There is a peculiar rhetorical disease that afflicts discussions of World War II in the United States: historical solipsism.

You can see it even in people who should know better. David Frum, born and raised in Canada, briefly slipped into the same bombastic reflex that Donald Trump often displays — the reflex to narrate the Allied victory as though it were essentially an American solo performance. To his credit, Frum caught himself and corrected course, acknowledging the role of other nations, including his own homeland.

But the instinct itself is revealing.

The war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was not won by one country. It was a grinding coalition struggle in which:

• The Soviet Union destroyed the bulk of the German army on the Eastern Front.

• Britain survived the early years alone and served as the strategic base for the liberation of Western Europe.

• Canada mobilized massively for a country of its size, dominating parts of the Atlantic war, training air crews across the Commonwealth, and landing a full assault division on D-Day.

• The United States supplied colossal industrial power and fought decisive campaigns across two oceans.

This is not controversial history. It is the consensus of every serious historian.

Yet American political discourse periodically collapses this multinational effort into a simple morality play: America arrives, America wins, America saves the world.

That narrative is not history. It is national mythology — useful for domestic politics, but deeply distorting when it replaces the record of how the war was actually fought and won.

When even a Canadian-born commentator briefly slides into that narrative, it shows how powerful the gravitational field of American political storytelling can be. It pulls facts toward itself, compressing a complex alliance into a single flag.

Call it what it is: not patriotism, but historical narcissism.

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