“I will never apologise for the United States, ever. I don't care what the facts are.” President George H.W. Bush's statement in 1988 was more than just a “Bushism”, of the sort that his son later made famous. It was also a pithy summary of a whole school of thought in the US.

For many conservative Americans, one of the besetting sins of their liberal rivals is a tendency to go around apologising for their country. Jeane Kirkpatrick, a combative conservative, memorably excoriated liberals as the “blame America first” crowd.

Now conservatives are complaining loudly that one of those namby-pamby, self-flagellating liberals is sitting in the Oval Office – abasing himself and the country before foreigners. President Barack Obama, they complain, has turned himself into “global apologiser-in-chief”. Rush Limbaugh, the doyen of conservative talk radio, rages that “everywhere he goes, he's just apologising for the United States”.