11 - The American Dream
Nothing could have prepared me for how much Kosovo loves America. American flags line the streets in every city, town, and village. Monuments to American Presidents, Congressmen, Secretaries, and more litter the parks and plazas. And, one of the most popular songs for a long time was titled ‘Thank you USA’.
I know it sounds cliché, but we don’t know how good we have it, nor does it seem that we can grasp that we are the only ones who can preserve, protect, and continue the American experiment. Moreso, many of us struggle to grasp what America means to the rest of the world. In the grand scheme of history, America is the exception, not the rule. The rule is survival. The exception is so much more.
The exception, however, is more than just running water and abundant food. The exception is also wide sidewalks, mass air conditioning built into just about every building, clean and reliable produce, waxed floors, replenished toilet paper (flashback to COVID), city planning, ubiquitous cell coverage, lighting fast cell coverage, credit card readers, good shoes, a choice in fashion wear, thoroughly cooked meat, meticulously cooked meat, an infinite variety of spices, dance floors, water with every meal, ice, and fundamental traffic laws.
Yet, none of these exceptions come close to our military capability and what that capability means to many other people around the globe. For all our faults, shortcomings, and ill-refined accusations of so-called ‘American Imperialism’, America remains, whether one likes it or not, the last best hope for liberty.
I went to dinner with one of the most important figures in the Kosovo government. As often happens beyond the borders of the Union, the topic of American involvement and global leadership quickly sprung up. I wondered where this conversation was going to lead. Was she going to accost American involvement? Was she going to support it? Was the other American present going to denounce our involvements as imperialistic, undiplomatic, and unhelpful? Sensing the tension, she told us a story about when she was a young woman during the war in Kosovo.
She said she grew up in the northern territories of Kosovo, dominated by the Serbian minorities. Fortunately for her, the war itself had been mostly uneventful, but she and her family were confined to their apartment for the vast majority of the fighting. They lived in a building populated by Serbs. To leave the building for anything more than food and basic supplies was suicide.
They had heard fighting in the distance and followed the war as closely as they could. So when the Rambouillet Agreement was signed, it was a great relief for her and their family, thinking the war was finally ending and they had avoided the worst.
Yet, only hours after news of the agreement had spread across Kosovo, a banging came to their door. Serbian paramilitary dragged her family out of their apartment and into the street. They were forced into lines with the other Albanians in the area and were marched to the local stadium.
“There were hundreds of paramilitary and about 30,000 Albanians they had rounded up,” she said. “We were trapped in that stadium for about 45 minutes, but it felt like hours to us. The Serbs would come and take women away; they would come back covered in blood, beaten, and raped. They would take men away, and those men would never return.”
“As I would learn later, the call for help went out from the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) to NATO forces.”
“The call went to the Italians. No response.”
“The call went to the French. No response.”
“The call went to the British. No response.”
“The call went to the Americans. They said only three words: ‘We are coming.’”
As quickly as the knock had come to her family’s door, a helicopter appeared in the sky. “I looked up at the helicopter and saw the words ‘U.S. Marines’ I will never forget that. They felt like angels from the sky. It hovered over us for a long time, watching over us while the Americans drove the paramilitary away. There were maybe 500 paramilitary, and, I think, only 12 Americans.” That was the last they saw of the Serbs.
Later, in reviewing the records of the event, she discovered that even though the Americans were the furthest away from her city, they flew from Italy to Kosovo in just 18 minutes to rescue the captured Albanians. The Americans scrambled everything, jetted across the Mediterranean, woefully outnumbered, engaging in a situation they knew nothing about, all because a people few Americans knew existed, the Albanians of Kosovo, needed help.
Stories like hers are common here; they’re told by parents and grandparents to their children about how the Americans came to save their lives, and their very existence is entirely owed to America.
Yet, what struck me the most from this story was the American’s response to the call for help. “We are coming.” I’ve heard similar war stories from veterans and internationals; they all tell the same tale.
During the war in Afghanistan and Operation Enduring Freedom, for instance, if you were an allied soldier in NATO and you needed to call for backup, you prayed the Americans answered the call. Other militaries, when responding to a call for help, haggle over logistics and intelligence, wasting precious time trying to understand the situation you’re in and what kind of capabilities the enemy possesses. If the Americans picked up the call, the answer was the same, “we are coming to get you.”
Responding Americans don’t ask any questions until they’re already close, but even then, the Americans usually already know the answer. American intelligence gathering and radar is nothing short of miraculous. To the foreign soldier, calling in the Americans for help is nothing short of a magic wand. In an instant, the Americans arrive, and the enemy vanishes in a fury of artillery fire and airstrikes.
As one French officer said about fighting alongside the Americans in Afghanistan, “If you have seen Rambo you have seen it all – always coming to the rescue when one of our teams gets in trouble, and always in the shortest delay. That is one of their tricks: they switch from T-shirt and sandals to combat ready in three minutes. Arriving in contact with the enemy, the way they fight is simple and disconcerting: they just charge! They disembark and assault in stride, they bomb first and ask questions later . . . . Honor, motherland – everything here reminds of that: the American flag floating in the wind above the outpost, just like the one on the post parcels. Even if recruits often originate from the hearth of American cities and gang territory, no one here has any other goal than to hold high and proud of the star spangled banner.”
In Kosovo, that memory of American troops arriving is permanently engrained in their national psyche. The Kosovars believe in America more than just about anything else.
I worry that this American legacy and the meaning of liberty and freedom that the star-spangled banner carries with it is waning in the average American. The fruit of our hegemony tempt us to forget the importance of our founding principles. Our Declaration of Independence, our Bill of Rights, and our thoroughly American Republic have brought us higher than any other nation in the history of mankind.
Our national discourse is riddled with comparisons to Europe; expats expound notions of America’s decline and turn critical focus to our many faults, often citing notions of international law like the Rome statute or customary international law under the Red Cross. Our politics are accused of being extreme or backwards, our courts are accused of issuing outdated or immoral rulings, our Congress is shamed for not ratifying international treaties or subverting human rights.
Yet just about everyone I’ve met wants what America has: a robust and outrageous First Amendment, a revived Second Amendment, a powerful Fourth Amendment, and an expansive Tenth Amendment, to name a few. In essence, the manifestation of negative rights (those limiting intervention on people’s lives) is what people desire most. The freedom to be.
The implication, however, is that for negative rights to be as powerful as they are in America, positive rights must be curtailed. For what is a positive right to anything, be that health care, education, or child care, if not someone else making a choice for you, and often at the expense of yours?
Yes, our healthcare and education are absurdly overpriced. Yet that does not stop Canadians from flying to the U.S. to avoid death-in-the-waiting-line; it does not stop young men and women from leaving their entire lives behind for a shot at an American university; it does not stop the endless lines of people wishing to invoke the American dream. The dream remains real, and our founding principles remain true.
I must confess that I’ve struggled greatly to exact the essence that is the American dream, and why that dream must be preserved and defended in our system of law. I know it began with the Founders and their conception of ‘natural rights’. Yet the communal and legal understanding of natural rights was upended by the rise of realism, relativism, and the modern age. Despite the efforts of our modern psychologists, philosophers, scientists, and anthropologists to understand mankind, we have not been able to re-anchor that fundamental essence of natural rights in any place, concept, or physical reality. Still, our Constitution, relative to the various governments of the world, has changed very little since 1789, and the principles divined by the Declaration of Independence have only become truer. In other words, if our Constitution was designed, mainly by Maddison, to be one that could withstand both the best and the worst behaviors of mankind, then the success of America and the American legal system, the unprecedented ascendency of the world’s quality of life due to the ‘Pax Americana’, the near-universal envy of the American dream, and the so far undying American spirit, shows that Maddison’s design continues to work better than any other alternative. Despite the fact that we no longer understand why our natural rights work, they continue to work in creating and maintaining “a government, by the people, for the people, of the people.”
To explore the why, let’s return to the preamble of the Declaration of Independence: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” The appeal to “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” establish the single anchoring point of the entire American experiment. This anchoring point being that rights are not created by an exercise of positive law by mankind itself, but rather that the rights of mankind are “endowed by their Creator,” preordained by virtue of mankind’s very existence. In other words, the most fundamental rights of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” can never be alienated from a human being. For such an alienation would be to disprove existence itself. Just as a tiger hunts, a dog has fur, and a rooster crows, so too do human beings think and therefore are. By our very nature, we exist and live (Life), we pursue the proliferation of both our lives and others (Liberty), and we attempt to make those lives worth living (Happiness).
Perhaps, then, the best way to conceptualize the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the best method of interpretation for squaring government action against the rights endowed to the people, is to think of our Constitution to be one that places the presumption of ‘free will’ above all other presumptions as to the fundamental nature of mankind. Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness encompass the only universally shared traits by all mankind. All people who have lived (thus fulfilling the natural right of life) have pursued the proliferation of their lives in some capacity (even if many have failed), and all have pursued a life that will make them feel fulfilled (happiness). The key principle in this conception of rights is that just because someone might lose their right to life or liberty by virtue of death or incapacity does not necessarily mean that such a right is no longer a right; thus, the natural rights of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can be deduced into a right to try.
The American Revolution is the best example of this. The Declaration of Independence was a shot in the dark and an appeal to the natural right to “dissolve the political bands” that have connected one people to another; in other words, to revolt. Such a right to revolution, however, does not imply a right to succeed in that revolution. The same is true for all the fundamental rights. One does not possess the right to succeed in life, to succeed in liberty, or to succeed in attaining happiness. As grim as that sounds, these principles' manifestation is, instead, incomparably uplifting. Instead, everyone has a right to exercise their life through actions of liberty in the pursuit of happiness in said life; maximal liberty allows each and every one of us to take charge of our own lives. Life is necessary for liberty; liberty is necessary for the pursuit of happiness. Thus, these are not three separate rights but a roadmap for life as a human being, encompassing a more fundamental, singular right: the exercise of free will.
Free will, thus, is the most fundamental of our natural rights. The American dream promises the maximal possible exercise of free will. It’s that promise of the opportunity to try in one’s own exercise of free will that the rest of the world craves to have. My time here has made me more proud to be an American than any experience before.
Note: Quotations about the conflict are paraphrased from the best of my memory and should not be considered direct quotes. I wrote this way for artistic flare and for a better read.