Why do
we still commemorate D-Day?
It’s
not a rhetorical question. The event is more distant to us than Custer’s Last
Stand was to the men who stormed the Normandy shore. Those men are nearly all
gone. The tumultuous events that defined them, and which they defined in turn,
are closed chapters in history books that are no longer widely read.
Nor do
we believe any longer in the ideals for which they fought.
Oh, we
sound as if we do. For once, Donald Trump hit the right notes in his speech at
the American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, near Omaha Beach. He paid a
fitting tribute to the veterans, to the fallen in their graves, and to the
institutions that the fallen and the living together made possible.
“To all
of our friends and partners,” he said, “our cherished alliance was forged in
the heat of battle, tested in the trials of war and proven in the blessings of
peace. Our bond is unbreakable.”
But Trump was only
mouthing words. He repeatedly contemplatedwithdrawing the U.S. from NATO
just last year. He considers our European partners to be freeloaders on defense
(which they are) and rip-off artists on trade (which they are not). His America
Firstism is the direct ideological descendant of those who would have let
Britain fall to Hitler to keep America out of the war.
Trump
isn’t alone. Most everyone agrees that defeating the Nazis and liberating those
they enslaved was necessary and right. Fewer agree that free nations, led by
the United States, have an obligation to oppose tyrannies and aid those they
oppress and threaten. A Pew survey from last November found
that only 31 percent of Americans believed that “promoting and defending human
rights in other countries” should be a leading foreign policy priority.
Promoting
democracy? Seventeen percent.
Much of
this is the hangover from Iraq, just as a previous generation’s disenchantment
with foreign-policy idealism was a hangover from Vietnam. Americans have always
wrestled with the question of whether we have the means, wisdom or moral right
to be anyone’s liberator. Rightly so: Heady idealism untempered by realism can
be as destructive in its consequences as a cold realism unmoved by humane
sympathies.
But how
long should the hangover last?
Bashar
al-Assad and Vladimir Putin have resumed their offensive in Syria’s holdout
province of Idlib with another gruesome campaign
of indiscriminate bombing. The world no longer winces. Trump says he
and Kim Jong-un, the world’s most sinister dictator, “fell in love” over the
latter’s “beautiful letters.” Conservatives shrug. The socialist catastrophe in
Venezuela takes an ever-greater toll in lives and misery. Progressives can
hardly seem to form a coherent thought about it other than that America should
stay out.
The
indifference takes an accumulating toll. Repeated and presumptive inaction in
the face of humanitarian atrocities emboldens those who commit the atrocities.
It exposes the language and legal architecture of human rights as feckless
virtue signaling. And it desensitizes us to the suffering of others.
Who, other than a few
journalists and activists, calls attention to the plight of dissidents in Russia, Cuba and Saudi Arabia, or the political prisoners in
China, Iran and North Korea? And who, among today’s Western leaders, is
prepared to speak out on their behalf, much less act?
Looking
at the leaders assembled for the D-Day commemoration — Trump, Theresa May,
Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau and the rest — it was hard to
spot one. Trump practices a crass version of realpolitik,
indifferent to human rights and adulterated by his personal inconstancy and
obsession with “winning.” But his peers are hardly better. Merkel, supposedly
the moral conscience of the West, has been more than happy to cut pipeline deals for Putin’s
benefit.
This is
the West almost as it looked in the 1930s: internally divided and inward
looking, hesitant in the face of aggression, incanting political pieties in
which it no longer believed—and so determined not to repeat the mistakes of the
last war that it sleepwalked its way into the next. The only thing missing is a
skillful political marauder — Trump isn’t him — ready to tear the whole thing down.
If we
really wanted to honor the sacrifices of D-Day, we would do well to learn again
what it is the Allies really fought for — not to save the United States or even
Britain (which by 1944 could not be beaten) but to liberate Europe; not to
defeat an aggressive nation-state but to eradicate a despicable ideology; not
to enjoy the spoils as the victors but to lay the foundations of a just and
enduring peace; not to subsume our values under our interests but to define our
interests according to our values.
“The
price of greatness is responsibility,” Winston Churchill told an audience at Harvard in
1943. The greatest generation was also the most responsible one.
Will it be said of ours that we were the least?
No comments:
Post a Comment