If there is one blessing in the world greater than to be born an American, it is to become an American. Those born here feel rightly fortunate to be heirs to the greatest nation on earth. Those of us who came here know we can never repay the debt we owe this country for permitting us to share in the fruits of its greatness.

If you’ll permit me, I think we immigrants may even have a clearer, or at least a more empirically tested, appreciation of what makes the U.S. great. Neophytes tend to be more passionate about the virtues of their new allegiance than those who have always believed. For those who have direct experience of elsewhere, the appeal of American virtues has been especially luminous. Those who spent the formative part of their lives looking at America from afar have a unique gratitude for what it has done and what it represents.

If you grew up, as I did, in Europe in the decades after World War II, through the darkest days of the Cold War, America’s leadership shaped your entire understanding of politics and history. It inspired not only hope but also a verified belief that the moral order of the world was sound and benevolent.

My parents owed their freedom and even their survival (and therefore perhaps I owed my existence) in significant part to the sacrifices Americans made in defeating the fascist tyrannies of Europe and Japan. I owed my liberty to the steadfast determination of the U.S. in a long struggle to face down communist Russia, keeping us safe from Soviet missiles and free from the threat of enslavement to its suffocating ideology.

You couldn’t fail to be impressed at and grateful for the triumph of American power. But most of all, you were overwhelmed that America had exercised that power not so it could impose its writ on us or to exact tribute, but to enable us to live as we wanted.

The words of Gen. Mark Clark, who led his men ashore at Salerno, Italy, in 1943, are now immortalized at the Normandy D-Day memorials: “If ever proof were needed that we fought for a cause and not for conquest, it could be found in these cemeteries. Here was our only conquest: all we asked . . . was enough . . . soil in which to bury our gallant dead.”This is American exceptionalism: No nation on earth, no society in history has ever combined such power with such a willingness to use it for good.

This virtue aligned neatly with American strategic interests: A free world helped secure America’s own peace and stability.

We can’t ignore the wrongs America has sometimes committed: the strategically reckless wars, the propping up of brutal regimes, the cynical alliances of convenience with enemies of freedom. But even these were done in pursuit of the higher ideal—seen as means justified by the end of making the world safe for freedom.

As the cynical British journalist says of the idealistic young American diplomat in Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American,” “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”It is painful to be an American and watch our leadership today and wonder if it stands for something quite different—to listen as the president aligns himself with the successor to Stalin and Beria, to watch as he castigates the leader of a free Ukraine fighting for its survival against a murderous tyranny, to observe as he helps Vladimir Putin fuel his war machine so it can more effectively flatten hospitals and schools, to hear that his White House might have restricted access to a vital technology for protecting innocent Ukrainians from incoming Russian hellfire.

To see all this and realize that it isn’t only Russia, but that the president’s evident favor for Mr. Putin fits with a wider preference for tyrants and dictators—whose overriding strategic priority is the destruction of American leadership—over the leaders of flailing democracies who want to preserve it.

And none of this seems to be in pursuit of some higher American ideal, but for the seizure of raw power and even for the personal enrichment of family and friends.

There is an irony in all this. President Trump and MAGA succeeded in part because they tapped into the sense of loss many Americans were feeling, the fear that the civilization the U.S. had helped create was in peril. They were elected to restore faith in America after years in which its leaders and culture had trashed American values.

I don’t for a second believe Americans have lost their idealism. I don’t think they voted to see the U.S. quit the alliance of nations that fought for freedom and join the gang of thugs that fight for naked self-advancement. I understand that many Americans have grown tired of feeling exploited and taken for granted and wanted redress. But that isn’t what the administration has delivered.

America is still the greatest country on earth. But its greatness will atrophy unless it restores its historic sense of purpose and the ideals of its founding principles and finds again leaders willing to place those ideals above the sordid, shameful, soul-defiling lust for power and money.