The Proposition Abandoned

The world did not make America its enemy. America, in a fit of national amnesia and cultural exhaustion, chose that role for itself. In the blink-of-an-eye, America, under the second presidency of Donald J. Trump, became the very thing America had spent two centuries opposing. An unpredictable transactional norm, a violating power that treated its allies as adversaries, its institutions as obstacles, and its values as weaknesses, and the rest of the world as a problem to be exploited rather than a community to be led. Whether America can choose differently - whether the better angels of its nature can yet reassert themselves - and whether the institutions its founders and greatest presidents built can survive the assault from within is the defining question of the twenty-first century's first quarter. The answer has not yet been written. But the warning is as clear as any in American history. A nation that abandons its principles does not thereby gain freedom. It loses everything, those principles were built to protect.