During the America250 celebration, the sitting President of the United States declared in his State of the Union Address that "America is back." Without further elaboration, we are compelled to return in our minds to those who promulgated the Declaration of Independence.
They were not boasting.
They were not proclaiming superiority.
They came before the "candid world" asking to be received as an equal among the community of nations — asserting their right to a separate and equal station among the powers of the earth.
The Declaration was a petition for recognition, not a victory speech.
Donald Trump's boast, therefore, unintentionally reminds us of a deeper truth: all nations are equal. Every Independence celebration since 1776 has served as a ritual reaffirmation of that principle. The 250th celebration is only the latest reminder.
Yet reminders only matter if they are heeded.
The Missed Opportunity of Equals
In their response to Proclamation 10998, Dominica and Antigua & Barbuda missed a rare opportunity to remind the United States of its own founding logic.
These nations are not merely neighboring states. They are constitutional mirrors of America itself — sovereignties that transferred authority from monarch to people. Their constitutions, like America's, vest final power not in a crown but in the citizenry. They achieved through constitutional process precisely what America claimed in 1776: the right to govern themselves as equals.
When the United States arbitrarily included them in travel restrictions nominally directed at declared enemies, the constitutional parallel was exact: a more powerful nation imposing its will without consultation, treating sovereign equals as subordinate territories.
The appropriate response was not diplomatic negotiation alone.
It was constitutional reminder.
What the Reminder Might Have Said
A joint statement from Dominica and Antigua & Barbuda to the United States government, delivered through formal diplomatic channels and released publicly, could have invoked the language America itself established:
"We recognize that the United States faces challenges in its relations with neighboring states. But we note that Presidential Proclamation 10998 includes our nations in measures we did not provoke and cannot remedy.
This is the posture the American colonies rejected in 1776.
When you declared independence, you did not claim exemption from international norms. You claimed inclusion in them — on equal terms. You asked the world to recognize that sovereignty resides in peoples, not in the powerful.
We hold that same sovereignty. Our peoples, like yours, are the source of governmental authority. We stand equal in law, even when unequal in power.
The principle you invoked in 1776 binds the powerful no less than the powerless."
Such language would not be protest. It would be education — reminding the United States that its own constitutional logic prohibits hierarchical sovereignty.
The Silence That Speaks
Instead, silence prevailed.
Diplomatic channels addressed the practical inconvenience. No voice invoked the constitutional principle.
This matters because smaller nations possess a moral authority the powerful lack: they can speak from the position America once occupied. They can remind the United States that its founding claim was not "we are strong enough to be free" but "all nations are equal under natural law."
By remaining silent on the principle while negotiating the practice, Dominica and Antigua & Barbuda allowed the language of hierarchy to prevail over the language of equality.
America250 as Constitutional Window
The founders understood that independence did not confer superiority. It conferred equality — and responsibility.
When the colonies appealed to the world, they were not seeking permission to dominate others. They were seeking recognition that no nation had the right to dominate them.
If America now behaves as the power it once resisted, the lesson of 1776 has been reversed.
America250 therefore functions less as a celebration and more as a constitutional window — a rare moment when the nation's attention turns explicitly toward its founding principles. Presidential Proclamation 10998, issued during this commemorative period, reveals the distance between America's founding plea for equality and its contemporary exercise of power.
The Unanswered Question
Yet the tragic dimension remains unspoken: Would America hear such a reminder?
Nations with the clearest constitutional standing to invoke 1776's logic — those who share America's transformation from monarchical to popular sovereignty — may be precisely the nations America is least prepared to hear.
This does not excuse the silence. It explains why the silence is costly.
The Declaration of Independence established a principle that binds the strong no less than the weak. When smaller nations fail to invoke that principle, they do not merely forfeit leverage in a single diplomatic dispute.
They allow the memory of equality to fade — not just in Washington, but everywhere sovereign peoples still seek recognition as equals rather than submission as subordinates.
The 250th anniversary will pass. The proclamation will be forgotten. Another routine exercise of American power will recede into history.
Unless someone remembers to speak the language of 1776.
That language remains available. It has always been available.
The question is whether anyone will use it.
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