A set of official renderings released this Friday by the Commission of Fine Arts depicts a 250-foot stone arch towering over the National Mall. The monument, a personal project of the President, bears a striking resemblance to the Arc de Triomphe but stands nearly 100 feet taller, obstructing the traditional sightline between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. While the return to neoclassical beauty is a welcome departure from the glass and steel of modernism, we must ask what this monument is intended to celebrate.

Architecture is the moat and the gate that guards our civilization, as Charles Krauthammer once noted. But a triumphal arch is a hollow shell if the people it represents are suffering. As the government prepares to spend hundreds of millions on this 'Victory Arch' and a new neoclassical ballroom, the American agricultural baseline is facing a literal liquidation. In the Colorado River basin, the mountain snowpack has hit a record low of 22 percent, threatening the very survival of the family farm.

We must not become a nation that builds gilded monuments to its own ego while the biological hearth decays. True monumentalism grows out of a healthy, rooted culture that honors its land and its workers. If we build this arch while the domestic food supply fails and our allies are abandoned in a strategy of 'Imperial Triage,' it will stand not as a tribute to victory, but as a headstone for a lost era of responsibility. Let us build beautifully, yes, but let us first ensure that we have a nation worthy of the stone we carve.