"These formidable people think freedom is so valuable that it is worth dying for."

A Brit's admiration of America:

We are inclined, in our snobbish way, to dismiss the Americans as a new and vulgar people, whose civilisation has hardly risen above the level of cowboys and Indians. Yet the United States of America is actually the oldest republic in the world, with a constitution that is one of the noblest works of man. When one strips away the distracting symbols of modernity - motor cars, skyscrapers, space rockets, microchips, junk food - one finds an essentially 18th-century country. While Europe has engaged in the headlong and frankly rather immature pursuit of novelty - how many constitutions have the nations of Europe been through in this time? - the Americans have held to the ideals enunciated more than 200 years ago by their founding fathers.

The writer makes a connection between our old Constitution and our willingness to fight wars. Do you see that connection?

ADDED: There is the converse notion, expressed by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Missouri v. Holland:

[W]hen we are dealing with words that also are a constituent act, like the Constitution of the United States, we must realize that they have called into life a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. It was enough for them to realize or to hope that they had created an organism; it has taken a century and has cost their successors much sweat and blood to prove that they created a nation. The case before us must be considered in the light of out whole experience and not merely in that of what was said a hundred years ago.

So instead of seeing the Constitution as providing the foundation for the wars fought after it was ratified, one can also see these subsequent wars as giving meaning to the Constitution. These two views aren't contradictory, but mutually reinforcing.