American power confers benefits on most inhabitants of the planet, even on many who dislike it and some who actively oppose it, because the United States plays a major, constructive, and historically unprecedented role in the world.

While analogies are useful, however, they can also be misleading. They smuggle in assumptions that can be wrong.

Societies raise their grandest monuments to what their cultures value most highly. As the tallest buildings in a city noted for tall buildings, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were certainly monumental.

The United States doesn't do what it does in the world for altruistic reasons. Nobody set out to be the world's government.

After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.

The real threat to world stability is not too much American power. It is too little American power.

Let me remind you all that the first task of American foreign policy is to reduce threats to the United States.