The Greatest Generation defeated fascism. After Japan launched its surprise attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared war, swearing, “We will gain the inevitable triumph.” Sixteen million young men mobilized to win that victory. When Japan surrendered, President Harry S. Truman promised, “We shall not forget Pearl Harbor. The Japanese militarists will not forget the USS Missouri,” here they signed the unconditional surrender. He added, “This victory shall be a monument worthy of the dead who died to win it.” Few Americans during World War II doubted the righteousness of the cause nor the need to win an outright victory rather than settle for some amorphous diplomatic compromise.
The fruits of victory were short-lived. The Soviet Union sought to impose its totalitarian vision upon the world order. The Chinese Communist Party was not far behind. During the Cold War era, Jimmy Carter’s administration represented the defeatist nadir. While Carter and many of his predecessors were master tree counters, Ronald Reagan never lost sight of the forest. Alas, the same could not be said for George H.W. Bush. As the Soviet Union crumbled, rather than confirm the evil empire’s defeat, Bush sought to throw it a life preserver, infamously urging Ukrainians to extend their subjugation in his “Chicken Kiev” speech.
Perhaps nowhere has the U.S. consistently been so averse to winning than the Islamic Republic of Iran. Perhaps it’s self-hatred among some in the political class, or maybe simply a lack of vision. As the world’s leading state-sponsor of terror, the Iranian regime is responsible for death and destruction across the globe, from Baghdad to Beirut, and Buenos Aires to Bangkok. When in 2009, Iranians took to the streets en masse, President Barack Obama ignored them in the hope that he might have a sit down with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Then, with the Iranian economy in a state of collapse, rather than press Washington’s advantage, Obama authorized payments of more than $1 billion per month just to entice Tehran to negotiate. Future diplomats will look at the 2015 nuclear deal as a textbook case of lost leverage, incompetent negotiation, and an outcome that reversed decades of counter-proliferation precedent. Unfortunately, Biden and his Special Envoy Robert Malley seek to compound the error as they continue to dangle tens of billions of dollars for Tehran to fund its security forces rather than recognize a fraction of that money channeled into strike funds could end the Islamic Republic once and for all.
Biden also embraced and then doubled down on President Donald Trump’s shameful Afghanistan policy, even though the U.S. presence in Afghanistan by then held the Taliban at bay and cost little more than the U.S. deterrent missions in Japan and Korea. Rather than press for victory, Biden chose humiliation.
Unfortunately, the failure to seek victory has become a bipartisan fault. President Donald Trump turned “winning” into a laugh line. Russia, which under dictator Vladimir Putin, is both openly anti-American and seeks to revive the Cold War challenge, now has its back to the wall through errors of its own. For very little investment, Ukraine can put the final nail in the coffin of Putinism. And yet, Trumpian blinkered embrace of America alone and a healthy dose of conspiracy theories have inspired the insipid to once again resist winning. As former Rep. Will Hurd, a man who for his generation is among the most capable of taking up Reagan’s mantle, put it when facing such short-term thinking, “Ronald Reagan is rolling over in his grave knowing there are Republicans who think America shouldn’t stand up to Russia.” Indeed. It is hard to imagine what the Greatest Generation or, indeed, nearly anyone who fought to preserve the liberal order would think of such reticence to win.
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Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
