When I was a child in the 70s and 80s, I dreamed of a future in America. Ireland’s culture was swamped by media from the United States and, to a lesser extent, the UK. Our much smaller creative industries, drained by emigration, could not compete. Everything looked better in the US; beautiful people lived more exciting lives, in a place where problems could be solved in a forthright, decisive fashion. America was a land of audacious heroes.

The Irish perception of the UK was more... complicated. On the one hand, the British were more like us than the Americans in a lot of ways; their entertainment was drier, more grounded, and while their portrayal of heroism had its own triumphalist shades, it didn’t have the same billboard quality as the US. But the British were also the villains of our history, so it was hard to offer complete loyalty to British heroes in fiction.

I grew up about an hour’s drive from the border of Northern Ireland, when the sectarian conflict was in full swing. This meant that I was eating up exciting British comic stories like Charley’s War and Johnny Red, watching James Bond and reading Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie and Len Deighton, while listening to news about the latest outrage committed by the British military in the North and learning about our struggle with this global empire in history class – a history that was all but unknown to people in Britain.

For a teenager, Irish heroes were also problematic. Like most small countries in Europe and elsewhere, we lacked a glorious imperial past. As a former colony, we did not have many historic battles of our own to celebrate, so our culture worshipped symbols – martyrs. The Irish heroes we learned about tended to suffer tragic and dramatic deaths. Our mythological stories, fantastically outlandish as they were, often had similarly sombre endings and for a kid, our literature was downright funereal. I didn’t want heroes who died, I wanted heroes who won.

Somewhere between Britain’s history-fuelled expectations of itself and Ireland’s appetite for dead warrior saints, there are stories to be told about not letting a war start in the first place

The United States was familiar enough to relate to, far enough away to be a fantasy; its confidence in its own bombastic heroism was intoxicating and, of course, the relationship was unpolluted by colonialism. While British nationalism could give us James Bond, American stories regularly featured the US President himself getting stuck into the drama. The idea of Ireland’s Taoiseach taking on terrorists with an assault rifle or aliens with a jet fighter is something even the most loyal Irish patriot could only laugh at. It’s just not our style.

Nobody personifies this unabashed heroism more than Jack Reacher, an American created by a British writer. An ex-military cop who has taken to wandering the United States, discovering a country he hardly knows; physically imposing and supremely self-assured, he delivers his unilateral, violent form of justice, with a different piece of Americana featured in each book. Tom Cruise would eventually capture that self confidence perfectly on film, even if it was expressed a foot lower down than required. Alan Ritchson now does it at the appropriate height. But there was another Cruise vehicle that would prove, if anything, more brazen than Reacher, and that was the patriotic spectacle that was Top Gun: Maverick.

I had a strange mix of feelings watching Maverick in the cinema. It was a masterpiece of moviemaking – an adrenaline rush of gung-ho heroes in fighter jets taking on faceless foreigners. At this point, however, I’d long had major issues with American foreign policy. I came out of the cinema feeling that we might have reached the end of an era. As we were seeing more and more of the struggles of ordinary life in the US on social media, as well as its troubled politics, it was hard to imagine such a successful piece of full-on, American triumphalism ever being made again.

Europe’s perception of heroism, like its power structures, is more conflicted, introspective and often frustratingly slow-moving. However, our clump of countries has developed an approach to taking action that is less interested in the single great figure, free of doubt, and more in the diverse and resolute strength to be found in cooperation. There is no unified European army. It’s better, and cheaper, to have friends and trading partners rather than a world-conquering military. It’s far from a perfect system and it can still be predatory, but somewhere between Britain’s history-fuelled expectations of itself and Ireland’s appetite for dead warrior saints, there are stories to be told about not letting a war start in the first place. And while there’s a vulnerability in this model of action that might still cause it to fail in the face of bloody-minded villains, it is flexible and adaptive, where they are insecure, hard and brittle.

Stories have power, and its effects can be negative as easily as they are positive. But even as we watch America’s disillusionment and grief at seeing its heroic mythology come undone, there is also a groundswell of cooperative action. Under threat from figures who see themselves as Great Men of History, more and more voices are saying: "This is an attack on all of us. We are ashamed of what has happened to our country." People are uniting, organising, defying the authoritarians and getting out onto the streets. Whatever becomes of the United States of America, it may never be able to project its heroism with the same supreme, infectious confidence again – and that might be no bad thing.

Insecurity and vulnerability can breed empathy, a greater appreciation of your reliance on others around you, and their reliance on you – on a personal and a national level. In a world threatened by fascism, vast divisions in wealth and the apocalypse of climate change, stories about the power of people united by empathy are the ones we need most.