you obviously didn't grasp the meta-commentary, meta-humor
that's ok.
let me put it bluntly:
the greatest country in the world could not prevent ebola outbreaks in dallas and new york city.
the greatest country in the world could not prevent cavemen with box cutters from hijacking planes and flying them into the world trade center and the pentagaon.
....
do you want me to go further?
Go look it up - the happiest time of American history (if you're white) was the 1950's. The future was sparkly, you were definitely the good guys, and prosperity, dominion over nature and progress was assured.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175645/tomgram:_noam_chomsky,_why_it's_"legal"_when_the_u.s._does_it
The main founder of contemporary IR [international relations] theory, Hans Morgenthau, was really quite a decent person, one of the very few political scientists and international affairs specialists to criticize the Vietnam War on moral, not tactical, grounds. Very rare. He wrote a book called The Purpose of American Politics. You already know what’s coming. Other countries don’t have purposes. The purpose of America, on the other hand, is “transcendent”: to bring freedom and justice to the rest of the world. But he’s a good scholar, like Carothers. So he went through the record. He said, when you study the record, it looks as if the United States hasn’t lived up to its transcendent purpose. But then he says, to criticize our transcendent purpose “is to fall into the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds” -- which is a good comparison. It’s a deeply entrenched religious belief. It’s so deep that it’s going to be hard to disentangle it. And if anyone questions that, it leads to near hysteria and often to charges of anti-Americanism or “hating America” -- interesting concepts that don’t exist in democratic societies, only in totalitarian societies and here, where they’re just taken for granted.