Eighty-four years have passed since the morning the world changed in a matter of minutes. On Dec. 7, 1941, as Americans awoke to an ordinary Sunday, Japanese aircraft descended on Pearl Harbor with a ferocity that stunned a nation that believed oceans still offered protection. By the time the attack ended, 2,403 Americans were dead and the United States had been forced into a global conflict it had hoped to avoid.

Each anniversary prompts us to remember the fallen. But at 84 years, Pearl Harbor is also becoming something else — a test of whether we remain capable of learning from the very shocks that shaped the modern world.

The men and women who survived that day, and the millions who fought in the years that followed, understood something we still struggle to confront: threats ignored

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