Lessons from history at a Pacific Ocean outpost

“GLOBALIST” is a fashionable term of abuse in American politics just now. The world is full of haters, cheats and ingrates, powerful voices declare. Walls are beautiful. Openness is for fools.

To turn inwards, thanking providence for a homeland shielded by two oceans, is a tradition with deep roots. But it is not the only American way. To land at the United States Air Force airfield on Wake Island, a green and turquoise speck of coral in the dark vastness of the Pacific, is to be reminded that America has been a global, maritime power for more than a century. Openness is an American tradition too, of a swaggering, risk-taking, profit-mixed-with-patriotism kind.

Your blogger landed on Wake Island aboard a blue and white air force jet carrying the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Joseph Dunford. This is American territory, claimed by a naval gunboat in 1899 and maintained today as an aircraft refuelling stop and test site for missile defence systems. It has fewer than 100 residents, all of them either military...Continue reading

Source: United States http://ift.tt/2sb21kg

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