I came to RONA from Addis Ababa in the spring of 2037, eight weeks before the founding, to cover what I expected would be a fascinating failure. The editorial instinct was reasonable: new republics, in my experience as a correspondent, tend to fail. They fail because of corruption, or because of internal division, or because great powers with interests in the outcome apply sufficient pressure to break them, or because the institutional capacity required to govern a modern state cannot be conjured from nothing on a schedule determined by a constitutional convention in a Vermont city of 8,000 people.

Three years later, I am writing this column as a citizen of the Republic I came to cover, and trying to account honestly for what I got wrong and what, it turns out, I got right.

What I got wrong: I underestimated the institutional depth of Vermont specifically. The state's tradition of direct democratic participation — town meetings, citizen assemblies, extraordinarily high rates of civic engagement — provided a foundation for republican governance that most new nations have to build from scratch over decades. RONA didn't have to build it. It inherited it, along with a civil service culture of genuine competence, a university system that could supply trained personnel, and a business environment that understood regulatory frameworks. The founding generation didn't create RONAn civil society. They formalized what was already there.

What I got right: the international environment is harder than the optimists predicted. The United States has not accepted RONA's existence, and it will not accept it for as long as the current political configuration in Washington holds. This means that RONA's security costs — financial, institutional, diplomatic — are higher than they would be in a world where Washington behaved the way democratic theory suggests a great power should behave. The drone incident last week is not an anomaly. It is the normal operating environment, and every RONAn institution has to be built to function in it.

What I am genuinely uncertain about, and will be uncertain about for another decade at least: whether the things that make RONA exceptional — its culture of civic participation, its commitment to institutional transparency, its insistence on treating governance as a serious craft rather than a political performance — are durable features of the Republic or artifacts of its exceptional founding moment. Founding generations are not representative of the generations that follow. The people who built RONA in 2036 and 2037 were, by selection, unusually committed, unusually capable, and unusually willing to sacrifice comfort for principle. The people being naturalized now — 47,000 of them in the first quarter of this year alone — are coming for reasons that are entirely legitimate but are not the reasons the founders came. Whether the institutional culture that made RONA worth coming to can absorb that growth without being diluted is the most important question the Republic faces, and it is one that no one can answer yet with any confidence.

I remain, three years in, more hopeful than I expected to be. But hope, in my experience, is most useful when it is accompanied by clear eyes about the distance between what is and what we want it to be. RONA is doing something genuinely remarkable. The first three years have proven that. The next ten will prove whether it lasts.