I have in the past few weeks been roundly abused by many of my readers for an alleged hostility to the United States. About a thousand have even unsubscribed from my mailing list—though I have acquired almost as many new readers as lost. I regret this. On the one hand, I write—like everyone else who does so not in hope of payment—for my own amusement: I am curious to know what I think on certain issues, and how well I can express myself; and I am happy if others want to overhear this conversation. On the other hand, I do like to be overheard. It is gratifying to know that, without the advantages of being published in The Spectator or in some other established journal, I can still be reasonably famous and reasonably influential. I do not suppose that I shall bring back my lost readers by writing this article. But I do hope that the ten or eleven thousand who remain will appreciate a clarification of my views on the United States.

There is no doubt that the United States is home to the greatest civilisation the world has ever seen. Except in film, and then largely now in the past, this is not a civilisation great in high cultural achievement. Where not actually barbarous, its music is a small and dispensable appendage to the great German tradition. It has completed the British task of extending the English language over the whole world; but its own native literature has been similarly of little importance. It has even degraded the language with unwise neologisms and a confusion of grammar. In painting and sculpture and in architecture, it has also been undistinguished.

Nevertheless, high culture is not the only achievement of a civilisation. What the Americans have achieved is a way of life that breaks decisively with all that went before it. Every American is born into a nation that has solid protections of freedom under the law. If he is willing to work for it, he also has the means to raise himself to considerable wealth. Even if not willing to work, he can - almost as a birthright—enjoy standards of personal comfort unimaginable within living memory, and that are the envy today of almost every other nation. In science and technology and commerce - that is, in all those areas necessary for the many to enjoy the good life—America is pre-eminent. I go further. Though not distinguished as originators of high culture, the Americans have, through their inventions and manufacturing processes and general enterprise, brought the fruits of high culture within the reach of all who are able or willing to desire them.

It may be that I have entirely failed to appreciate the blessings of American popular culture, and that—should my writings survive - I shall one day join those past critics who, looking out with their preconceived notions of culture, are laughed at for their blindness to the greatness around them. But I do appreciate the American spirit. I may despise the undeveloped, sexually aggressive music, and the mindless television programmes, and the childish habits of thought and speech. But I do appreciate the spirit of the nation. I admire the achievement of those who have made a reality of Colonel Rainborough's then despairing claim, that "the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the richest he". I admire the philosophy of optimism summed up in the statement "tomorrow is another day". Anyone now alive who believes in freedom and legal equality and progress must inevitably to some degree be an American.

The problem is that American greatness has made America not just rich but also powerful. The Americans have the ability to impose their will across the world more surely than the Romans or the British ever had before them. Their conquest of Iraq, and their ability to do so in the face of opposition from most other of the great powers, is a demonstration of their power. As I have frequently said, I do not believe that the Americans have the will to impose themselves with the same finality as other great people have in the past; and I believe that the frailty of their will to rule will bring endless grief to the world. But to the extent that they do summon the will to rule, they will undermine the foundations of their greatness.

Are the Americans greater today than before 1917 or 1898? In the military sense, they are so undoubtedly. But every step towards world domination has been at the expense of the qualities that underpin their general greatness. Their government has become more distant and opaque, more centralised and more open to capture by special interests. It has repeatedly violated the old Constitution. Liberties have been abridged on the grounds of dealing with emergencies, and then never restored. America has been at war almost throughout the whole of the past century—at war with other countries, or at war with abstractions like "drugs" or "terrorism". As everywhere else, war has been the health of the State and the sickness of the people. If the Americans today remain the freest people in the world, that is only because they started with so much more to lose.

A world without America as it was and still can be would be immeasurably the poorer. But a world with America as it seems set to become will be a nightmare. I do not in the least admire monsters like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. They represent values that have kept ninety nine hundredths of humanity submerged in poverty and ignorance and tyranny for the past 5,000 years of recorded history. But I do understand how the projection of American military power throughout the world is driving uncountable millions to regard them as great men, and to confuse fear of American power with hatred of American values.

The war with Iraq is over. I am glad that it claimed fewer lives than it might have. But I remain convinced that it was right to oppose that war. I will oppose further American wars—at least, those in which my own country is "persuaded" to join. And I will do so not in the spirit of those intellectuals who dislike all that America represents—but in the spirit of what America truly is and ought to remain.