Presidents give a lot of speeches, and most of them don’t mean very much. They “urge,” they “call on,” and they “challenge”—and, for the most part, their messages bounce off their intended audiences. Congress doesn’t fund the program or balance the budget; the American people carry on wasting energy and dropping out of school. But there are occasions when presidential words are not mere puffs of breath and waves of sound—and today was one of those occasions. Ever since Vladimir Putin launched his war on Ukraine, the question has been whether the United States would really act to defend its …read more
Source: The Atlantic
