Thomas L Friedman: It's morning in India

> We don’t want America to lose self-confidence. Who else is there to take over America’s moral leadership?

My first reaction on reading this was "the world doesn't depend on one country", but on thinking about it, it does depend in this case. There is currently no other country that can take up America's ideals of personal freedom of expression, individuality and openness and embrace them as completely. To be sure, those ideals are getting distributed everywhere around the world mainly through the Internet, but being present in diluted quantities in a lot of places is not as good as being the loud voice in a particular place.