Busily monitoring our well-known tendency to strident self-importance, earnest American practitioners of personal diplomacy can risk missing the genuinely humbling lesson of being abroad: an awareness of how bewildering another country’s own blend of boorishness and fervent belief, of openness and defiance, of backwardness and progress and of internal dissensions can be. In the end, it’s as narcissistic to assume we’re the overbearing cause of everybody else’s national identity crises in a dizzying world as it is to imagine that we can orchestrate the solutions to them. The sobering, and liberating, truth is that our britches are not that big.
