Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently asked President Trump, “Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack?” It is a fair question — one that many Americans were asking following Trump’s performance at the NATO summit — and it deserved a better answer than the president’s musing on the “aggressive” nature of Montenegrins.

Instead, Trump should have recalled the words he spoke last year in Poland praising the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising, the 74th anniversary of which is being marked on Wednesday. In one of the most powerful speeches of his presidency, Trump recalled the terrible price that millions paid for the West’s failure to deter Nazi and Soviet aggression. “Under a double occupation, the Polish people endured evils beyond description,” Trump recalled: “the Katyn forest massacre, the occupations, the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the destruction of this beautiful capital city and the deaths of nearly 1 in 5 Polish people. A vibrant Jewish population — the largest in Europe — was reduced to almost nothing after the Nazis systematically murdered millions of Poland’s Jewish citizens.”