Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) made the substantive speech of the year so far when he spoke on June 2 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
Communist China took the hardest hit from Sasse’s words. U.S. isolationists also were pummeled. But the American people’s can-do spirit and abilities earned a welcome boost.
Mostly, Sasse’s message was that to stay ahead of the world, including the dangerous Chinese dragon, the United States must engage with the world rather than pursue the fantasy of “nation-building at home,” divorced from global interactions and without U.S. international leadership.
“The last 75 years, with the U.S. as the globe’s unrivaled superpower, we have seen shocking peace and shocking prosperity, by every historical measure,” Sasse said. “In flesh-and-blood lived experience, American idealism about human dignity helped create immense realist, geopolitical stability. And American military, our might, enabled the spread of human rights and broader representation, and private property rights and land reform, and unleashed entrepreneurial innovation on every continent, thereby uplifting millions of families and innumerable communities.”
“Stated more brass-tacks,” Sasse continued, “American military and economic engagement wasn’t some charity … It was indeed very good for the world, but we did it because it was good for America.”
Sasse is not known for mincing words. That’s why, a few sentences later, he was blunt: “If ‘America First’ just becomes shorthand for ‘America Alone,’ then it’s a dumb slogan and an even dumber meaning: ‘America poorer,’ and ‘America less safe.'”
Sasse said this is particularly true because of the threat from China.
“The rise of this belligerent, confident, expansionistic, indeed imperialist Communist Party is the competitive challenge that will define much of the next half-century,” he said. “These threats are real, and China’s power-hungry leadership is coming for us, whether we reflect sufficiently on this reality or not. No amount of pretending or ignoring or hiding is going to make it go away.”
Among the “big, hard things” that Sasse said the U.S. must do, he highlighted this: “Let’s pass a trillion-dollar defense budget, but let’s radically cut the share that goes to legacy systems and platforms that employ an army of lobbyists. In a new era of cyber and asymmetric war, let’s make sure we’re getting maximum lethal capacity for every taxpayer dollar spent by overhauling procurement policies that aren’t just too expensive but primarily way, way too slow.”
And this: “Let’s build a ‘NATO for the Pacific.’ We need allies to get back on the offensive against the CCP, and those allies need U.S. leadership. NATO in Europe has been the greatest treaty organization in history. It held the line against the Soviets, and it’s now holding the line against bloody Putin. But as Chairman Xi looks to expand his sphere of influence, we need a new military alliance centered far out into the Pacific.” Also, Sasse said, we should “arm Taiwan to the teeth” so it can better defend itself.
Eventually, Sasse segued into an exuberant re-enunciation of the “American idea” and a renunciation of the loud voices on both the political Left and Right who say our constitutional system neither works nor can work anymore.
“We should reject all such warped visions of this glorious inheritance we’ve received,” said the Nebraska senator. “It’s liars who tell us that our Constitution is obsolete, that principled pluralism can’t possibly work anymore, that the very act of believing we can make it work again is quaint.”
Alas, he said, “Think how long it’s been since the American people have heard a big, optimistic, Reagan-like, aspirational message.”
To his own Republican Party and conservative movement, Sasse offered a corrective: “American conservatives don’t traffic in grievance. Our party must reject politicians who tell the American people that we’re victims. We embrace leaders who tell the American people that we can write our own destiny. Americans have never wallowed in self-pity. The people who built this country and passed it on to us sought to make it better and more expansive and more inclusive. … We in this country and in this party embrace leaders who understand that America makes legends, not victims.”
Finally, he drew his thought strands together: “This is our moment to build an American-led future. This is our moment to out-innovate, out-compete, and out-perform the Chinese Communist Party, formidable though it is. Because the totalitarian certainty is that humans are small and weak and tame-able. Well, they’re wrong.”
The totalitarians abroad and naysayers at home are indeed wrong, and Sasse is right. We definitely can out-compete the Red Chinese and others. But to out-compete them, we must not retreat into our own angry cocoon.
