In the Washington Times today, Midge Decter recollects the responsibility the United States shouldered during the Cold War and reflects on what our role in the world should be today:
So what is now to be our role in the world? To begin with, it must be said that to no other nation can such words be applied. Usually, after all, nations are not arrangements entered into but developments that happen. They are the results of nature, accidents of geography, the movement and spread of language, wars and hatreds and rivalries and the settlement of rivalries. But boasting, we too often forget, what has turned out to be the oldest continuously surviving form of popular government on earth, the United States was a nation invented — by, let us ever be on our knees in gratitude, a group of men of political genius, whom a benign providence happened to place upon the eastern shores of a vast and rich and empty continent.
Aside from the fact that it would take nearly a century and an almost unimaginably bloody civil war to keep their invention whole — we remain beneficiaries of what they devised for us there in Philadelphia nearly 234 years ago.
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