§ “..., with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

§ ≡ A section of Preserve, Protect, and Defend: Faithfully Executing the Office of the President
{Section 3.1 « Section 3.2 » Section 4.1}

{link » Ending Tyranny}

“But only tyrants are apt to defend tyranny. A focus on ending it could move us beyond distracting debates over where democracy can be transplanted and how long this might take, allowing concentration instead upon the single greatest prerequisite for democracy, which, as Franklin D. Roosevelt once reminded us, is ‘freedom from fear’. It is from this that all the other freedoms flow.”

“This, then, should be our standard: to respect the ways in which people elsewhere define their fears, not to impose our own fears upon them. That may mean working with authoritarian regimes when there is more to fear than their authoritarianism—when the trajectory is toward making democracy possible, even if it’s still a long way off. But it also requires resisting regimes—and terrorist movements—whose course lies in the opposite direction: toward making themselves the source of all fears, rather than the safeguard against them. Tyranny is being ‘enslaved to fear’, and it will be quite enough, for the next few decades at least, to secure emancipation.”

—John Lewis Gaddis, Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University.

Professor Gaddis' essay analyses the fundamentals of evaluating the relative significance of American Presidents. Not only the usual suspects are presented (Jefferson, Monroe, Lincoln, FDR, Truman, et al.), but also George W. Bush! The latter has been much maligned by his contemporaries (as was Lincoln himself). But, as I have stated on occasion in this blog [e.g., search blog for George Bush], the jury of historians will be out for some time to come before their verdict is rendered.

The excerpts quoted above only give a flavor of the the author's scholarly views. I recommend the essay to the interested reader.