seemed to them. How embarrassing. How un-nuanced. And no one, it seemed, across the whole panoply of hand-wringers had time to ponder whether their delicious moral qualms would even be possible had not men far younger than they, drawn from throughout America, risked their lives for years in dusty compounds, pursuing enemies whose existence the people they protected often doubted.