President Trump, Rand Paul, and others seem to think we can get peace by pulling out of places that are not yet pacified, because they imagine that people are “tired” of war.
They could not be more terribly wrong.
History — World War II for example, and “peace in our time” — should have cured them of that thinking.
If you think people are tired now, think how exhausted they were in 1946. After four years of war (seven in Europe and some parts of Asia), they had to suit up again for what one World War ll veteran would later describe as a “long twilight struggle.” The Cold War was less given to bombings and bloodshed but costly and nerve-wracking.
Some people, like Robert A. Taft and Joseph P. Kennedy, opposed this reaction, but Harry Truman, George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy all believed otherwise. Over the next twenty years, these men built and enhanced the set of alliances that contained the Soviet Union until its empire crumbled in 1989.
Key to this success were the kind of residual forces that until recently protected the Kurds in Syria and were the key to the end of the Cold War. As the late Charles Krauthammer explained: “During the Cold War, we stationed troops in Germany to face the massive tank armies of Soviet Russia…a deliberate message to the enemy that if you invade our ally you will have to kill a lot of Americans first. Which will galvanize us into full-scale war against you.”
As a result, nobody dared to kill the Americans until the Soviet Union imploded. This is something that Trump and his defenders now ignore.
It is the willingness to sacrifice small numbers of people that secures the safety of millions and millions, and the willingness of the defenders to be the defenders that in turn keeps them safe. In removing the tripwire people, as Obama once did and Trump is now doing, you open the gates to flood tides of violence, which one way or another you will one day be forced to clean up.
The Islamic State had to sweep through the Middle East and plant bombs in Europe before Obama came to his senses and started responding. Trump might take a little more convincing.
Trump and his ilk express their concerns for the troops on the ground and the strain on their loved ones, but this, too, seems misplaced.
Joe Kennedy misunderstood the plans of the Axis and/or their depravity, but he was above all a father, whose concerns for his sons (and all sons and all fathers) eclipsed all other matters, leading him once to ask of Truman, “What are you doing campaigning for that crippled son of a bitch that killed my son Joe?”
Roosevelt of course had his own sons in battle — one of whom, Elliott, was in a small plane following that flown by Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. on his final mission.
The only way to stop war is to be ready to wage it. “I hate war,” FDR said famously. But what he hated even more was the period in the late 1930’s and in 1940, when he saw the Axis rise and then rampage, and knew, because of the public’s war weariness, that there was nothing at all he could do.
