Watching the small parade of elderly men and women—many in wheelchairs, some wearing military insignia—receive the gratitude of the President of the United States and the leaders of the Western world on the 80th anniversary of D-Day was profoundly moving. So, too, were the vistas of row upon row of white marble grave markers of those who gave their lives on June 6, 1944 and in the days and weeks and months that followed.

“You saved the world,” said Joe Biden to one of the veterans of the battle. And we know there was no hyperbole in the comment. You could hear in Biden’s emotional and inspiring remarks during the commemoration ceremonies that he appreciated and understood in a visceral way what happened on those beaches so long ago.

Infused in the remarks however, there was a sense that while the D-Day landings marked a turning point and the beginning of the end of World War II, that even that great victory had not put an end to the kind of threats the world faced from the Nazis and fascists of the middle of the last century.

You could hear it in the words of President Biden when he said, “To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators is simply unthinkable! Were we to do that, it means we’d be forgetting what happened here on these hallowed beaches.”

Surveying the last few surviving heroes of that long ago war, he made it clear that we had an obligation to them—and to those who had fallen beside them—to continue to fight threats against democracy, against our values, against our allies as they had once done.

He was specific about the nature of one of those threats, another war raging in Europe as the result of the aggression of a ruthless dictator. He said that to be “worthy” of the sacrifices made on D-Day and throughout the Second World War, we must now fight against tyranny once again, this time in........

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