The Burden of
Free People

There is an overwhelming weight and responsibility that comes with leading the free world—a phrase we toss around as though it were a coat one man puts on each January and removes four or eight years later. But this is a dangerous misunderstanding. The burden does not rest upon one man. It never has. It rests upon a people, millions of them, most of whom would prefer not to think about it before breakfast.

And here we arrive at a truth so plain that nearly everyone conspires to ignore it: evil is not a relic. It is not a metaphor reserved for Sunday sermons or the paperback thrillers you read on vacation. It is an operative force in the world—as real as gravity, and considerably less neutral. One need not adopt any particular theology to observe that there exist, at this very moment, men and nations whose ambitions are not bounded by the quaint notion that other peoples have a right to govern themselves. The appetite for dominion is ancient. It did not expire with the last century’s tyrants. It merely changed clothes.

Now, the comfortable citizen of a free republic would rather not dwell on this. You have, after all, a mortgage, a streaming subscription, and a general sense that history is something that happened to other people. But history is not finished with you. There are, to speak with uncomfortable directness, a great many powers positioning themselves for supremacy, not through philosophy or persuasion, but through the older and more reliable instruments of economic leverage and military patience. They are not gunning for the number one spot out of sporting interest. They mean to hold it. And what is held by one is necessarily taken from another.

The question, then, is not whether we face adversaries. That much is settled by observation. The question is whether a free people retains the stomach for what freedom actually costs. Not merely in taxes or soldiers (though it costs both) but in attention, in seriousness, in the willingness to look at the world as it is rather than as we would like it to be.

A nation that loses its appetite for the fight does not get to retire peacefully. It gets conquered. Or, what is sometimes worse, it gets managed—slowly, quietly, until one morning it wakes to find that all the important decisions are being made elsewhere.

And let us not speak of this in purely martial terms, for the modern contest of civilizations is waged first in ledgers and shipping lanes. Consider the monetary architecture upon which your daily life depends: the price of bread, the rate on your mortgage, the value of the paper in your wallet. These are not acts of nature. They are sustained by an arrangement in which one currency, and therefore one set of norms, underwrites global trade. If you find the cost of living burdensome now (and you are right to), then permit yourself one moment of imagination: picture a world in which the yuan, backed by a state that answers to no electorate, dictates the terms of international exchange. Picture what cost of living means when the entity setting prices owes you nothing: not transparency, not representation, not even the pretense of caring whether you can afford eggs.

This is not speculation dressed as prophecy. It is arithmetic. Power follows money, money follows trade, and trade follows the strong. If a free people will not be strong—not aggressive, not imperial, but strong—then the terms of existence will be written by those who are. And they will not write them with your comfort in mind.

By a people awake enough to carry it.