Old World, No Fight

Jon Meacham is the author of Franklin and Winston. Writing in Newsweek, Meacham has noted on 9/11 that “there is no hiding from history”:

In another September, amid another war, Winston Churchill stood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to explain why America, the anchor of the New World, seemed forever linked to the passions and politics of the Old. “I will offer you one explanation—there are others, but one will suffice,” Churchill said at a Harvard convocation. “The price of greatness is responsibility. If the people of the United States had continued in a mediocre station, struggling with the wilderness, absorbed in their own affairs, and a factor of no consequence in the movement of the world, they might have remained forgotten and undisturbed beyond their protecting oceans: but one cannot rise to be in many ways the leading community in the civilized world without being involved in its problems, without being convulsed by its agonies and inspired by its causes. If this has been proved in the past, as it has been, it will become indisputable in the future. The people of the United States cannot escape world responsibility.”

Meacham writes that “there is a larger fight to be waged and won so that perhaps one day the sounds of our cities may again be. . .—the sounds of a world at peace—rather than the sounds of war.”

Does Meacham appreciate the irony of 2006, that while fighting to protect civilization is a debatable proposition in America, in the “Old World”, to use Churchill’s phrase, the issue is largely settled—Europe has no plans to entertain “the sounds of war.”