It is time to attempt that hardest of things—to see ourselves for who we are, to see what it is we are doing and what is being done to us.
Two things prompt the thought. We have the latest news on Washington’s confrontation with Russia, and we have a newly precipitous decline in the national conversation on this crisis. In my estimation, we reach dangerous new lows in both respects.
…Two, there can be no Cold War II because the Cold War as we knew it never ended.
Patrick Smith is the author of “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century.” He was the International Herald Tribune’s bureau chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992.
