The US Puts Its Greatest Vulnerability on Display
Runaway partisanship endangers the United States more than foreign enemies do.
By Kori Schake
Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies, AEI
February 19, 2021
In one of his first public speeches, in early 1838, Abraham Lincoln warned that the biggest threat to the United States came from within. “If destruction be our lot,†said the future president, then 28, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.â€
Citing the killings of a mixed-race boatman and an abolitionist newspaper editor by pro-slavery crowds, Lincoln described a country in which widening political division had turned into violence, declaring:
"There is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice … By instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to no restraint, but dread of punishment, they thus become, absolutely unrestrained."
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2021/02/us-puts-its-greatest-vulnerability-display/172132/
