To the Journal editor:

As a kid, I loved Scouts. I proudly wore the khaki uniform and carried the American flag at community events.

I was proud that my father fought for freedom in World War II against the imperial Japanese and that my uncle fought for democracy in Europe against Hitler.

In high school, I had the life-changing experience of being an exchange student and living with a family in Bangkok, Thailand. I was proud that our country supported free countries like Thailand. I saw first-hand the positive results of American exceptionalism around the world.

Let’s not forget that representative democracy is fragile. It’s an experiment. And ours has only been around for 240 years. Ben Franklin once famously said in 1787, “We’re forming a republic…if you can keep it.” Before that, for thousands of years, democracy was largely unheard of. Instead, people were governed by various one-man totalitarian regimes: monarch, czar, dictator, chairman, general, shah or emperor.

America chose a different path. Today only 24 nations are classified as full democracies. (EIU 2023 democracy report). And in the past 100 years of world wars, when other democracies were attacked by military dictatorships, America stood up to protect the threatened democracies — at the cost of our blood. That is American exceptionalism. But our exceptionalism is now at risk.

Recently, Elon Musk spoke at a neo-Nazi AfD party rally in Germany. And our vice president actually met with the AfD leader. What part of neo-Nazi do they not understand? The recent verbal attacks by our president against Ukraine, a democratic county, and its President Zelenskyy and his coziness with Putin have been embarrassing and offensive.

Our president falsely said that Ukraine “started the war” and that democratically elected Zelenskyy is a “dictator.” My wife, who grew up in Ukraine knows first-hand who Zelenskyy is and he is not a dictator.

And at the United Nations on the 3rd anniversary of Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, our American president did the unimaginable. He made America, the land of the free, join the world’s most repressive anti-democratic regimes: Iran, North Korea, China, Venezuela and Cuba in backing Putin’s white-washed UN resolution against Ukraine’s resolution that condemned Russia’s invasion.

Ukraine’s resolution — backed by our democratic allies in Europe — passed overwhelmingly even without our support. How is it possible that the beacon of democracy is siding with the most repressive totalitarian regimes in the world?

I wonder what Ben Franklin, Washington and Jefferson would think about this? Can we keep our republic? If my scoutmaster, my father and my uncle were here now, what would they think? They taught me patriotism and fought for America against totalitarianism.

And what about the people of Ukraine as they fight for their very existence. Haven’t they suffered enough? Only in past 20 years did a true multi-party democracy take root in the soil of Ukraine, next to its much larger one-man rule repressive neighbor who felt threatened by Ukraine’s success.

Remember the words of folk singer Joni Mitchell: “That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”