Most U.S. allies are sure to be worried by the choice Americans made on November 5. Many observers are confounded by voters’ willingness to roll the dice and reelect the intemperate Donald Trump as president. But Americans have long had an outsize risk tolerance, a characteristic that is integral to both the dynamism of the country’s economy and the vibrance of its society. As the poet Robert Pinsky wrote in 2002, American culture is “so much in process, so brilliantly and sometimes brutally in motion, that standard models for it fail to apply”—an analysis the election result only reaffirms.