When those planes flew into those buildings, the luck of America ran out. We must allow ourselves to be sobered out of our sensation of historical and geographical immunity. We must not let the tremor of what we have seen pass from us. It happened.

History is asking more of America than sorrow. Let us start the rebuilding of our understanding of our place in the world by recognising we are living in a new era of anti-Americanism. This may seem surprising, in the aftermath of the US's triumph in the Cold War. "I am for peace," the Psalmist declared in bewilderment, "but when I speak, they are for war." This is the US's bewilderment exactly.

Perhaps the equivocal position of the US in the post-Cold War world is not so surprising. The victory of the US, democracy and capitalism demonstrated more than superiority over the Soviet Union, totalitarianism and socialism. It was also a demonstration of what used to be called American exceptionalism. The US – and more generally the West, a geographical appellation that is really a moral appellation – was revealed to be peaceful and prosperous in a world that was more and more a political and economic shambles.

The spectacle of American happiness – we were pursuing what Thomas Jefferson instructed us to pursue and we seemed to be gaining it – provoked opposite reactions in the suffering regions of the world. Briefly, it provoked a love of America and a hatred of America. There were many who wanted an American happiness for themselves and their children, and they did what they could to gain it. But there were many who chose to condemn what they could not attain, whose envy of America curdled into resentment and whose resentment caused them to make America responsible for the non-American conditions of their lives.

This anti-Americanism had its spokesmen in the US, too. "When will the smaller, lesser, weaker peoples," Edward Said wrote in 1999, during the American-led war to rescue Kosovo from extinction, "realise that this America is to be resisted at all costs, not pandered to or given in to naively?" That was the progressive question and the progressive vocabulary in the 1990s.

Does anybody doubt the crusade against globalisation is to a significant degree a crusade against the proliferation of American values and American practices around the world? The US has become once again the archetypal adversary of the wretched of the earth. In the excitable warrens of militant Islam, this conspiracy theory has been promoted into a theology, an expectation of apocalypse.

Thus it was that Al-Ahram, the government newspaper in Egypt, described the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon as the "beginning of a war against globalisation". The editorial explained that "the real reason behind the terrorism is the widening of the gap between north and south". Never mind that poor people do not generally become murderers and that the lesser, smaller, weaker peoples have sent many more immigrants to US shores than terrorists.

Anybody who hates modernity hates America. Anybody who hates freedom hates America. Anybody who hates privacy hates America. Anybody who hates human rights hates America. Anybody who hates ballots and bookshops and newspapers and televisions and computers and theatres and bars and the sight of a woman smiling at a man hates America.

Osama bin Laden and the terrorists of al-Qa'ida chose the US as their target in perfect accordance with their beliefs. Philosophically speaking, we are their mortal foes and they are ours. But to the hatred of America they add another virulence, the hatred of Israel. In the same breath, bin Laden calls for the killing of Americans and the killing of Jews. "We will see again Saladin carrying his sword," he ranted on a tape that surfaced this June, "with the blood of unbelievers dripping from it."

By unbelievers, of course, he means those who do not believe what he believes: this is an enemy by whom we should be proud to be known.

The fires were still roaring at the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon when the air began to fill with alarms about the morality of a serious campaign against terrorism. The editorial page of The New York Times warned that "the temptation will be great in the days ahead to write draconian new laws that give law enforcement agencies – or even military forces – a right to undermine the civil liberties that shape the character of the United States".

Military forces? The editors of the Times have been spending too much time at Blockbuster. Who in the US Government is suggesting that we tear up the constitution or perish? The notion that we cannot destroy terrorism without destroying liberalism or that the fight against terrorists transforms us into terrorists is bien pensant demagoguery, and its only effect is to inhibit the already inhibited.

Our security need not be purchased at the price of our scruples. Now we have been shown we are not secure, is there really no significant change in national security policy that is warranted by what we have witnessed?