Walling Ourselves

In his masterful study of Sino-Western Relations, Dragon by the Tail, John Paton Davies describes the Great Wall, "stretching more than 1400 miles from the Jade Gate, on the frontier with Turkestan, to the sea: it protected the Chinese from unwelcome attention only when the Dynasty was bristling and alert. But when the human defenses were slack, it was no serious threat to invaders. It was really a monument in brick, stone, and mud to a usually static point of view."

Frederick Jackson Turner, in his seminal work on the importance of the frontier in shaping the American character, reminds us that the colonists in Massachusetts resisted a proposition of 1676 to build a defensive wall from the Charles River to Massachusetts Bay. "This project," wrote Turner, "of a kind of Roman Wall did not appeal to the frontiersmen of the time."

Walling away the outside world is un-American. Bin Laden's primary objective is to re-establish the Caliphate, walling the Islamic World off from the moral pollution of the West. Another way to obtain the objective would be for the United States to wall itself in.

Are we really going to wall ourselves in? Have we given over to a static point of view?