by Mitt Romney
Of course, Putin’s moves have purpose beyond energy: anything that diminishes America pleases him, both because it weakens a competing power and because it gratifies his personal animus for the United States. Russian presence in Venezuela and Russia’s resistance to severe sanctioning of North Korea and Iran as they have pursued their nuclear programs are a stick in the eye for the United States. So, too, is Russia’s insistence that the world replace the dollar as the reserve currency. Putin also bitterly opposes any development that would strengthen the United States such as missile defense, particularly in Eastern Europe, and admission of the former Soviet satellites into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). President Barack Obama’s decision to walk away from our missile defense program in Poland and in the Czech Republic was a huge concession to Putin, as is the stalling on admission of Georgia and the Ukraine into NATO. Russia welcomes concessions and these, like their predecessors, were not repaid in kind. Russia takes, President Obama gives, and Russia demands more.
There is a fourth global strategy. It, too, is calculated to overcome the West and ultimately lead the world. Though this strategy is formally embraced by only one country—Iran—it animates many foreign leaders and some of the most infamous names on the planet, among them Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Mullah Omar. It is violent jihadism: the fanatical, terrorist, and always threatening branch of extreme fundamentalist Islam. Despite the theological differences between radical Sunni Wahhabism and radical Shia extremism, both endeavor to cause the collapse of all competing economies and systems of government, and thereby, in a last-man-standing approach, become the world’s leading power—in fact, its sole power. In the minds of the jihadists, there is only one legitimate government and it is waiting to be unleashed: a caliphate with global reach and power.
Violent jihadist groups come in many stripes across a spectrum, from Hamas to Hezbollah, from the Muslim Brotherhood to al Qaeda, and from Lashkar-e-Taiba to Jaish-e-Mohammed. Each espouses causes that are unique to its own branch of Islamism and to its own geographic region—independence for Chechnya, political dominance in the Sudan, hegemony over Kashmir, and so on. But without question, the jihadists also share a common overarching goal: violent holy war on America and the West, the destruction of Israel and the Jews, the recapture of all lands once held by Muslims, the elimination of infidel leaders in Muslim nations like Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and ultimately, the defeat of all non-Muslim nations.
Theirs is a strategy based on conquest and compulsion. Because it has no singular or coordinated leadership—and because its objectives are both grandiose and fragmented—attempts to execute this strategy are pursued by a number of tactical means. Some, like the Wahhabis, focus on the virtual brainwashing of young people to help spread radicalism throughout the world of Islam. Others, like Hamas, recruit and train suicide bombers. Some endeavor to mollify and pacify the West, lulling these nations into complacency and inaction. Lebanese American scholar and NBC commentator Dr. Walid Phares argues in his book, Future Jihad, that the massive Saudi investment in Islamic study centers in Western universities is designed to do precisely that. Al Qaeda itself continues to plan devastating attacks like those it carried out on September 11, 2001, and also targets unstable nations like Somalia and Yemen for takeover, with the hope of converting them into training and launching sites for an ongoing series of massive attacks.
Regardless of the choice of tactics, the overarching objectives of the various radical groups are linked by adherence to common fundamental goals. One of these was spoken by jihadist Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil: Due to the blessings of jihad, America’s countdown has begun. It will declare defeat soon.
These are the four strategies for world leadership that are in competition today. Only one is founded on freedom. Only one. Think of what that means. Only if America and the West succeed—if our economic and military strength endure—can we be confident that our children and grandchildren will be free. A strong America is good for peace, and it is essential for the spread of freedom. Our superpower status and our leadership in the world, however, are not inevitable. Three other global strategies, each pursued by at least one state or major actor, are aggressively being pursued to surpass us and, in some cases, to suppress us. The proponents of each are convinced they will succeed. And world history offers us no encouragement: Every superpower in history has eventually weakened and fallen behind—many have ultimately collapsed. Given what is at risk, I have come to believe that our primary objective as a nation must be to keep America strong. I am convinced that every policy, every political initiative, every new law or regulation should be evaluated in large measure by whether it makes us stronger or weaker. Our freedom, security, and prosperity are at stake.
Some of us take our many personal freedoms for granted. Others in the world who have never experienced them, and who have instead only heard their autocrats malign freedom, may not yet fully understand what it means. But for most Americans, the pulse of freedom beats in our very DNA. The New Hampshire license plate reads LIVE FREE OR DIE, reminiscent of patriot Patrick Henry’s famous entreaty. There are those who insist that New Hampshire’s motto isn’t politically correct. But most Americans envy the Granite Staters their motto and believe, as I do, that this is the American resolve.
I have been inspired by the passion of those who have recently won freedom. In 2002, I sat near Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai at a State of the Union address in our nation’s capital. As we were filing out of the House chamber, he encountered a serviceman who had lost his arm in the fight to free Afghanistan. He said to the soldier, I and my people want to thank you for your sacrifice for our freedom. Thank you, thank you so very much. And the young man responded, It is an honor to serve the cause of freedom.
Afghanistan under the Taliban had assailed freedom. For jihadists, the very ideas of democracy and freedom are blasphemous; they believe law is given by God, not chosen by man, and that freedom and democracy substitute the rights of the individual and the collective will of the people for the demands of Allah. The result of their belief has been unimaginable oppression administered by religious mullahs.
The oppression inherent in a society without personal freedoms is not always as obvious as it was in Afghanistan. By almost all appearances, China is a very impressive nation, as the Beijing Olympics were designed to demonstrate. The Chinese government spent an estimated 40 billion to showcase their Games. In comparison, Atlanta’s Games were produced for less than one tenth that amount, even adjusting for inflation. Modern, cosmopolitan Beijing now resembles a typical Western city—bustling commerce in stores and malls, daunting traffic, even plenty of McDonald’s restaurants.
During the Games, the people seemed the same as those you’d encounter in any modern city—large crowds on the sidewalks, people laughing and talking and engaging in the work and play of the day. But a closer look revealed what it is like to live in a society without a Bill of Rights.
There is no First Amendment freedom of the press in China. The media is prohibited from criticizing certain Communist Party officials—those who do may lose their jobs or be imprisoned. My wife Ann and I wondered whether the censorship actually had the desired effect. We got our answer during the Olympic Opening Ceremonies. The audience warmly welcomed every national team as it was introduced into the stadium, but the Chinese gave some of their loudest cheers to the teams from North Korea and Cuba. We wondered how it was possible that nations ruled by tyrants who deprive their citizens not only of freedom but also of economic subsistence could be celebrated. The explanation, of course, is that the Chinese people don’t see media reports of North Korea’s population being starved to feed the maniacal military ambition of Kim Jong-il or of Castro jailing dissidents who advocate freedom and democracy. The Chinese people receive only glowing accounts of these tyrants; their information is shaped by a monolithic government rather than by the varied perspectives of a free press.
Nor do the Chinese cit
izens enjoy the equivalent of the First Amendment protection of religious freedom. According to the international organization Freedom House, While officially sanctioned groups are tolerated, members of unauthorized religious groups are harassed and imprisoned. Americans celebrate our almost impossibly varied spectrum of religious beliefs and practices. Most of us would fight to defend this freedom for our fellow citizens, no matter how deep the theological disagreements. In China, the average citizen must carefully consider whether to voice even the faintest of religious opinions.
The First Amendment right to peaceable assembly is also absent. Christine Brennan of USA Today reported during the Games that she had observed a gathering of about one thousand Chinese in a train station, watching an Olympic event on a big-screen television. The Chinese authorities turned off the television and told the people to leave. Any group assembly, even a small, peaceful, and celebratory one, may be viewed as a potential threat.
The international media reported that in order to construct the Olympic venues, the government had ejected many thousands of Chinese from their homes. Protests followed, during which the displaced complained that they had received wholly inadequate compensation. Absent a free press, there was no effective media effort to investigate the fairness of the payments or to ensure that those who protested were not subsequently punished. And without the equivalent of our Fifth Amendment guarantee of just compensation, a fair redress through an independent judiciary was far from certain.
We are well aware of China’s abuse of dissidents, but the absence of basic freedoms impacts not only the prominent and the outspoken, but also the ordinary Chinese citizen. As the bleak oppression of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution has been largely eliminated, the Chinese have become increasingly prosperous. But personal freedom as we know it is still fiercely resisted by the Communist Party. Given the attitude toward political liberty of the other aspirants for world leadership as well, freedom for our grandchildren and for people everywhere can be guaranteed only by America—a strong America.
A Change in Foreign Policy
Throughout the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly portrayed himself as the embodiment of change. As has been noted by Robert Kagan, the prominent military and foreign policy scholar, President Obama is in fact a departure from the past, and it is much more than a departure from his predecessor, George W. Bush: it is a rupture with some of the key assumptions that have undergirded more than six decades of American foreign policy. Given the challenge for global leadership that confronts us, it is a break that is unnecessary and unwise.
At the end of World War II, the United States executed a dramatic and profoundly meaningful shift in our relationship with the rest of the world. After a long tradition of guarding our own hemisphere while deliberately attempting to stay isolated from the affairs of Europe and Asia, the United States found itself the greatest single power amidst a world in chaos and disrepair. Secretary of State Dean Acheson appropriately titled his memoirs from this time, Present at the Creation. President Harry Truman, his secretary of defense George C. Marshall, Acheson, and a few other visionary leaders set out to help create nothing less than a new international order with the United States in the permanent lead, not as a neutral actor in world affairs but as the protector and defender of a particular world order. The enormity of the task . . . after the wars in Europe and Asia ended in 1945, only slowly revealed itself, Acheson wrote. The wonder of it, he said, is just how much was done. And Truman and his team believed, as Winston Churchill did, that the hope of the world depended on the strength and will of the United States.
This was not an expression of American jingoism. The United States has never wanted to impose itself on the world. As General Powell noted, we do not seek conquest or colonies. We seek our own safety and, insofar as possible, the chance for other people to live in freedom. President Truman vividly understood the mutual dependence of these two goals. The world had just suffered through two of the most destructive wars in history. America had tried to stand apart from those conflicts; we did not want to become involved, but in both cases we found that our vital interests could not be secure in the face of threats to the cause of freedom elsewhere. At the dawn of the nuclear age, a third world war was unthinkable; it would mean the destruction of humankind. So the president and the leaders of both parties shifted America’s foreign policy. America took on the task of anticipating, containing, and eventually defeating threats to the progress of freedom in the belief that actively protecting others was the best way to protect ourselves.
Broadly construed, the new order had three pillars: active involvement and participation in world affairs; active promotion of American and Western values including democracy, free enterprise, and human rights; and a collective security umbrella for America and her allies. Along with these pillars came new institutions to fortify them and give them expression: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the GATT (later WTO), and NATO, among others. And specific actions and initiatives gave them expression as well: the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the Truman Doctrine (aid to Greece and Turkey to defeat communist insurgencies), and the intervention in Korea, among others. President Truman’s administration played a vital role in setting the main lines of American foreign policy for many years to come. What Acheson did not know – what he could not know – is how long and deep those main lines would go. Every one of Truman’s successors—Republican and Democrat—from Dwight Eisenhower through George W. Bush continued in these broad traditions. There were modifications, adjustments, and occasional deviations to be sure. But these three pillars essentially defined the American posture in the world for the duration of and in the aftermath of the Cold War.
The Cold War began with Soviet aggression deep into Western Europe and Asia and with Harry Truman’s declaration in response that the nations of the world were obliged to choose between alternative visions of how life was to supposed to be led—as free peoples or as subjects of communist states—and that it was the duty of the United States to support free peoples who were then resisting subjugation and to assist them in the working out their own destinies in their own way.
Dwight Eisenhower consolidated and reinforced the institutions founded by Truman and the principles he championed. The most stirring description of these principles was offered by John F. Kennedy in proclaiming America’s determination to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, and oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. At the end of the Cold War there was Ronald Reagan citing the words of John Winthrop and Thomas Paine and promising to begin the world anew in vanquishing an evil empire and leading the world to a new era of freedom.
America’s next three post– Cold War presidents—George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush—continued in that tradition by championing free trade and freedom by using the American military to thwart the ambitions of evil regimes, to expand NATO, and to make Europe whole and free. Each of our post–World War II presidents—with Jimmy Carter being the closest to the exception—believed the United States should lead the free world, stand with our allies, confront our adversaries, and speak out for democracy.
The course has not been easy. But the policy followed by presidents of both parties from 1945 until 2008 had an unparalleled impact for good. Under the shield of American power and leadership, hope and freedom expanded as never before. The United States has enjoyed three generations of prosperity and liberty while preventing a general war. Japan and Germany, which had been dictatorships, are now secure democracies. So are Taiwan, South Korea, the nations of Eastern Europe, and many other countries across the world. Billions of people today live in freedom, or have the hope of freedom, who otherwise would have lived in despair if not for the greatness of the United States. And thanks to America’s promotion of free enterprise, capitalism, and economic freedom, billions of people have been lifted from poverty.
President Obama is well on
his way toward engineering a dramatic shift in this American foreign policy, based on his own underlying attitudes.
The first of these envisions America as a nation whose purpose is to arbitrate disputes rather than to advocate ideals, a country consciously seeking equidistance between allies and adversaries. We have never seen anything quite like it, really. And in positioning the United States in the way he has, President Obama has positioned himself as a figure transcending America instead of defending America.
This sentiment manifests itself in several different ways, including President Obama’s American Apology Tour. Never before in American history has its president gone before so many foreign audiences to apologize for so many American misdeeds, both real and imagined. It is his ways of signaling to foreign countries and foreign leaders that their dislike for America is something he understands and that is, at least in part, understandable. There are anti-American fires burning all across the globe; President Obama’s words are like kindling to them.
President Obama, always the skillful politician, will throw in compliments about America here and there. But what makes his speeches jump out at his audience are the steady stream of criticisms, put-downs, and jabs directed at the nation he was elected to represent and defend.
In his first nine months in office, President Obama has issued apologies and criticisms of America in speeches in France, England, Turkey, and Cairo; at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the United Nations in New York City. He has apologized for what he deems to be American arrogance, dismissiveness, and derision; for dictating solutions, for acting unilaterally, and for acting without regard for others; for treating other countries as mere proxies, for unjustly interfering in the internal affairs of other nations, and for feeding anti-Muslim sentiments; for committing torture, for dragging our feet on global warming, and for selectively promoting democracy. So critical was President Obama at his speech before the United Nations that dictator Fidel Castro complimented him for his brave gesture and courage in criticizing the United States. Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela, said that the smell of sulfur (meaning the presidency of George W. Bush) had been replaced by the smell of hope (meaning the presidency of Barack Obama). And Muammar Qaddafi, the dictator of Libya, declared that we’d be content and happy if Obama can stay president forever.
