You can be forgiven if you hadn’t noticed our three-decade holiday from history lately. It hasn’t exactly felt like party time in the United States since the 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union, a competing hegemon and existential threat.
In the decade that followed, we endured a spate of terrorist attacks, culminating in the 9/11 jihadist strikes that killed more Americans than died in Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor — the 1941 sneak attack that vaulted the U.S. into World War II, the deadliest conflict in history. There followed military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan that, combined, lasted over 20 years. In the interim, we suffered through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. By 2021, amid the Biden administration’s provocatively humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, we were struggling to move beyond a once-in-a-century pandemic, to which over a million Americans deaths are attributed.






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