The best way to love America is to leave it | Opinion

As America approaches its 250th birthday, we're arguing over what America is. Some say it's the greatest country on earth. Others insist it's irredeemably flawed.

Before taking either position, Americans should do one thing: Leave. Not forever, but for long enough to see it clearly from a distance.

In his 1891 poem "The English Flag," Rudyard Kipling wrote, "What should they know of England who only England know?"

Having grown up between Britain and America and spent much of my adult life traveling abroad, I've come to believe Kipling was right.

The point is that you cannot fully understand your own country until you've seen it from somewhere else. Millions of Americans never have. Only about half of Americans own passports. And many who do travel rarely venture beyond the resorts, cruise ships and English-speaking tourist bubbles that make up what I call "America abroad."

International travel isn't cheap, but the cost often isn't the hardest part. When you enter a country jetlagged and ignorant – of the language, the exchange rate, the unwritten social rules – travel can feel like a series of minor humiliations. But it's worth embracing the struggle because that's where understanding and growth come from.

The world gets smaller

Everyone knows travel can broaden the mind. But it can narrow the world, too ‒ narrow the distance you imagine between yourself and everyone else. You go in expecting difference and instead find how similar people are everywhere: They want security, dignity, a future for their kids. It's an encouraging discovery, unless your sense of self depends on believing your country, or your people, is fundamentally unlike the rest.

In my experience, the Americans most invested in that kind of difference are usually the ones who've traveled the least.

Newcomers often see their adopted country differently. A Russian immigrant I met in Brooklyn last year described gun ownership not merely as a hobby or a right but as a civic responsibility – one that should be exercised regularly, along with America's other constitutional rights, lest they atrophy and Americans drift toward something resembling modern Russia.

My own travel has only deepened my appreciation for the rule of law here, for how well this country absorbs people who weren't born in it, for the chance (real, though not guaranteed) to rise from nothing through hard work. And for the radical claim at the heart of the Declaration of Independence: that our rights don't come from government at all, that government's job is to protect them, not hand them out.

Reporting in Syria last year, I met a Druze woman in Damascus who told me that for most of her life, sect barely mattered. She had a close friend growing up and didn't learn until years later that the friend was Christian – it had simply never come up. She thought of herself, and everyone around her, simply as Syrian.

That changed after a change of government in 2024, when her own Druze community came under attack ‒ and other sects, the ones she'd always considered fellow Syrians first, didn't come to their defense. She told me she'd grown more insular since, more suspicious of people whose sect she didn't know. Increasingly, she felt forced to think of herself as Druze first, Syrian second, if at all.

The cost of American strength

It made me appreciate something easy to overlook from inside our own arguments: For all our political divisions (and they are real), most Americans still think of themselves as Americans first, not as members of a faction first and citizens second.

Last fall in Panama, I met a Venezuelan migrant who'd spent the past year working as an electrician across the American South. He'd earned enough to send most of it home to family in Venezuela. But what struck him more, he said, was that his coworkers rarely wanted to hang out once the workday ended. No one went out for a beer or asked about his family back home.

It's the kind of thing you only really notice from the outside: America's relentless focus on individual achievement and making money can leave less room for things like community, family and friendship.

Travel also recalibrates your sense of scale. The political battles, the sports rivalries and daily outrages that consume us at home matter ‒ but viewed from a distance, you see how local they really are. That's not a reason to stop caring. But it is a reason to stop treating every fight as the end of the world.

As America turns 250, we need a more mature patriotism. The kind that can recognize America's flaws without hating the country; the kind that can celebrate America's successes without pretending that it has nothing to learn.

So, if you get the chance, leave. Study abroad, work overseas or even just spend your next vacation in a place where you cannot avoid immersing yourself in a different way of doing things.

Then come home. You'll understand the place you went. And you may be surprised to find you understand your own country even better.

Daniel Allott, USA TODAY's conservative opinion editor, is the author of the book "On the Road in Trump's America."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The best way to love America is to leave it | Opinion

Reporting by Daniel Allott, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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This story was originally published July 2, 2026 at 4:02 AM.