Today, we have something to remember. Eighty-one years ago at 7:50 am on a peaceful Sunday morning in Hawaii, to use the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “the United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” For us, it was the beginning of a global war that changed the world, and our own country beyond imagining. And it was the product of our steadfast inattention to one of history’s great lessons.
Great nations with worldwide interests will, sooner or later, be challenged by those who wish to supplant them. The challenge is sometimes sudden, as it was with Japan, or it can be an incremental and drawn-out process, as it was with the great war for supremacy between England and France, which lasted more than a hundred years. But it will come, and those nations which are unprepared are often swept away.
Today we are falling back into the lassitude that characterized our relations with the rest of the world in the 1920’s and 1930s. And like the cataclysm that dragged us out of our sleep at that point, a challenge will come.
Are we ready? Doubtful. We seem instead to be very much like interwar France – shot through with elitism, doubt, je m’en fouisime and at least one major group who keeps telling us that the United States is not worth saving.
We all know how that turned out.
