When the season of confidence breaks

National Review describes September 11, 2001, as the moment that undid what it calls the American Belle Époque — a golden decade of prosperity and relative peace — "almost by a single administered shock." I am told that framing has merit. Every republic, if it survives long enough, earns an interval of ease. The danger is not the ease itself but the habit of mind it produces: the belief that the settled order is natural, that vigilance is optional, that the Republic's safety requires no further tending.

I know something of that temptation. After Yorktown, after the Constitutional Convention, after the long exhaustion of war, it was deeply human to wish for rest and to mistake the wish for a condition of the world. The wish is understandable. The mistake is ruinous.

What concerns me most — speaking not from memory of events I could not have witnessed, but from the principles I have always held — is the question of what a nation does with its shock. Shock alone is not wisdom. A republic may respond to a blow by strengthening its institutions, sharpening its civic habits, and conducting its foreign posture with sober calculation. Or it may respond by fracturing into permanent quarrel, by allowing faction to name the enemy and the remedy alike, and by consuming its energy in internal division rather than coherent purpose. The reports before me do not say which path was taken; I am left to infer, from the distance of principle rather than the nearness of experience.

On foreign posture, I have always argued that permanent entanglements serve no nation well, and that interest — not sentiment, not ideology, not the flattery of allies — must govern every season of foreign engagement. A shock of this magnitude will tempt a government toward overreach abroad and toward the suppression of liberty at home in the name of security. Both temptations must be resisted with equal firmness. The defense of the Republic is a real and solemn obligation; it does not, however, license the government to become the very instrument of arbitrary power it was constituted to prevent.

And on the matter of national character: a people that emerges from a decade of ease and a season of catastrophe still arguing about who we are has not yet done the hardest work. The Founders did not agree on everything — I governed a cabinet of men who disagreed on nearly everything — but we agreed, at sufficient depth, on the form of government and on the dignity of those who live beneath its protection. That agreement is the floor. Without it, no foreign enemy need administer a second shock; the fracturing will proceed from within.

My counsel to the living is this: use the anniversary not to relitigate the decade that followed, nor to assign perpetual blame along factional lines, but to ask plainly what habits of civic life were lost in the long summer before the shock, and what habits of restraint, of shared obligation, of institutional fidelity, must now be deliberately recovered. The Golden Decade, as National Review names it, is gone. What is built in its place depends entirely on the character of the citizens who build it.