It is up to us in our time to choose, and choose wisely, between the hard but necessary task of preserving peace and freedom, and the temptation to ignore our duty and blindly hope for the best while the enemies of freedom grow stronger day by day.
During WW2, we became freedom’s defender; at the end of the Cold War, the world’s sole superpower. We did not seek the position. It is ours because of our ideals and our power, and the power of our ideals.
We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free.
The Germans had assembled a massive force of 60 divisions, more than 1.5M troops, for the invasion of Poland. The Poles had been able to hold out against Hitler’s onslaught for only a few weeks — and Poland’s army was significantly larger and better equipped than the US Army of 1939.
The president wasn’t convinced. After unsuccessful attempting to sway Roosevelt, Morgenthau told him, “Well, I still think you’re wrong.” “You’ve filed your protest,” Roosevelt said.
At that moment, when the Germans had 2M men marching through Western Europe, the US could dedicate only 15,000 men to combat. “If you don’t do something… and do it right away, really do it today, I don’t know what’s going to happen to this country.”
All this reads easily now, but at that time it was a supreme act of faith and leadership for the US to deprive themselves of this very considerable mass of arms for the sake of a country which many deemed already beaten.
But we must do everything for them that is humanly possible. The people of China, of the Philippines, of the Dutch East Indies will be watching us. They may excuse failure but they will not excuse abandonment. Their trust and friendship are important to us.
In the day after the invasion, Time reported that “the plan had grown to a complexity of detail incomprehensible to the civilian mind.” The Navy’s invasion plans were 800 pages long and a full set of naval orders weighed 300 pounds.
When there is hope, there is life.
“I enjoyed my new position as Vice President, but it took me a while to get used to the fact that I no longer had the voting privileges I had enjoyed for ten years as a senator.” Indeed, Truman had lost virtually all his power — he could no longer vote in the Senate, and he had no role in FDR’s White House.
The thing I saw beggar description… The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were overpowering… I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.
Some have said, for example, that the US should have alerted the Japanese that we had a devastating new weapon and then conducted a test for them to see. What if we had announced a test and then it had failed? The damage to Allied morale and the consequence improvement in Japanese morale would likely have extended the war.
It might cost half a million American lives to force the enemy’s surrender on his home grounds.
My chief purpose was to end the war in victory with the least possible cost in the lives of the men in the armies which I had helped raise. In the light of the alternatives which, on a fair estimate, were open to us, I believe that no man, in our position and subject to our responsibilities, holding in his hands a weapon of such possibilities for accomplishing this purpose and saving those lives, could have failed to use it and afterwards looked his countrymen in the face.
Truman closed his remarks by explaining the link between economic devastation and the rise of communism:
The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive. The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world — and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own Nation.
In every nation occupied by the Red Army at the end of the war, the Soviets carried out a four-part program to impose their rule. They created local secret police forces modeled after Stalin’s NKVD. They took over the radio stations. They carried out policies of ethnic cleansing. And they banned or took over the youth groups. Young people were a special target. “Even before they banned independent political parties for adults, and even before they outlawed church organizations and independent trade unions, they put young people’s organizations under the strictest possible observation and restraint.” The slogan of the German Young Pioneers explains the philosophy of their Soviet master: “Those who own the youth own the future.”
No people in history have preserved their freedom who thought that by not being strong enough to protect themselves they might prove inoffensive to their enemies.
We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Every president since has had to grapple with this fundamental issue. Without our armed forces, there could be no liberty. They are the ultimate guarantor and protector of our freedoms. But as our civilian leaders adopt policies to provide for our security, they must also keep in mind their sacred duty to safeguard the civil liberties of the American people.
Kennedy said just enough in that room to convince me of the following: Khrushchev had studied the events of the Bay of Pigs; he would have understood if Kennedy had left Castro alone or destroyed him; but when Kennedy was rash enough to strike at Cuba and not bold enough to finish the job, Khrushchev decided he was dealing with an inexperienced young leader who could be intimidated and blackmailed.
Speaking to the nation on October 22, 1962, Kennedy reminded his audience, “The 1930s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” Therefore, America had to secure “the withdrawal or elimination” of the Soviet missiles.
Perhaps the most significant obstacle to our success was that our policy was never aimed at defeating the enemy. SecDef McNamara captured the essence of US policy in Vietnam when he famously asked General Westmoreland in 1965, “How many additional American and Allied troops would be required to convince the enemy he would be unable to win?” The American strategy wasn’t to win. It was to convince the enemy he couldn’t.
It is not clear that Reagan’s approach would have been as effective in the 1970s as it was in the 1980s. Strategies (or tactical approaches, for that matter) have to be tied to concrete circumstances. The art of statesmanship is understanding the environment correctly and choosing the most effective ways and means to secure national objectives. It is also true that another of the hallmarks of detente, the Helsinki Accords, sowed the seeds of the destruction of the Soviet empire.
Former ambassador to the US Dobrynin described the reaction of Soviet Politburo members when they read the text. He said they had no objections to the first parts of the treaty, but when they read the article guaranteeing human rights, “their hair stood on end.”
As for the sections about human rights, Gromyko, declared, “We are the masters of this house, and each time, it will be up to us to decide how to act. Who can force us?”
“The great democracies are not free because we are strong and prosperous. I believe we are strong and prosperous because we are free.” It was an odd turn of phrase given that it was precisely America’s strength that guaranteed our freedom. As for the other “great democracies” to which Carter referred, in the aftermath of WW2, they, too, were free because America was strong.
A few months later, Reagan addressed those who argued that there was a moral equivalence between the US and the Soviet Union. The president reminded his audience that totalitarian leaders who “preached the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth… are the focus of evil in the modern world.” He warned against ignorance where nature of our enemy was concerned. “If history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It meant the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.”
Reagan explained why SDI was needed and provided a tutorial in defense budgeting. It shouldn’t be done, he explained, by “deciding to spend a certain number of dollars.” Rather, it had to be based on necessity, on a determination of what was needed to defend against all threats to the nation. Then, once a strategy to meet those threats was developed, a cost could be determined for carrying out the strategy.
- To deter or defeat any attack against the US and to honor our historic and treaty commitments
- To strengthen and extend mutual defense alliances
- To preclude any hostile power from dominating a region critical to our interests
- To preclude conflict by reducing sources of regional instability and to limit the violence should conflict occur
The claims made by Senator Obama the night he declared victory in the Democratic presidential primary were extraordinary. His election as president would not only end a war and ensure the nation’s security, it would affect the rise of the oceans and the health of the planet. The new nominee’s level of self-regard was apparent, as was his underlying belief that America had played a malign role in the world. If the election of a new American president could alleviate all these problems, then America must have been largely responsible for creating them.
President Obama was asked “whether you subscribe, as many of your predecessors have, to the school of American exceptionalism that sees America as uniquely qualified to lead the world, or do you have a slightly different philosophy?” Obama said, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greek believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
“Just as Iraq has pledged not to interfere in other nations,” he said, “other nations must not interfere in Iraq. Iraq’s sovereignty must be respected.”
President Obama still seemed not to understand that words divorced from action cannot defeat a determined enemy.
On Afghanistan, my poll numbers will be stronger if I take issue with the military over Afghanistan policy.
Iran had fought the Iraqi Army for a decade without being able to defeat it, and watching the Americans prevail in a matter of weeks likely focused the thinking of Iranian leaders.
America’s global financial power is such that any bank operating in international markets is likely to need access to the American financial system. Any transaction denominated in dollars, for example, must at some point pass through a dollar-clearing account, most often in New York. Banks that are cut off from America’s networks find it hard to survive.
One principle the president has lived up to is something he announced in his June 2009 Cairo speech. “No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons.”
Our successful defense of freedom was not due to the words we used, but to the strength we stood ready to use on behalf of the principles we stand ready to defend.
Dedicated to a vision of an idealized community of nations where none lead, none follow, and all progress is shared, President Obama apparently sees no danger in abandoning our leadership role in the world and diminishing our power. Convinced, it seems, of his own powers of persuasion, he sees little need for conventional or nuclear deterrence. Certain that “the arc of history bends toward justice,” he appears unconcerned with the need to ensure America can defeat her enemies.
Neither China nor Russia, it is safe to say, plans to use these anticipated gains in prominence to further the cause of global freedom, security, or peace. Nor do they seem to agree with President Obama’s assertion that the days when global power “was a zero-sum game” are over.
JFK knew this too. For our own sake, and for the sake of global peace and freedom, he believed America must always maintain “a national security position which is first, not ‘first, but’; not ‘first, if’; not ‘first, when’; but ‘first.’” America must, he warned, maintain a military power that is “second to none.” Everything else — everything — depends on this.
No foe in the field can wreak such havoc on our security as mindless sequestration is achieving today.