For the last year and a half, Americans have been slammed with politics to the point that it has made vast numbers of people nearly crazy.

Following the news, the blow-by-blow is not easy, and it is worse seeing coalitions form, collapse, reconstitute, form again, and be witness nonstop to what seem to be subversions, betrayals, duplicates, and disappointments.

We follow the polls, donate to candidates, listen to podcasts, cheer our friends and boo the bad guys, all in this exciting spectator sport. I’m told it’s not really this way in Europe. Americans have a distinct sense of investment in the way our public life operates and we believe we can and should do something about it.

Do we really have a clear conception of the larger forces at work? I sense that what is lacking is a clear-headed theory about what is actually going on, that is the thematics of the larger struggle going on here.

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In foreign policy, timing, leverage, and national interest must guide the strategy of engagement with rising powers.

President Richard Nixon grasped this principle as well as any Chief Executive during his groundbreaking 1972 opening to China.

President Bill Clinton, however, failed his test when he championed China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) and Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) in 2000.

President Donald Trump’s recent state visit to Beijing revives the Nixonian tradition of pragmatic, interest-driven diplomacy with a foreign adversary—engaging from strength while delivering concrete American wins—while actively correcting the structural imbalances and strategic vulnerabilities created by the failures of past policies.

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Recently, at the US-China summit in Beijing, Premier Xi [Jinping] mentioned that he hoped that both parties, the United States and China, could avoid the Thucydides Trap.

What did that mean?

It refers to a book and an article by the well-known political scientist Graham Allison.

In it, he presented a paradigm of international relations. Briefly, it was this: If you have an established power, like ancient Sparta, and it gets worried that there is an ascending power, a rising new neighborhood bully or something, the older power, the established power, will attack it, and there will be a war.

He gave some examples from history. He called it the Thucydides Trap because the historian Thucydides, who was born about 460 BC and died somewhere around 400 or 395 BC, wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War.

At two key places in his first book or chapter, he said that there were various reasons to go to war, but probably the most likely, in his opinion—and he said this in two different places—was that Sparta was afraid of the dominance that was growing throughout the Greek world, and so it staged a preventive war by invading Attica, the country around Athens, in 431.

He used this term that he created called a Thucydides Trap, and then he applied it to some incidents in history. Most importantly, Xi was referencing [Allison’s] book because in the book it said that the United States might do something rash or might prevent.

With all due respect to Graham Allison, who is a very distinguished scholar, this is false.

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A few days ago, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation bestowed one of its storied Bradley Prizes on James Hankins, a sometime professor of history at Harvard University, now at the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, and co-author of The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition.

(Actually, Hankins is the sole author of Volume I of The Golden Thread, which tells the story of the Western tradition from the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC through the Renaissance.

Volume II, which picks up the story with the Reformation, is by the historian Allen Guelzo.)

This is the moment when I note for the record that, being the publisher of these magnificent books at Encounter Books, I have what is called in the trade an “interest.” But don’t take my word for the adjective “magnificent.”

The reception of these books has been nothing short of ecstatic. Perhaps the most searching review is by Spencer Klavan and appears in the current number of The Claremont Review of Books.

Listening to Jim Hankins’s remarks at the Bradley event prompts me to reprise a few thoughts about what we are up to with The Golden Thread.

The phrase names not only these two books but also a larger project that Encounter is undertaking with several partners to change the conversation about—well, I was going to say “about education.”

But really, it is about that vibrant thing that the soporific word “education” designates, namely, opening the treasure chest of the past in order to confront and ultimately to emulate greatness.

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We may have witnessed the most MS NOW moment of all time.

On Monday, MS NOW host Katy Tur moderated a panel in which she discussed recent, supposedly controversial comments by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La.

“What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government, they come from you, our Creator and heavenly father. Is this him putting God over the Declaration of Independence?” she asked incredulously.

I’m just going to pause here and quote from this obscure line in the Declaration of Independence. And by obscure, I mean one of the most famous lines in the English language.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal… ” maybe Tur never got past that part, “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

So, the concept that God is “above” the Declaration of Independence is… in the Declaration of Independence. God’s law supersedes man’s law. Governments that deprive citizens of rights endowed by their creator without due process are bad governments and are possibly illegitimate. That’s the whole point of the thing, right?

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