To the men and women of the greatest armed forces in the world, to stand before you on Armed Forces Day is the greatest privilege of my position, and one of the greatest honors that anyone can ever hope to hold. I'd like to read a passage describing a certain pivot point in history. It is a solemn moment for American democracy. The United States stands at the pinnacle of world power. As you look around you must feel a sense of duty done, but with this primacy and power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future.
Opportunity is here now, clear and shining.
Those words could well have come from any one of this morning's newspapers, but these words actually were spoken by Winston Churchill in his legendary Iron Curtain speech back in 1946. But the picture that Churchill painted then is even more true today because American stands at another solemn moment, another pivot point in history. Perhaps more than any other nation at any other time, we stand at the pinnacle of world power. The concrete and razor wire that was the Berlin Wall are but scattered memories in museums. The ideology that Communism claimed lies in the dustbin of history.