Rare is the moment when America may enjoy both peace and prosperity at home, and tranquility abroad.

For the sins that can consume us as individuals – faults such as greed, vanity, vengeance and the lust for power – are the same vices that can strike nations that seek the fruits of war without the blood of the battlefield.

Many of those countries will wage war – some of those countries are already at war – while others are stateless enemies of civilization: They are terrorists, most of them jihadists and Muslim extremists, for whom human rights, national sovereignty, language, law, literature and tradition, as well as the very rules of war, are a fiction; to be severed by the sword, a beheading from the map not unlike the crude murder of innocents in Syria, Gaza and Iraq, so civil society can vanish while the caliphate rises.

As citizens, and as voters with the chance to elect (in November 2016) the forty-fifth President of the United States, we have a duty to study that map – and the map of Europe and Asia, too – because we can neither isolate ourselves from these threats nor appease those responsible for them.

All these problems are serious; none of them is intractable. But each of these challenges will worsen, if our next commander-in-chief treats these incidents like pockets of regional unrest rather than a network of forces arrayed against our interests and the sustained independence of our allies.

I issue these words as an observer, not as a partisan Democrat or Republican blinded by ideology and poisoned by propaganda. I have no talking points, and I wear no button for or against a candidate.

Instead, I see fascism in Moscow, madness in Damascus, belligerence in Beijing and the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. And I hear nothing from the powers that be in Washington, DC.

Let us, therefore, look at the price of doing nothing.

Among the Poles, the Czechs and the Slovaks – among the survivors of the most vile forms of tyranny to befall mankind, the evils of Hitler and Stalin, among this trio of nations where the Nazis fed the crematoria with the corpses of children and the Soviets purged whole communities through show trials and mass shootings – these countries only know two decades of freedom . . . and they look to us with hope as they look eastward in fear.

They see our infamous “reset” with Russia, the withdrawal of a missile defense system, leaving these countries just as vulnerable, today, to the territorial ambitions of Vladimir Putin as they were, 70 years prior, to the terms of the Yalta Conference and their enslavement by the Red Army.

In the Middle East, the Israelis see Iran ascendant. They see the obvious: A country with rich reserves of oil and natural gas that, in defiance of common sense and dependent on the West’s willing suspension of disbelief, would rather build nuclear reactors to solve its nonexistent “energy crisis” than admit its plans to harvest plutonium and aim its missiles toward Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

In Asia, North Korea continues to starve its citizens, and imprison and torture dissidents, while the country expands its cache of nuclear weapons and tightens its ties with China.

Look, finally, at that nation of 1.3 billion people.

Look at her construction of an imperial navy, and her reclamation of the South China Sea by way of the creation of artificial islands; potential military bases and landing strips for fighter jets and bombers, a twenty-first century version of the Japanese Empire’s control of places like the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, and the Solomon Islands and New Guinea.

Across the globe, America is either silent or in retreat.

Our next president must lead.

Our next president can give us peace only if we give ourselves – and our friends – strength.

Now is a time for choosing.