India, July 11 -- As the US celebrates its 250th anniversary, we have been inundated with reflections on its past achievements and present frailties. The common theme has been toconsider how far the country has lived up to - or strayed from - what is calledthe Spirit of '76, the rousing love for libertythat led 13 plucky colonies to teach Britain, their "assuming brother", a lesson on the rightful bounds of power. But do we measure a nation by its youthful ardour or by its considered later choices? 1776 is where the generation that founded the USbegan its journey, but where did it end up? By 1787, when Americans gave themselves a Constitution, a very different idea was in circulation. Living in an era in which dominion dare not speak its name, we hear less about this idea thanwe should. But it is the impulse that hasshaped the world we inhabit today: America's quest for greatness. When we speak of the US Constitution we invariably think of the laws and institutions it establishes, the most famous being the separation of powers. What is quietly passed over is that the separation of powers was designed as a remedy - to ensure that a "vigorous" government would not become despotic. But why was a "vigorous" government needed in the first instance? The answer is laid out most clearly in the Federalist Papers, the epochal essays penned by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison in support of the Constitution. Early in the Federalist Papers, which were published serially in 1787-88, Jay, who had proven an astute spymaster and diplomat during the Revolution, reminded his compatriots that "among the many objects to which a wise and free people find it necessary to direct their attention, that of providing for their safety seems to be the first". This object was difficult to obtain,however, because "it is too true, howeverdisgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it". This meant that the safety of the US would depend not on humility or rectitude or alliances, but on its "efficiency" and "power". The unyielding truth, Jay warned, was that, in international relations, the very same conduct that would be accepted when undertaken by a "strong united nation" would be rejected when performed by a nation "of little consideration". If Jay emphasised how union would defend the US from insult and assault, Hamilton admitted, with his characteristic boldness, that history showed that republics, no less than kingdoms, could be motivated by territory and commerce to wage war on others. America was to be nodifferent. It did not merely desire safety; it had another "great national object" to pursue. This was to develop an "active commerce", which was essential to "prosperity". Here, power mattered even more because the "adventurous spirit which distinguishes the commercial character of America", Hamilton observed, was bound to attract "European jealousy". It would, therefore, be necessary for America to build up a "powerful marine" - to prevent other nations from"clipping the wings by which we might soar to a dangerous greatness". The end point of the Constitution, the Federalist Papers thus made clear, was not merely to create a union - but a particular form of it - a "vigorous national government" that would prevent other nations from, in Hamilton's words, "availing themselves of our universal impotence, to prescribe the conditions of our political existence". This daring spirit had deep implications for the law. Since the US could not "chain the ambition or set bounds to the exertions of all other nations," Madison argued, it could not prudently "chain the discretion of its own government". This spirit also had implications for the design of American institutions. Since war and diplomacy demanded "perfect secrecy and immediate dispatch", as Jay put it, the Senate was structured to encourage "discretion and discernment", and the executive was organised for "energy". Hamilton's maxim was blunt: "A government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government." What emerged from the Constitutional Convention then was, as its great critic Patrick Henry put it, a government that could "make nations tremble". Whether such power constitutes greatness has, of course, always been contested. The list of dissenters is long and hallowed, running from Thomas Jefferson who wished for the US to "abandon the ocean" rather than "jostle" with other nations, through to John Quincy Adams, who urged that the country not go abroad "in search of monsters to destroy", and on to William Graham Sumner who praised "blessed isolation" as the US' true calling. But the facts speak for themselves. Whether in the acquisition of territory, which has grown from the Eastern seaboard to distant Guam, or in the acquisition of wealth and resources, with its share of world GDP growing from about 2% then to 25% today, the US has pursued a very definite - eminently material - greatness. Thus, when President Donald Trump declares that he intends to stymie nations that want to challenge American pre-eminence - he is not saying something unprecedented. Given the impulse behind the Constitution, it is difficult to conceive of the US reconciling itself to life in the shadow of other nations. If it is not Trump, it will be someone else, with a different style perhaps, but not an altogether different message. This is because the Constitution encourages, to borrow Theodore Roosevelt's later idiom, not "mere easy peace" but the willingness "to dare mighty things". To return to where we began, it is well and good to recall, on this semiquincentennial, the US' founding love of liberty. But as fireworks burst above its vast and richly peopled expanses, it is worth recalling that clarity and honesty about human nature - Hamilton's insistence that we "take mankind as they are" - have been its elixir. It is not the temper of our age, which is as suspicious of authority as people were in the Age of Revolutions, to celebrate such frankness. As Hamilton warned in the opening of the Federalist Papers, the Founders knew that "an enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty". The US' good fortune was that the Founders succeeded where others have failed: They admitted the passion for freedom, then tempered it with the "accumulated experience of ages". And so, to other nations is left the business of wanting, or more often merely claiming, to be morally superior to the US - and falling ever further behind it....