There's More to Life Than War and Competition
First Principles of the International Order
I've drafted ten sets of remarks for that stage over three administrations (for military and civilian leaders). The president suffered narcissistic injury last night but there's another reason he wasn't on that stage today. He sees only one side of life.
After the president's first visit overseas in 2017, H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled "America First Does Not Mean America Alone."
The op-ed stated: "Simply put, America will treat others as they treat us." And "The world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage."
One month later, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and German Minister of Defense Ursula von der Leyen visited the George C. Marshall Center in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, to commemorate the 70th Anniversary of the Marshall Plan. They reflected on the Hinge of History after WWII.
"Sometimes, it is necessary to pause and recall first principles. We can kind of take things for granted after a while if we do not. We need to remind ourselves of why we initially embarked on a path…of why free people of Europe, Canada, and the United States made a conscious decision to codify our transatlantic partnership and dare to bind our nations by treaty to collective defense.”
“Our nations experienced the horrors that can only happen when freedom is imperiled, when peaceful pursuits of civilized life are suspended, when deterrence fails and our societies are engulfed in total war. When at enormous cost, the force of arms had restored peace to this continent, the peoples of our nations gazed on the destruction."
"Longing for a safer future, the Greatest Generation saw their own security in the security of others…They also had the courage to act, not just to look at it, not just to talk about it…to make the necessary sacrifices and to make genuine commitments to keep the peace. That generation, schooled by life's cruelties, by severe economic deprivation and the death of friends and family members, stood face-to-face with the competitive, zero sum side of life."
"The vileness of the Second World War, waged on a scale unimagined perhaps other than by those with memories of having lived through it, nevertheless left the generation aware that there is more to life than war and competition alone."
"Western values, respect for a rules-based order and for national sovereignty, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the dignity of the human person, these are values worth defending."
"...Out of destruction…our peoples built a grand new world, the Bretton Woods Institutions, the IMF and the World Bank, the United Nations, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade… Marshall's generation built these tools to help underwrite stability and prosperity. The last seventy years have proven the value of these institutions and the wisdom of that generation.”