Constitution Day, 28 June 2019

Anniversaries of documents are odd things to mark. A treaty or a charter has no birthday in the way a person does; what is being remembered is a decision, taken in a room, by people who could have decided otherwise.

That is the part worth noting. It was not inevitable. Someone drafted, argued, conceded and voted, and the result is the framework everything else here operates inside.

My congratulations to Ukraine on the day, with the good wishes of a guest who has benefited from that framework without having helped to build it.