In a column today in the New York Times, Bret Stephens challenges Americans and our traditional belief in freedom and democracy as progress and universal. He is not proposing WWIII over Ukraine, but he is asking us to stand together.

Here is how he puts it:

“The United States used to have self-belief. Our civilization, multiple generations of Americans believed, represented human progress. Our political ideals — about the rule of law, human rights, individual liberties, democratic governance — were ideals for all people, including those beyond our borders. Our literature spoke to the universal human experience; our music to the universal soul. When we fought wars, it was for grand moral purposes, not avaricious aims. Even our worst blunders, as in Vietnam, stemmed from defensible principles. Our sins were real and numerous, but they were correctable flaws, not systemic features.

It goes without saying that this self-belief — like all belief — was a mixture of truth and conceit, idealism and hubris, vision and blindness. It led us to make all sorts of errors, the acute awareness of which has become the dominant strain of our intellectual life. But it also led us to our great triumphs: Yorktown and Appomattox; the 13th and 19th Amendments; the Berlin Airlift and the fall of the Berlin Wall; the Marshall Plan and PEPFAR.”

I sent Bret a copy, actually two, of my new book, The Universe Is on Our Side. I hope he reads it. The book will help him see, as he cannot quite today, what went wrong and what we can do about it.