Here’s a terrific, deeply thought-provoking speech by Charles Krauthammer at the American Enterprise Institute: Democratic Realism. Very highly recommended. (Hat tip: Saul Singer.)

Americans have an healthy aversion to foreign policy. It stems from a sense of thrift: Who needs it? We’re protected by two great oceans, we have this continent practically to ourselves and we share it with just two neighbors, both friendly, one so friendly that its people seem intent upon moving in with us.

It took three giants of the twentieth century to drag us into its great battles: Wilson into World War I, Roosevelt into World War II, Truman into the Cold War. And then it ended with one of the great anti-climaxes in history. Without a shot fired, without a revolution, without so much as a press release, the Soviet Union simply gave up and disappeared.

It was the end of everything—the end of communism, of socialism, of the Cold War, of the European wars. But the end of everything was also a beginning. On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union died and something new was born, something utterly new—a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower unchecked by any rival and with decisive reach in every corner of the globe.