I REMEMBER a time when, following an event of international significance, the world would wait to hear what the president of the United States had to say about it. In Britain we would have an impatient few hours before America had woken up. Because until the President had spoken, you couldn’t be sure of even the shape of what might happen next.

On Monday we woke to the news of North Korea’s nuclear test, and to a banal commentary of people who didn’t really know what to say about it. Just when you wanted some real insight and even facts, the Today programme again indulged its tiresome obsession with Iraq, focusing upon whether Tony Blair’s actions there had made this move by Kim Jong Il more likely blah blah. That didn’t surprise me. What did was my instinctive reaction when George W. Bush did speak much later in the day. There he was gravely intoning on one or other news channel that this “constitutes a threat to international peace and security”, and “Oh sod off” I heard myself muttering, with no desire to hear any more. It was as much ennui as irritation: I didn’t believe he would have anything useful to say and found it faintly annoying that he spoke as though the world would care.

One reaction from a completely insignificant voice in the political process. Yet it reveals, I think, a sad truth: the 43rd President of the United States of America has squandered the political authority of a great country. Never mind whether world leaders still feel the need to check in with the US; ordinary people no longer expect from Washington international leadership of any use. So spent is the authority of the United States that even a foreign affairs ingénue such as myself recognises that there is little constructive it can do any more. So it doesn’t really matter what the President thinks.

To judge from extracts, State of Denial, the latest book by the Watergate journalist Bob Woodward, seems to confirm a picture of an Administration out of its depth in international affairs. The enemy of the state might be Donald Rumsfeld, who comes across as pretty near to certifiable. But the whole administration is portrayed as dysfunctional, fragile, unable to admit or unwilling even to see, let alone correct, possible mistakes such as the dismantling of the Iraqi military.

Now, the trouble with writing about the United States in Britain is that one tends immediately to be categorised as one of two things: an enemy or a fan. “For” or “against” the US. A supporter or opponent of the war in Iraq. Even, in the most dishonest polarisation, “pro” or “anti” Israel.

To criticise the lack of planning for a post-Saddam Iraq, for instance, means you are assumed to condemn the war completely, always knew it was wrong, think that it glorified Osama bin Laden and Islamofascism and persuaded Kim Jong Il to conduct that nuclear test. The only part of that I believe is that the war in Iraq acted as a recruiting ground for bin Laden. The rest is more complicated.

Yesterday one respected commentator asserted that Kim was persuaded by the fate of Saddam Hussein “that only weapons of mass destruction can ensure his own security”. As an American might say: hello? It was the belief (mistaken but sincerely held) that Saddam possessed WMD that ensured his destruction. In other words, WMD made him un-secure. How do you get to that assertion about Kim from there? And anyway, how does anyone know for sure what this most obsessively secret, probably mad, despot is calculating?

However murky these causes and effects, it is clear that the US cannot respond as it once might have to the test conducted in North Korea. Because of the muck it has made in Iraq, it lacks the political and moral authority to do so. Were it to have wanted to address North Korea’s nuclear pretensions, it should have prioritised it over Iraq; the world knew Kim was a brutal tyrant with a nuclear weapon within his reach.

And now we have this: a tinpot totalitarian with no economy to speak of, whose people are starving, thumbing his nose at the world. And we look to China to tell us what happens next.

I’m afraid I am both for and against the US, although overwhelmingly a fan. I love the United States. I love its wide streets, its doughnuts, its hugeness, its multiculturalism. I love its food, its service, its value for money. I love its conspicuous consumption. I love its steaming manholes. I love it that my grandfather is buried in California. I love American tourists. I love how much they love Britain. I love New York. I love Disneyworld. I love square dancing in Texas.

I hate US visa queues, the obsession with cars, its ability to overlook its underclass. I hate its two-tier society. I hate its conspicuous consumption.

More loves than hates.

I hate what the US has done to itself and, were I an American, I would hate it even more. I hate the fact that we now look to China for international leadership. Yes, I know, it’s their side of the world, but time was . . .

I hate that we have got into a place where somebody British can even entertain the thought of smiling quietly with satisfaction that the revolting regime of Kim Jong Il has stuck two fingers up to the great United States. I hate it that I didn’t care what the President said on Monday.

I hate it that I said sod off.

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