Regarding your editorial "Rubio Gets to the Heart of the Matter" (Oct. 8.): The secretary of state is correct that the Western world must recover confidence in its history and heritage. That inheritance wasn't merely a retrospective justification for the postwar liberal order; it was one of the reasons its architects built that order in the first place. Western civilization -- built on Greece and Rome, Christendom, the Renaissance and Reformation, the Enlightenment and the English and American traditions of liberty and representative government -- provides a common intellectual and moral inheritance for the nations that built the Atlantic alliance.
In 1949 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted unanimously to report the North Atlantic Treaty to the full Senate. Its report concluded: "In tendering this unanimous report on the North Atlantic Treaty, we do so in furtherance of our Nation's most precious heritage -- shared in common with the other signatories -- continuing faith in our dependence upon Almighty God and His guidance in the affairs of men and nations."
That isn't antiquated rhetoric; it is an explanation of why these nations belong together. The postwar order is more than an arrangement of strategic interests; it is a political expression of a shared way of life and conception of the world. Recovering confidence in the West should mean reaffirming these principle that promote human flourishing.
Alexander Gellos
New York
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