Celebrating American Greatness

America’s 250th is a great moment to stop and review some of our greatest hits.

John B. Carpenter | June 30, 2026

I was eleven at the bicentennial and have been a patriot ever since. Seven years living overseas only strengthened my patriotism. I first lived in Singapore when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq swallowed Kuwait, and a Singaporean asked me, an American, what we were going to do about it. If I had been French or Australian, I would not have gotten such a question. I met U.S. Marines in Singapore on their way to Iraq. When I lived in Ethiopia, I met U.S. soldiers doing “demining”—helping remove landmines. There were no Russian or Chinese troops doing that work. When an ingrate Filipino letter-writer to Singapore’s newspaper complained about American intervention in Asia, I wrote a letter to the editor reminding readers that the U.S. sacrificed our blood to make good on MacArthur’s promise to return and free them from Japanese occupation. When China was rattling its sabers, the U.S. sailed its aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, between China and its intended victim. A judge in Singapore exclaimed to me, “Thank God for the Nimitz!” No other nation could do that.

Now, many pseudo-sophisticated people look down on celebrating America’s role in the world. Many on the ideological Left treat American history chiefly as a source of shame, as though our country’s story were mainly one of oppression, hypocrisy, and exploitation. That is part of the Left’s larger project: to instill in us a revulsion at our history so we will be willing to embrace a revolution. As George........

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