“Bring the troops home” was the rallying cry of leftist radicals during the Vietnam War, including the newly formed television media. The veterans in the photo were inspired by 1960s Bolshevik propaganda, but they had other reasons. “We won’t fight another rich man’s war,” the sign reads. After all, they had gained a decisive upper hand right after the initial successes of the Communist’s Tet Offensive early in 1968.
The US had won the battle, only to find that liberal politicians back home had already declared them defeated. Together with the mainstream media and college students afraid of the draft, the political elite of both parties had no problem engineering public opinion against the war. They’re trying to do the same thing against President Trump today.
Those on the right today would agree with the veterans for very different reasons: we should never fight in wars where the managerial elite doesn’t even try to win. Or in wars where America has no skin in the game, or in wars that are internal civil wars far from our home, or in wars that benefit certain corporations and increase the bank accounts of key politicians. In other words, we need to pick our battles carefully.
“None of America’s wars of the past half-century really involved crucial national interests,” wrote journalist Tom Streithorst the year before Donald Trump’s epic victory in 2016. Both men are realists and pragmatists, neither is a pacifist. Trump is a businessman, but there’s no blood trail. He is concerned about our increasing national debt, not to mention wasting lives and taxpayer dollars in fighting endless, unwinnable wars.
“Why Does America Keep Losing Wars?” asks Streithorst: “It’s time to admit it: America sucks at war. The last time we decisively defeated our enemies was 1945. Korea was a draw, Vietnam a defeat, the first Gulf War only a qualified success—Saddam Hussein stayed in power considerably longer than George H. W. Bush—Afghanistan and Iraq epic disasters for American foreign policy. The United States has more firepower at its fingertips than any empire in history but seems unable to translate all that might into anything that could be called victory.”
America’s military is the best in the world, he says, brave and patriotic, perseveringly doing their duty. The bad guys are the civilian and political policymakers who continue to keep the generals and admirals from doing what it takes to win—or even to determine if a war is necessary. The same Uniparty cartel of liberal Democrats and neocon GOP ties the hands of the military just as they do police departments across the nation, with self-defeating rules of engagement. Soldiers become nation builders and humanitarians, though trained as fighters.
Both Trump and Streithorst would agree with new interpretations of old problems: “In a democracy with a free media, a long, pointless war in a faraway land is a tough sell—as it should be” and a “’Mission Accomplished’ banner is a moment you can sell on television. The tedious work of building a bureaucracy is not.”
All of us should have the freedom to practice devil’s advocacy in order to understand the length and breadth and width of issues. This is what debate always used to be about. How did people think in the last century about our wars? Should we have kept out of both the World Wars and Korea? They weren’t our wars then, in the same sense that so many aren’t ours today. Above all, we can’t let the advocacy-steeped media determine our wars and public policy. If not distracted by rancorous political theater, President Trump has shown both strength and clarity in tackling the toughest geopolitical issues imaginable.
“Were the United States to face a genuine threat to its national security, were Mexico try to reconquer Arizona or Canada invade North Dakota, I am confident America would find the wherewithal to defeat its enemies,” says Streithorst. “The American foreign policy establishment rarely admits it, but the US is by far the safest country on the planet. Unlike China or Russia or Israel or Iran or Congo or Ukraine we have no enemies on our doorstep.”
Were it not for the constant slanted news from the media, Streithorst has faith in the common sense of the average American voter: “The control of some territory halfway around the world does not strike the average American as being vital to the security or prosperity of the United States.”