So here's what I want this quick dash through our nation's history to accomplish: to impart an unshakable sense of grounding in this American orientation. I want your sense of who we are and what we mean to this world to become so strong that you can confidently navigate the grand strategic issues we now collectively face as a result--not of our failures as a nation but--of our success as a global force for good.
There is plenty of anti-Americanism across the world today, but there is no pre-Americanism out there today. Let me show you how our country changed everything by the choices we made, because in those decisions we locate the quintessential examples of American grand strategy and the genius of America's grand strategists.
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As an example of how to rapidly develop an underdeveloped portion of any country's territory, this is arguably the single most important step to take. Hernando DeSoto, the brilliant Peruvian economist whose pioneering study of "informal," or poorly credentialized economic activity and associated capital in Latin America, has argued that nothing transforms the political economy of a nation better or faster than "adapting the law to the social and economic needs of the majority of the population," because law is "thus made to serve popular capital formation and economic growth." In many ways, the Homestead Act of 1862 was desperately late on the scene in the American West, where so-called squatter's rights were already widely recognized as a method of obtaining legal right to property. As DeSoto states, "it was less an act of official generosity than a recognition of a fait accompli." What the Homestead Act did accomplish was to codify this practice for the vast Federal lands still held by the government at that time, thus accelerating to a significant degree the rapid settlement of the West in the years immediately following the Civil War. The symbolism of this law, DeSoto notes, is great, because it marked the end of "a long, exhausting, and bitter struggle between elitist law and a new order brought about by massive migration and the needs of an open and sustainable society."
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But it's not enough simply to build the physical structure of a nation, for identity is attachment and attachment comes through shared experiences. Those shared experiences, in turn, need to be strung together in stories of destiny--namely, things turned out this way for a reason. If you simply build it and let them come, the resulting multiplicity of identities, if left to develop on their own, will splinter along the many choices afforded by all that connectivity (on the frontier, much like on the Internet, nobody knows if you're a dog). So railroading them out to the frontier isn't enough. You don't travel to the frontier to impose your old identity but to find your new identity, a reality our armed forces have finally come around to understanding today in Iraq. The role of leadership in this process is one of shaping and enunciating, not inventing and dictating: You have to tell people why the connections you forge result in identity you must all now share. You have to offer them grand strategic narratives of how they and this all came to be--and what must come next. In this dialogue, yours is not the only voice, but being a primary agent of change, yours is the bully pulpit.
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That's why, in many ways, the defeat of the Soviet challenge was unremarkable: we simply waited out the inevitable failure of an alternative, mini-world globalization model. In contrast, gaining China's admittance to our model of globalization was world changing, because it triggers critical mass dynamics that make inevitable the final, global victory of our grand strategy--the one revolution that truly remakes the world in its image.
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Again, this is as good as it gets for now. For something better, we have to keep working. We have to recalibrate that American grand strategy and its underlying American System to the next set of challenges, the next set of allies, the next set of enemies, the next set of opportunities. Nothing we'll confront in the days ahead will be unknown to us. In building our American System, we have done it all: the best and the worst, the most sacred and the most profane, the most defensible and the most unforgivable.
It's not that America didn't make mistakes, it's that Americans corrected them and moved on.