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America was born in direct opposition to “power by decree,” under which an unelected elite exercised unaccountable control over the people. America was an idea formed in the crucible of a monarchy’s arrogating the sovereignty of its citizens, the colonists of British North America. The American Revolution was defined by the idea that it wasn’t the happenstance of being born into the correct family or class which secured your membership in a governing elite. Government was recognized by the Founding Fathers as an expression of the will of the people, not the caprice of an unrepresentative elite.

Why are we still fighting this war more than a decade later, and why are we losing? We defeated the Nazis in less than five years, yet the global war on terror is now in its fifteenth year. How can America, a country of unprecedented military power, not yet have vanquished this new deadly religious totalitarianism? The answer to this burning question has many elements, the most obvious one being that we have applied the wrong strategy since 9/11. But the most important reasons go beyond not having the right plan of action and have instead to do with politics and ideology.

And the ideology that drove this slave state would simply not allow it to coexist with America and the other Western democracies. Kennan’s analysis became the basis not only for America’s later “containment” policy—the plan to protect the West from the threat of communism that President Truman eventually announced to a joint session of Congress in 1947—but also for National Security Council Report NSC-68, the top-secret White House plan to defeat Soviet Russia, a plan that would result, forty years later, in the fall of the Berlin Wall and victory in the Cold War.