I think the germans’ peaceful ways are more about compensating for what came before than about innate qualities of them as a people. The U.S. response to 9/11 was indeed abysmal, with no self-examination at all, and I know several people who since then refuse to travel to the U.S. because they basically consider the whole country to have gone mad. There is this very odd thing where if you talk to Americans they are mostly sane and reasonable people, and then you see their political system and it is like an episode of game of thrones.