Given all the talk, courtesy of Donald Trump, of making America great again, I’ve been thinking about European greatness. One state, Great Britain, does of course have its greatness built in, but still the idea sits strangely.

Europe is done with greatness. It thinks greatness leads to trouble. It’s been great . and suffered. The Great War (1914-18) killed about 8.5 million combatants and as many as 13 million civilians . not so great, really. Before that, a million people or so died in Ireland’s Great Famine.

Great European empires unraveled, often in bloodshed. Several hundred thousand were killed before France left Algeria. Not so great, either. No wonder Great Britain is thinking of breaking itself up.

From Sweden to Sicily, greatness is looked at askance. It feels like a code word for bellicosity, self-delusion and shoot-from-the-hip hubris. It has a whiff of danger: far better to curtail ambition and embrace ordinariness. Better to be the face in the crowd than the face on the cover of Time magazine.

Still, here’s a possible slogan for the 2017 French presidential election: “Make France Great Again!” (I can hear the seismic rumble of dissent on the Rive Gauche already.)How? By believing in God, to begin with. Belief in God leads to belief in God-given missions, which must be good by definition. Anticlericalism was the start of the unraveling of French greatness.

Or perhaps by sending a neo-Napoleonic army out across the Continent (even as far as Moscow but without that painful retreat); by instilling an entrepreneurial spirit; by banning moroseness through decree; by restoring the scandal-tainted presidency to the monarchical splendor envisaged by De Gaulle; by scrapping the 35-hour work week; by getting tough on something (possibly immigration); by manufacturing multicolored campaign hats that say, “La France, Terre Eternelle de Grandeur” . “France, Eternal land of Greatness.”That should do it! Would be great.

Or how about, “Let’s Make Italy Great Again!” It’s hard to know where to begin, really. Italian interest in greatness is about as deep as its interest in swapping its cuisine for neighboring Albania’s. Greatness: Been there, done that, a couple of millennia ago.

A first step might be reviving gladiatorial combat at Rome’s Colosseum, or making the trains run on time (again), or abandoning the consolations of style and beauty for the thrill of shock and awe, or, of course, manufacturing chic “La Grandezza Italiana” (“Italian Greatness”) campaign caps.

“Make Italy Great” is going to be a tough sell.

Then, of course, there’s Luxembourg.

No, greatness is America’s thing now, the recurrent frisson of a still-frisky power not deflated even by two wars without victory. Ronald Reagan, who also had striking hair, declared more than three decades ago, “Let’s Make America Great Again.” Trump is more peremptory, as befits a man of bullying inclination. “Make America Great Again.” He’s doing great with it. He’s identified a genuine need. There’s work to do on American greatness.

I’m not sure, but I think it was while sitting on the Seventh Avenue express of the New York City subway looking at a map that helpfully showed stops for the Lexington Avenue line, when water started dripping on my head from the subway car ceiling and an inaudible announcement was made, that I realized I was back in the greatest nation on earth.

Or was it as I gazed at a man channeling his bristling defiance into the occupation of three subway seats rather than one, or as I listened to voices much louder and more assertive than they needed to be, or as I struggled to identify a station with no visible sign naming it, or as the temperature in the subway elevator hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit, that the thought hit me that America was indeed the greatest nation on earth?

I cannot say when America being the greatest nation on earth really sunk in. It might have been as I walked along a garbage-strewn street in Queens beneath a bridge so corroded it seemed not of the last century but of the one before that. Or as I peeled small stickers off fruit and vegetables (I’d forgotten in Europe about those pesky little charmers) while listening to Trump confuse Iran’s Quds force with the Kurds. Every foreign war . and plenty loom if there’s a Trump presidency . is an American geography lesson.

America may be great, in fact I would argue it is, but it sure doesn’t look great right now. Europe looks better but is shrunken within.

Europe’s divisions, endlessly pored over, amount in the end to what Sigmund Freud called “the narcissism of minor differences.” The Continent is united in the rejection of greatness, while the United States cannot picture itself without it.

The most dangerous point in the arc of a nation’s power is when the apogee of its greatness is passed but it is not yet resigned to decline. That’s where Trump’s America is. Which is really, really great.