Vice President Kamala Harris delivered the commencement address at the United States Naval Academy on Friday. Few in the press paid much attention to what she said. If they had, they would have heard Harris give voice to a vision for America’s armed forces that is strikingly different from previous administrations, both Republican and Democratic.

Harris told the graduating class that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world, much as Pearl Harbor and the Civil Rights Act and the fall of the Berlin Wall changed the world in the past. Today’s situation presents new threats, Harris explained: “A deadly pandemic can spread throughout the globe in just a matter of months. A gang of hackers can disrupt the fuel supply of a whole seaboard. One country’s carbon emissions can threaten the sustainability of the whole earth.”