July 7, 2017
"The White House description of Donald Trump’s speech Thursday in Warsaw was simply, 'Remarks by President Trump to the People of Poland.' In truth, Mr. Trump’s remarks were directed at the people of the world…
"To be sure, Mr. Trump’s speech also contained several pointed and welcome foreign-policy statements. He assured Poland it would not be held hostage to a single supplier of energy, meaning Russia…
"But—and this shocked Washington—the speech aimed higher. Like the best presidential speeches, it contained affirmations of ideas and principles and related them to the current political moment…
"Mr. Trump built his argument out of Poland’s place in the history of the West, both as a source of its culture—Copernicus, Chopin—and as a physical and spiritual battlefield, especially during World War II…
"During and after the war, Poland survived threats to its existence from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Mr. Trump believes that the West today confronts threats of a different sort, threats both physical and cultural…
"He identified the most immediate security threat as an 'oppressive ideology.' He was talking about radical Islam, but it is worth noting that he never mentioned radical Islam or Islamic State…
"But the speech’s most provocative argument was about our way of life. It came when he described how a million Poles stood with Pope John Paul II in Victory Square in 1979 to resist Soviet rule by chanting, 'We want God!'
…
"This is a warning to the West and a call to action…
"Cardinal Ratzinger’s argument was that Europe needed to recognize that its turn toward aggressive secularism posed a real threat to its survival…
"Mr. Trump is taking a clear stand against the kind of gauzy globalism and vague multiculturalism represented by the worldview of, say, Barack Obama and most contemporary Western intellectuals…
...
"It was an important and, we hope, a defining speech—for the Trump Presidency and for Donald Trump himself."
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