In the Arena

by Pete Hegseth

  The wealthy can, and must, do their part. Roosevelt said, “I decline to recognize the mere multimillionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country. . . . If he has earned or uses his wealth in a way that makes him a real benefit . . . then he does become an asset of real worth.” A great modern example of this is Charles and David Koch, CEO and executive vice president, respectively, of Koch Industries. Not only do their businesses choose to stay in the United States and employ more than sixty thousand Americans (sixty thousand livelihoods), but they produce thousands of retail products that Americans want, need, and use in their daily lives. This is good in and of itself; but in addition to creating jobs and wealth for many, the Koch brothers use their wealth to a “real benefit” for America, not just themselves. While I disagree with many of their views on foreign policy and national security, they are true champions of individual freedom and free enterprise, and have spent millions fighting for policies they believe will create economic growth for all and against corporate cronyism and political patronage that benefit an elite few. They have fought against the very subsidies, tax credits, and protective tariffs that stack the economic deck in favor of most major businesses, including their own. Nonetheless, their critics are ferocious—and disingenuous. The mainstream media assumes that like so many others in big business, their political giving must be in pursuit of special privilege. But if you look at their principles and, more important, their giving—the Koch brothers have put their money where their mouths are. Despite what the Left might say, an argument for equal opportunity is not about the rich or the poor; it is about “good citizens” who come in all sizes, shapes, and pocketbooks.

  Advancing these arguments in the real world is not easy. I have learned that firsthand through my work to deliver timely and quality health care to America’s veterans—another “little guy” currently being crushed under the weight of big government. The fact is, what veterans want and need most is what Roosevelt points to in the speech: equal opportunity to get decent health care. Unfortunately, despite having a $160 billion budget and an army of 340,000 employees, the Department of Veterans Affairs still cannot manage to provide timely and quality health care to veterans who have earned that care. From secret lists of appointment requests that were hidden from inspectors, to veterans dying while waiting for care, the system is dysfunctional, the bureaucratic culture toxic, and the health-care delivery model outdated. Veterans and their families are forced to live with this fact. It is so bad, in fact, that most members of Congress dedicate a number of full-time caseworkers to helping veterans in their states and districts try to navigate the VA. Think about that for a second—getting care from the VA can depend on the power and effectiveness of a politician and his team. If your senator cares about the VA, you might have a chance. If he doesn’t? Good luck. That’s not equal opportunity. That’s big-government incompetence and a travesty of justice.

  Nothing changes, because the VA bureaucracy—outdated and bloated—is almost entirely unaccountable and has lots of friends inside and outside government looking to protect its failed model. The VA’s public employee unions and old-line veterans’ organizations are more interested in protecting the VA than in giving veterans what they want by reforming the system to fit their needs. The only solution for defenders of the VA is to convince reelection-seeking members of Congress that the department is always in need of more money. The next $5 billion is always going to fix the system. Just the next $5 billion.

  If you ask veterans what they actually want, 90 percent simply want the choice—the simple choice—to either see a VA doctor or go to a private doctor if they cannot be seen in a timely or convenient manner. But that simple choice—and real accountability for workers who deserve to be fired for gross incompetence—is extremely difficult to get. The VA bureaucracy only wants to grow and will never reform itself, traditional veterans’ groups have long ceased to be watchdogs and are instead VA lapdogs, and members of Congress want feel-good bills and photo ops, but not the tough reforms needed to truly deliver for veterans. As a result, special interests maintain a stranglehold on important policy matters related to veterans, making reforming the VA an extremely difficult proposition. It takes sustained outside advocacy—straddling the line of policy and politics—in order to even create the conditions where folks in Washington, D.C., might do the right thing by veterans. Without the pressure of outside organizations and efforts, the individual veteran is unlikely to ever be afforded a real VA health-care choice that empowers them and incentivizes the VA to treat them like customers. Armies of advocates—of “good citizens”—must fight back. Efforts to change the status quo may fall short or may succeed, but our faces will be “marred by dust and sweat and blood.” We must be in the arena for veterans, and all Americans crushed under the weight of failed government.

  This is just one example, at one department, in the federal government. Across our federal behemoth, the deck is stacked in favor of government growth and government control, just as it is on the big business side of the ledger. Only good citizens, bonding together and supported by those who use their wealth for “real benefit,” can create the conditions for real opportunity to flourish.

  • • •

  As you know by now, Roosevelt spends the vast majority of his speech talking about citizens, but he also makes an important point about the type of leaders republics need in order to maintain equal opportunity. Speaking to his elite audience of French academics and dignitaries at the Sorbonne, Roosevelt says,

  It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in any democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes represented in this audience to-day; but only provided that those classes possess the gifts of sympathy with plain people and of devotion to great ideals.

  The Left gushes with the “sympathy with plain people” Roosevelt describes, but for decades the big-government policies they’ve advanced have only exacerbated entrenched poverty for “plain people” while building a maze of government regulation and bureaucracy that America’s elite happily exploit. Politically, the Left benefits from this unfortunate reality by decrying the resulting “income inequality” and then proposing even more government intervention as the solution. After years of class warfare, postmodernism, and investments in government growth, the Left has truly forgotten the “great ideals” upon which this country was built and that make this country exceptional.

  As outlined in previous chapters, the rise of Barack Obama is the powerful example of a cultural seduction that fundamentally misunderstands America’s exceptionalism. Following his inauguration, Obama went on a worldwide American apology tour, during which he made the following statement: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” He is wrong about America yesterday and today, but I fear he could eventually be proven correct. If America’s good citizens do not do what is necessary to preserve what makes America truly special, then our exceptionalism can and will be lost. Just like everything else in this world, American exceptionalism is not inevitable. It does not perpetuate itself. It must be fought for, and defended, by every single generation.

  Unlike big-government advocates and big business cronies, the good citizens of America—such citizens being the most important ingredient to a great republic—must be unabashed about their special interest: the dogged pursuit of a vibrant American Dream that keeps America exceptional. We must be so grateful for the equal opportunity our founders gave us that we are willing to leap into the arena to fight for it. We are either “free people” in name only, dependent on a government, or we are truly free people fighting—day in and day out, in our own lives and in the lives of others—to ensure the vitality of our experiment in self-governance and equal opportunity. Our founders dedicated their “lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” to gifting us freedom, defeating the most powerful empire in the world to do it. The le
ast we can do, as good citizens of a great republic, is enter the arena in our neighborhoods, schools, communities, councils, and churches to grant the same gift of freedom to the next generation. Then, as “good patriots,” we must boldly face the world—and the threats it contains.

  EIGHT

  The Wise Statesman: Threats to a New American Century

  It is the duty of wise statesman, gifted with the power of looking ahead, to try to encourage and build up every movement which will substitute or tend to substitute some other agency for force in the settlement of international disputes. It is the duty of every honest statesman to try to guide the nation so that it shall not wrong any other nation. But as yet the great civilized peoples, if they are to be true to themselves and to the cause of humanity and civilization, must keep in mind that in the last resort they must possess both the will and the power to resent wrong-doings from others. The men who sanely believe in a lofty morality preach righteousness; but they do not preach weakness, whether among private citizens or among nations. We believe that our ideals should be so high, but not so high as to make it impossible measurably to realize them. We sincerely and earnestly believe in peace; but if peace and justice conflict, we scorn the man who would not stand for justice though the whole world came in arms against him.

  —TEDDY ROOSEVELT, 1910

  The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics.

  —SAMUEL HUNTINGTON, 1993

  Four years after Teddy Roosevelt spoke at the Sorbonne, his French audience was engulfed in a world war. A web of alliances had maintained a precarious balance of power in Europe for four decades, but a frantic arms race in the early twentieth century, especially between the British and German empires, exposed the tenuous nature of the resulting peace. War was triggered—or at least justified—following the political assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany stood by Austria-Hungary, declared war, and quickly turned its gaze west to France. Britain and France mobilized to defend Western Europe, and a pitched battle of bloody trench warfare ensued for years. The Great War took 16 million lives, roughly half of those on that Western Front.

  As president, Teddy Roosevelt had witnessed both the ambition and instability of Kaiser Wilhelm, and recognized the powerful and possibly nefarious potential of Germany’s emerging industrial and military stature. Roosevelt had a great deal of respect for the German people and did not consider imperial Germany an outright foe, but he also understood how the emergence of Germany as the strongest military power in Europe could upset that teetering continent. Germany was powerful, but it was not free and was not content to simply coexist. He had no idea Germany would instigate a world war in his lifetime, but he understood that the balance of power is never fixed, and that peace—while always desirable—was not the normal international condition (a point utterly lost on the Coexist Left today). This recognition, along with the need to enforce his Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, contributed to a substantial defense buildup—most substantially to the U.S. Navy—during Roosevelt’s presidency.

  Years before war broke out across Europe and the world, Roosevelt’s vision for American engagement in the world provided useful context to his historic Sorbonne speech. Roosevelt was not just a man who studied history, but also someone whose understanding of historical context allowed him to shape history. As such, Roosevelt ended his 1910 speech with a pointed, and eventually prophetic, reminder to his French audience: “We sincerely and earnestly believe in peace; but if peace and justice conflict, we scorn the man who would not stand for justice though the whole world came in arms against him. . . . You and I belong to the only two republics among the great powers of the world. . . . For [France] to sink would be a loss to all the world.” Four years later France was fighting for its very existence, and Teddy Roosevelt had the opportunity to show exactly what kind of friend he was to the free world. The advent of war provided yet another opportunity for him to shape history.

  When world war broke out in Europe in 1914, isolationism was the firm preference of the American public. Most Americans felt, justifiably, that two vast oceans and a history of nonintervention would shield the United States from the ambitions of European empires. President Woodrow Wilson reflected that sentiment by quickly proclaiming the United States “officially neutral,” taking neither side and refusing to place blame with Germany. This stance was initially popular with the American public but was made increasingly untenable by the aggressive actions of Germany—most especially the tragic sinking of numerous American civilian ships by a new weapon of war, the submarine. The unrestricted use of submarine warfare against neutral ships eventually forced Wilson’s hand and America reluctantly entered World War I.

  On April 2, 1917—nearly three years after the war began in Europe—Woodrow Wilson asked a joint session of Congress for a declaration of war against Germany, famously pronouncing, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Less well known are the litanies of long-forgotten justifications for U.S. nonintervention given by Woodrow Wilson over the preceding three years. Following the infamous torpedoing of the American civilian ship Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915, Wilson said, “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.” Overwhelming domestic criticism of that remark later forced him to retract the statement, for fear of looking weak abroad. As late as January 1917, with both sides locked in deadly trench warfare, Wilson was still calling for “peace without victory.” And just weeks before being forced into war, Wilson mused about the possibility of “armed neutrality.”

  Wilson may be credited with the phrase “making the world safe for democracy,” but it was former president Teddy Roosevelt who poked, prodded, and pushed him into the defense of France, and by extension, the shaping of the free world in the war’s aftermath. For the final four years of his life, with his health steadily deteriorating (he passed away on January 6, 1919), Teddy Roosevelt crisscrossed America urging preparation for war against Germany, making the case for intervention on the side of the Allies, and ultimately the need for “total” victory—as a means to prevent future wars. At times Teddy was publicly deferential to the current commander in chief; other times he could not contain his anger, declaring Wilson “cowardly” and “weak” and ceaselessly mocking Wilson’s “too proud to fight” statement. Roosevelt even wrote a hasty and fascinating book in 1917—titled The Foes of Our Own Household—that eviscerated Wilson’s naïveté and equivocation in real time. Wrote Roosevelt, “We are in the war. But we are not yet awake.”

  Once President Wilson gave his famous speech and war was declared, Roosevelt both publicly and privately supported Wilson’s execution of the war. In fact, in a personal meeting with Wilson shortly after war was declared, the fifty-six-year-old former colonel asked for only one thing: the opportunity to assemble a volunteer division of former soldiers, led by Roosevelt, that could be dispatched immediately to Western Europe. Dubbed the “Roosevelt Division” by historians, the concept was eventually rejected by Wilson on the grounds that it would interfere with the new draft process. But the French wanted Roosevelt and the morale boost he would bring, with the prime minister of France saying, “The name of Roosevelt has legendary force in this country.” He urged Wilson to send Roosevelt. Ultimately, Teddy never made it to World War I, but all three of his sons did—with his youngest giving his life over the skies of Germany.

  During World War I, a friend dubbed Roosevelt “the Bugle That Woke America” for his unrelenting commitment to American involvement. But Roosevelt woke America to much more than a war; he woke America to leadership on the world stage. Roosevelt understood, long before World War I and Woodrow Wilson, that the United States was no longer just a regional power, but instead a global power with an emerging responsibility to engage an increasingly interconnected world. The defense of a fragile free world required a powerful and assertive American republic. America in the early twentieth century may not have wanted to b
e engaged with the world, but the world was engaging—and challenging—America. Rapid advances in communications and transportation, alongside the ability for deadly tools of war to be projected farther and with more lethality, meant that America could no longer just police her shores, or even the Western Hemisphere. The affairs of both the Pacific and Atlantic would increasingly impact America—and America could either shape them, or be shaped by them.

  Roosevelt knew all of this at the time of his 1910 speech, and also understood the mood of the American public. He knew that average Americans had little interest in foreign affairs and that aggressive foreign interventions were generally greeted with protest from isolationists (called “anti-imperialists” in his time). As such, Roosevelt was careful to articulate that his extension of the Monroe Doctrine, which justified U.S. intervention in the Western Hemisphere, had nothing to do with American territorial interest or colonies. Instead he framed it as a responsibility to prevent further European meddling in America’s backyard—a reality that came true in World War I. While noisy anti-imperialists still howled about this extension, known as the Roosevelt Corollary, the move was popular with most Americans and Roosevelt recognized that fact. Americans were skeptical of the world but proud of America’s strength and values, and would support policies that successfully projected American strength and defense.