The giant dominoes were to tumble last night, an ironic gesture that maybe the domino theory wasn’t far-fetched after all.

For years, American foreign policy was guided by the domino theory — stop Communism at one point to keep it from spilling over into another country and starting a chain reaction of falling dominoes. In Berlin, millions celebrated the tumbling large dominoes, marking 20 years since the

Wall that divided a city and stood as a divider between hundreds of millions finally toppled.

It was a victory for all, Americans and Europeans alike. And yet, the man who called himself a citizen of the world a year ago in Germany was not going to be there for it.

President Obama dispatched his secretary of state to help commemorate the triumph of self-determination and freedom over totalitarianism 20 years ago.

The Wall — which came down before any of this year’s high school seniors were born — stood as more than a restraint on those who were trapped on the east side. With guard towers and barbed wire across the fence that separated West from East Germany, the Wall and its larger, longer dividing line reflected the grip the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact nations had on the people and ideals.

Hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and women, along with their NATO brethren, stood watch across the German frontier, waiting for the East German tanks to come pouring through the Fulda Gap. But they never came. What did come rolling through the border were the East German clunker cars, the two-stroke Trabants, packed with Germans reveling in their new-found freedom.

I remember what it was like as President Reagan moved to base Pershing II missiles in Germany. The fathers of many of my friends were either commanders or top NCOs at Fort Stewart and the worry was that the division would be sent to Germany as fast as possible to blunt a possible Soviet retaliation.

From Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement in the Gdansk shipyards to Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia to Pope John Paul II in The Vatican, Ronald Reagan in the White House, Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street and Mikhail Gorbachev at The Kremlin, the forces that held the Wall in place began to crumble. And 20 years ago, jubilant Germans, some of whom had never known their land without the Wall cutting its greatest city in two, danced atop it as hammers and chisels kept cracking away at the concrete beneath them.

And yet, our current president, whose own existence on this earth began after the Iron Curtain descended from Stettin to Trieste, will not be joining France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, Great Britain’s Gordon Brown and Germany’s Angela Merkel in a celebration of freedom over tyranny, of man’s individual self-worth over the hegemony of the state.

Where John F. Kennedy proclaimed that he was a Berliner, too, where Reagan implored Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” President Obama was not to be found.

Tomorrow is Veterans Day. We are supposed to — and rightly so — offer our deepest respect for the men and women who have served in the ice and cold of Valley Forge and the Chosin Reservoir and in the heat of North Africa and Peleliu and the Mekong Delta and today in Iraq and Afghanistan, including many current Effingham County residents. Their vigilance and steadfastness in the defense of freedom and democracy is one reason we still have both of those today — and why billions of others do, too.

Among those who have served are those who stood as sentinels during a Cold War and showed the strength of the immovable object that is democracy and freedom and ultimately led to the freedom of millions previously under the thumb of Soviet domination.

By dint of office, President Obama will be at Veterans Day events tomorrow, the day a presidential trip to Asia also is scheduled to commence. He is reportedly visiting Fort Hood today to meet with soldiers and families after last week’s shooting that killed more than a dozen soldiers and it is commendable that he is doing so. But he’s not canceling a pre-scheduled trip to Berlin to do it.  

He had long ago informed German leader Angela Merkel that he was too busy.

He also is weighing whether to send more Americans into the treacherous regions of Afghanistan to finally stamp out the Taliban. It is regretful he could not have been in Berlin last night to mark a victory won,  a triumph of freedom and self-determination, without a shot fired between armed forces.