A Nation Like No Other (23 page)

 

Without safety, freedom itself is threatened.

If the people's safety cannot be assured, the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless, which is why the first responsibility of government is to defend the nation. In the preamble to the Constitution, providing “for the common defense” is identified as a primary reason for forming the new government.

Our Founding Fathers knew it would require extraordinary courage and material provision to defend their new nation in a dangerous world. In fact, the American experiment could have perished in its infancy in the frigid winter of 1777–78 had it not been for the bravery, leadership, and vision of a few men at Valley Forge who kept the dream of independence alive.

That nation almost collapsed nearly ninety years later during the excruciating four-year Civil War. And in the most heated moments of the Cold War, we were one miscalculation away from a nuclear conflict that could have destroyed the country as we know it.

But we have persevered.

Even in our darkest hours, America's leaders and the American people have believed that our way of life is worth defending—no matter
how big the sacrifice. From Valley Forge and Yorktown, to Omaha beach and the black volcanic sands of Iwo Jima, and at this very moment the distant front lines of Afghanistan, the price has been steep and painful, but necessary in a fallen world where tyranny endures, waiting for those who falter and lose faith in themselves and in their destiny. Again and again in American history, even during the most trying of times, ordinary Americans have risen up to defend a simple idea: that God has endowed every man and woman with the capacity to be free.

No other nation has done that. No other nation has been so inextricably tied with the fate of freedom throughout the world. America is indeed the last best hope for mankind.

The world is no less dangerous today than it was in our Founders' time. Facing a variety of contemporary threats, America must reverse its current trajectory of appeasement, self-abasement, and submissiveness. As our Founders understood, the best way to stay safe is by proudly professing our values and defending them with unwavering strength and conviction.

The courage to be free is only sustained by the moral capacity to distinguish between good and evil. If evil cannot be called by name, we will not be able to deter—or even recognize—threats to our nation. Likewise, if we cannot proclaim the righteousness of our traditional values, then we won't be able to mobilize the fighting spirit necessary to defend America.

Throughout most of American history, our leaders have not been hobbled by the kind of moral ambiguity that characterizes our present administration. In 1858, during one of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, Abraham Lincoln identified the nature of the constant moral choice America faces: “It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings.”

Likewise, in an impassioned fireside chat in May 1941, as Europe was being overrun by Nazi Germany, Roosevelt offered a profound moral
defense of our civilization: “Today the whole world is divided between human slavery and human freedom—between pagan brutality and the Christian ideal. We choose human freedom—which is the Christian ideal.” And then, with his remarkable foresight of the deadly struggle to come, he warned us: “No one of us can waver for a moment in his courage or his faith.”
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American presidents set the moral tone for our struggles. But their calls would be meaningless if not for millions of ordinary Americans who willingly rise to the challenge to defend their rights, providing an example to millions across the world who take inspiration from our way of life. President Ronald Reagan paid tribute to this American courage in his first inaugural address:

Two years later, in his famed Evil Empire speech, President Reagan offered an extended meditation on the need to make moral judgments and embrace our history, even if we have not always lived up to our founding ideals:

As American presidents have traditionally found, our nation's peace and safety is best maintained through a robust military capacity, tireless vigilance, and a clear strategy for identifying and countering potential threats—a policy widely known as “peace through strength.” Adherents of such a policy do not seek out confrontation. To the contrary, America leads the world in spending on the military and on national security precisely to ensure that our wars are as rare and as swift as possible.

A strong military dissuades enemies and potential enemies from challenging us, while encouraging our friends and allies to stand up to aggressors rather than appease them. When we convey weakness and confusion, we become most vulnerable to attack—whether it is the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Iranian revolutionaries seizing American hostages in 1979, or radical Islamists attacking the United States on September 11, 2001.

America emerged from its victory in World War II as a superpower. We had liberated nations around the world from the evils of Nazism and Japanese totalitarianism, and millions looked to us to guarantee peace, security, and freedom in the post-war world. We did not seek that role. We entered World War II as a response to an unprovoked military attack, and most Americans assumed once the enemy had been defeated we would simply return home. But by 1945 nearly all could see that after so many years of suffering and tens of millions dead around the world, it was time for America to stand forth and save the world from another such conflict. Accepting the challenge, we assumed leadership of the free world's struggle against Communism.

Most U.S. presidents fought the Cold War with steeled purpose and moral clarity. From Truman's Berlin Airlift to Reagan's military buildup, American leaders saw the conflict for what it was: a struggle between good and evil, and between freedom and tyranny. Aside from a few disgruntled academics and media figures, the overwhelming majority of Americans also viewed the Cold War through this prism.

When America stood strong against the Communists, we kept them on the defensive. In every available venue, from dinner-table conversations to presidential UN addresses, we denounced their claims to legitimacy and their refusal to allow their own people to speak and worship freely, pursue private enterprise, or even leave their own country. We constantly pointed to the Berlin Wall as the ultimate symbol of Communism's failure, and we championed imprisoned dissidents who took comfort in knowing their suffering and sacrifice was not going unnoticed. In Hollywood movies and throughout popular culture, we ridiculed the hypocrisy, self-evident abuses, and absurd contradictions of Communist regimes—in just one example, after Nikita Khrushchev was overthrown as Soviet leader, this anti-Western stalwart could only publish his memoirs by having them smuggled to the West.
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This was the kind of unity, strength, and clarity of purpose we summoned for more than forty years to win the Cold War. Yet not every president subscribed to the consensus. Some presidents, especially in the
1970s, were less certain that military strength and constant vigilance were the best ways to defeat Communism. At this point, let's briefly look at that decade in general and the Carter presidency in particular as a cautionary tale for future leaders.

In the early- to mid-1970s, Washington began scaling down our military commitments, cutting national security spending, and disengaging from our allies in south Vietnam. This accompanied the policy of “détente” adopted by the Nixon and Ford administrations, a posture that focused on managing relations with the Soviets through direct diplomacy. Some welcomed détente as a less confrontational approach that lowered international tensions between the two nuclear-armed superpowers. However, the policy required U.S. leaders to mute their rhetoric about the criminal nature of Communism and, to a large extent, to stop questioning the Soviet regime's legitimacy or that of its Eastern European client states.

Upon taking office, President Jimmy Carter introduced what might be regarded as an extreme form of détente. Denouncing America's “inordinate fear of communism,” he felt no need to speak about the fundamental threat that Soviet totalitarianism posed to America, to the West, and to the entire world. In his view, the world was not as dangerous a place as most Americans had perceived, and at least some of the danger stemmed from Americans' supposed anti-Communist paranoia.

Carter eschewed America's singular role as the world's bulwark against Communism, adopting policies that accepted declining American power in the interests of “peace.” He signed the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (“SALT II”) with the Soviet Union in 1979, ignoring well-founded concerns that the treaty would erode U.S. strategic advantages. Carter even signed the agreement despite the Soviets' continued deployment of SS-20 intermediate-range nuclear weapons, which were not covered by the treaty and for which NATO had no comparable class of nuclear weapons deployed in Western Europe. In line with America's new, more modest role in world affairs, Carter also looked on passively
as Moscow-backed Communist movements seized power throughout Latin America and the Horn of Africa, openly employing surrogate mercenaries from Cuba and other states to do their bidding.

Perhaps Carter's greatest blunder was his incoherent policy toward the Shah of Iran. Alternating wildly between praise and condemnation of the monarch, Carter was paralyzed when the Shah was overthrown and ultimately replaced by an Islamist, pro-terrorist, anti-American regime. On November 4, 1979, less than a year after the Shah's ouster, a group of radical Iranian students and Islamist militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took fifty-two Americans hostage. Aside from a failed rescue attempt, the Carter administration was incapacitated during the crisis, which lasted 444 days until the hostages were released on President Reagan's inauguration day. During this saga, TV news broadcasts kept a constant count of how many days our fellow citizens suffered in captivity, while the Iranian regime heaped scorn on the United States and repeatedly threatened to annihilate us.

Looking at the poor results of Carter's foreign policy, we see that the president failed to understand the natural consequences of scaling back American power—it creates a vacuum that is typically filled by the most aggressive actors. Carter's policies reflected the weariness that some Americans, especially government leaders, felt toward our unique role in defending freedom around the world. They wanted to see America become a nation more like any other, without so many of the special obligations and responsibilities that befall the world's leader.

Leading the defense of the free world entails costs, in terms of money and lives, as well as the human energy required to constantly stand up to evil. It's easy to understand the urge to cast aside these responsibilities and live like everyone else. But as Carter learned, doing so carries its own price—both for America and for freedom throughout the world.

During Carter's presidency, the CIA tapped a group of experts on the Soviet Union—labeled “Team B”—to compare the capabilities of the United States and the Soviet Union. Unsurprisingly, they found that the United States was falling behind the USSR in terms of military strength and global influence. But Americans didn't need a CIA study to tell them
that. The indications were everywhere, especially in the Soviets' decision—one showing utter contempt for Western opinion—to invade Afghanistan in 1979.