The Test of All Time
The sun had set, and the darkness of night quickly descended over Warsaw, Poland, as the president of the United States walked slowly but steadily down a lighted pathway of the red carpet at the Royal Castle toward a platform and podium bearing the presidential seal. The American and Polish national flags hung side-by-side on the castle walls, illuminated by lights and a feeling of unity and common purpose that seemed to matter more than ever.
It was Saturday, March 26, 2022. One month earlier, on Thursday, February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the world. “It is not our plan to occupy Ukrainian territory,” the Russian leader said, seated inside the ornate walls of the Kremlin. “We do not intend to impose anything on anyone by force.”
Moments later, the Russian military invaded Ukraine by land, sea, and air. Explosions rang out across the country. Even the capital of Kyiv faced attacks. Air raid sirens echoed throughout empty city streets. By dawn, Ukraine was ground zero for the deadliest—and boldest—military aggression since Adolf Hitler ordered German forces into Poland in 1939.
Joe Biden began his speech by referencing Pope John Paul II, who, after his election in October 1978, told the throngs gathered in St. Peter’s Square of Christ’s “message of hope, salvation, and total liberation” for all in the world.
On this day, however, the president did not remind, or need to remind, the world of Jesus. Instead, he offered the world a simple choice, one that was no less spiritual than the utterances of Pope John Paul II. It was quintessentially American: a choice between democracy or autocracy, freedom or subjugation.
The struggle of the Cold War was central to the president’s message. “Nothing about that battle for freedom was simple or easy. It was a long, painful slog fought over not days and months, but years and decades,” Biden said. “But we emerged anew in the great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”
Biden mentioned Madeleine Albright, who, at age eleven, was forced to flee Czechoslovakia for America following the Communist coup d’etat in 1948 and who, in 1997, became the first woman Secretary of State in U.S. history, under President Bill Clinton. “We must learn from history, not repeat it,” Albright had said at the Harry Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, on March 12, 1999, a day that saw the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “And we must never forget that the destinies of Europe and North America are inseparable.”
“She fought her whole life for essential democratic principles,” Biden said, highlighting the fact that Albright had passed away just three days earlier. “And now, in the perennial struggle for democracy and freedom, Ukraine and its people are on the frontlines fighting to save their nation.”
The president added: “Russia has strangled democracy—has sought to do so elsewhere, not only in its homeland. Under false claims of ethnic solidarity, it has [invaded] neighboring nations.” Biden called on the world to “put the strength of democracies into action to thwart the designs of autocracy.” For, he added, “the test of this moment is the test of all time.”
Central to Putin’s aggressive policy was the claim that NATO seeks to destroy Russia, an assertion first issued by the defense ministers of the Soviet Republics before the North Atlantic Treaty was released or signed in 1949—the treaty, they charged, represented an Anglo-American conspiracy for world domination. The West viewed Soviet criticism as the desperate gasps of a dying totalitarian regime.
At a time when the ghosts of old schools of thought haunted the halls of Congress, Biden reaffirmed America’s commitment to the liberal international order of NATO—founded, as Truman had preached in 1949, as “an association of nations devoted to the great principles of human freedom and justice.”
America, Biden pledged, would marshal moral forces and aid a people in defense of their natural rights and national sovereignty. “It will not be easy,” he said. “There will be costs. But it’s a price we have to pay. Because the darkness that drives autocracy is ultimately no match for the flame of liberty that lights the souls of free people everywhere.”
If one looked closely enough, there was a hint of Frederick Douglass in Biden’s remarks. “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” he said in 1857. “It never did and it never will.”
Ultimately, Biden’s speech was routine—another in a long line of presidents who saw America as more than a sideline player. “There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace,” Woodrow Wilson said in 1919. “We have accepted that truth and we are going to be led by it, and it is going to lead us, and, through us the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before.”
“We must be the great arsenal of democracy,” Franklin Roosevelt had said in December 1940—a policy that is no less a part of the American creed than the words of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.