Liberty and Law: Not self-protecting or self-perpetuating.

June 21 | Posted by mrossol | American Thought, Losing Freedom

June 12, 2014 7:20 p.m. ET

From a talk by former Sen. Joseph Lieberman at an Aspen Institute-sponsored conference in Prague, June 10:

The relative peace, prosperity, tolerance and security achieved from Lisbon to Tallinn is by any historical measure not the natural state of the European continent. On the contrary, this has been a part of the world that has proven unusually prone to conflict—which is perhaps not surprising, given how diverse its people are and how fragmented political power historically has been. To the extent that Europe has moved in the direction of being whole, free and at peace, it is not the preordained result of some dialectic of history or irreversible evolution of Europeans toward a higher plane of geopolitical existence, but because of a remarkable combination of events, heroic and idealistic leaders like Havel, Walesa and Gorbachev, popular support for change, and moral and tangible backing from the United States and other Western nations.

That is exactly what the people of Ukraine need now. Today the bell tolls for Ukraine but it also tolls for the rest of Europe and the United States. The political order we have built over the last 70 years—first by defeating fascism in World War II and then by collapsing Communism in the Cold War—is under genuine threat.

The values of liberty and law are at the heart of the Euro-Atlantic Alliance, but values alone are not self-protecting or self-perpetuating. Political will and military strength are as necessary in Europe as anywhere else. There is no European exception to this truth that history teaches.

Notable & Quotable – WSJ.

Share

Leave a Reply

Verified by ExactMetrics