Probably a good thing..........................

      In truth, to the rest of the world, even as the American Founders boldly harbored utopian visions of the perfect republic, and as theyir wondrous ideas propounded in the Constitution fanned exuberantly outward, across the oceans, into the courts of the world's great powers, the United States remained little more than "revolting colonies," a fringe republic, an obscure land on the margins of Western civilization.  As Bernard Bailyn trenchantly reminds us, America was a "small, unsure, preindustrial borderland" filled with "provincials."  One European diplomat, the Comte de Montmorin, summed it up this way: "the united States," he sneered, were "the laughingstock of all the powers."  So, while Americans now groped forward to wrestle with their numerous inconsistencies—there were many—and their unresolved problems and seemingly insoluble dilemmas (they were numerous as well), the eyes of the world were not on these rustics.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800