The following bullet points should be nailed to the front door of the Pentagon:
- The Korean War saved South Korea from communism but was not a military victory.
- The Vietnam War was a lengthy, humiliating, and costly defeat.
- We intervened in Somalia and the Balkans for humanitarian reasons with little real success.
- We fought an “endless” and indecisive war in Iraq.
- We fought and lost a 20-year war in Afghanistan.
- We fought an ill-fated Global War on Terror which reduced our influence in the Middle East.
After more than 30 years of interventionism abroad coupled with more than a decade of emphasizing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies within the armed services, the United States is less secure than Ronald Reagan left us in 1989.
The leaders running the Pentagon for the past 30 years have demonstrably failed.
We need a fresh start in that massive building in Arlington County just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.
Pete Hegseth, who President-elect Trump plans to nominate as Secretary of Defense, is just the person to implement that fresh start.
During that 30-year time period since the end of the Cold War, there were two major exceptions to this record of failure: the first Gulf War in 1991, which was fought for the limited purpose of reversing Iraq’s conquest of Kuwait and possible aggression toward Saudi Arabia; and the mostly anti-interventionist policies of the first Trump administration. The first Trump administration came the closest of any post-Cold War administration to replicate the “peace through strength” approach of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
Ronald Reagan won the Cold War by restoring pride in our armed services after the debacle of Vietnam and the disastrous Carter administration. He implemented a needed conventional and nuclear weapons build-up to offset a decade and a half of a Soviet military build-up. He jump-started our economy to support crucial defense increases. He waged successful political/economic/subversive warfare against the Soviet empire to exploit Soviet economic and political vulnerabilities, which caused the “evil empire” to collapse.
The Reagan administration did not engage in endless wars and did not expend U.S. lives and resources in waging war for humanitarian purposes. Reagan used “human rights” as a cudgel to injure the Soviet empire. Unlike Carter, Reagan did not make human rights the centerpiece of his foreign policy. Reagan and his national security team—Casper Weinberger, George Shultz, Richard Allen, William Clarke, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Colin Powell, George H.W. Bush—won the Cold War without firing a shot (except for a brief and successful skirmish on the island of Grenada).
Pete Hegseth will bring to the position of Secretary of Defense an infantryman’s experience in the endless and futile wars of the first two decades of the 21st century.
The Gulf War beginning in 1991 was created for dick cheney to gain wealth from weapons sales and the bush family selling oil.