Abstract
On the 16th January 1984 Ronald Reagan declared in his Address to the Nation and Other Countries on United States-Soviet Relations that "Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance, it must be fought for, and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people." This can be read as a reference to the founding circumstances of the United States of America: the Founding Fathers didn't fight (diplomatically and military) to the bitter end in order to get freedom, but to keep and concretize a strong feeling of liberty they had already experienced. According to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (who both belonged to the commission in charge of the drafting of a declaration of independence), the very act of leaving England had been a decisive step towards freedom. Should we therefore conclude that the Declaration of Independence was only part of a war arsenal?
