We have made ourselves a navel-gazing folk, a little like Americans of the 19th century — until we lunged into the world by bravely going after the crumbling Spanish empire. And in truth there is plenty that is worthy of our inward gaze now that unjust foreign wars have dropped out of the repertoire.

But absorption in our many domestic ills is not what we are all about these days. Vigorous scrutiny at home, never an American habit, is not why we do not much look outward. For most of us, the point is to avert our eyes as our claim to leadership in global affairs weakens. As an impatient world wings past in pursuit of a new order, America is befuddled and America flinches.

This is my read of foreign policy in the era of Obama and John Kerry, our most mediocre secretary of state since Condi Rice. Well, since Colin Powell. No, since Madeleine Albright. OK, since Warren Christopher. Let's say since Larry Eagleburger, since ... Alas, there is a reason the State Department is called "Foggy Bottom."

It's time to notice that Kerry cannot do much more than run to catch up. In Syria, in Iran, in the Pacific: State has been managing no more than frenetic improvisation since Kerry took office last February. And when Kerry is able to exert American preferences, as in Egypt, he gets it very wrong — invoking the past, ignoring the new century's extraordinary dynamism, reverting to Cold War typology as if it can still be made to apply (and as if it ever did).

Scraping away the pretense, we are the ones crumbling now — not altogether unlike the Spanish when Teddy Roosevelt set America's sights on them. And I think it is terrific.

This is neither cynicism nor declinism nor simple pessimism. I call it "the optimism of pessimism." Once we finish our crumbling — and it is exactly like the Spanish in this regard — we will have a chance of getting on in the world constructively, of taking our proper place in history (as opposed to standing, somehow, above it).

It is a long-wave thought, true — "the work of a generation," to borrow from the honorable Edward Snowden. But this is what makes 2013 so singular a passage in the running tale of U.S. policy abroad. It is hard to see your moment in history — by definition you are in it. But, rare enough, it is easier now than it usually is.

Among Kerry inheritances when he took the chair after Hillary Clinton was the "pivot to Asia." The phrase faded quickly, and it was never more than a trumped-up effort to give American diplomacy the appearance of design — "architecture," as the dips like to say. Instantly, Kerry was up to his neck in the quicksands of the Middle East.

Egypt came first. It was hard to detect, not least because of the disgraceful news reporting (or maybe it was the editing), but we witnessed a Washington-sanctioned coup last summer while scarcely noticing it. The instrument was Susan Rice, just then made national security adviser: She put the call through to Cairo, giving the generals the nod.

Mohammed Morsi's fate was exactly the same as Mossadegh's in Iran, 1953 (elected leader, the nation's first, traded for a murderous autocrat) and Arbenz in Guatemala a year later (first elected leader out, military men and 30 years of civil war in). The three had the same flaw by Washington's reckoning: Two social democrats and a moderate Muslim, they all stood outside the arc of American control.

So much for Kerry's dexterity and imagination, as we read about these virtues in the newspapers. The take-home here: We have changed not at all over the past 60 years, and public deception is consistently essential to the proceedings.

We (well, some of us) mourn parts of our past, not least the coups. Bill Clinton, on a half-day visit to Guatemala City during his presidency, actually apologized for the CIA job on Arbenz. In the same way, some of us may someday get around to regretting what we did to the first president Egyptians chose for themselves. But this has to wait until it no longer matters.

And now you see what I mean, perhaps, when I suggest that it is time to recognize that we inhabit our own history.

Next to the same-old in Egypt, Syria and Iran are even more telling of our time. In both cases, we can discern the future arriving.

We are all trained to find Assad repellent. He is, but I would say less so than Pinochet was, to choose one among Washington's many repellent clients over the years. Washington gives not a hoot about Assad's domestic doings. Assad is