PHOENIX—On wings high above the Arizona landscape, I’m reading my latest mailing from the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars and pondering what would have befallen the western democracies had not the 28th president decided to make the U.S. into a world power on the international stage.
Although Wilson was a Democrat—and on the domestic front a social reformer in the league of fellow Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt—he pushed America into the First World War.
It was then game over for Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany.
There’s much talk currently—horrifying to the mish-mash of oddities who call themselves Democrats today—that President George W. Bush follows a Wilsonian policy in international affairs.
Well, it’s true—the 43rd president is very much of the linage of Wilson and so, indeed, was Roosevelt. FDR battled isolationist forces to bring the U.S. into the Second World War, aided fortunately by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. But for the U.S. entry, Adolf Hitler would have won that conflict with nightmarish results.
President Harry Truman, who followed Roosevelt, not only had the guts to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also then went on to contain Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s treacherous plan to expand his evil empire all across Western Europe.
One really has to wonder how Democrats Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman would regard the weak-kneed Democratic party today, a party of appeasement. Well, all three would probably be Republicans and cheering Bush along.
Truman also called a halt to Communist aggression in Korea, backed by both Canada and Britain. But for South Korea being Democratic today, that maniac Kim Jong-Il, who boasts about his nuclear arsenal, would be running a nation twice the size he does now.
Truman was followed by Republican Dwight Eisenhower, a politician-warrior, who largely carried on the Truman doctrine of keeping Stalin and his henchmen at bay.
We then come to President John F. Kennedy, largely responsible for getting the U.S. into Vietnam in a big way. Again a Democrat with blood in his veins, Kennedy’s plan was to prevent Southeast Asia falling to the Communists. Not daring to use the atomic bomb—one single bomb would have done it—and battled increasingly by Lib-Left news media, the U.S. became bogged down in Vietnam with disastrous results.
Republican contender Barry Goldwater had planned to campaign on turning North Vietnam into one big parking lot, and might well have won the 1964 presidential election had not Kennedy been assassinated in 1963.
With that, Lyndon Johnson, a right-wing Democrat, became president, and had the entire mess of Vietnam tossed into his lap. Not knowing which way to turn in a divided party and country and exhausted, he backed out of running for a second term. That was a tragedy, since Johnson was a master politician.
But it brought the much-maligned Richard Nixon on the scene, who saw with clear eyes the nation was tired of the Vietnam debacle, and so pretty much surrendered to the Communists. It’s ironic—and that much misused word is correct in this case—how a man who built his reputation on battling Communism threw in his gloves in this instance.
After Nixon, we have the short-lived presidency of Gerald Ford, who foolishly declared the Polish people, staggering under the Soviet heel, did not regard themselves as a “captive people.”
With that, every Polish and other Eastern European vote in the next election in 1977 went to the feeble-minded but egotistical Jimmy Carter.
Carter stumbled around almost from Day One, so it was relatively easy for Republican Ronald Reagan to knock off the Democratic incumbent just four years later.
We now know just what a historical juggernaut that became, because Reagan, together with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul, then went on to destroy the Soviet empire and free hundreds of millions of enslaved people.
In Bush’s steadfast foreign policy are all kinds of nuances—or stamps—of the warrior presidents from Wilson on.
One day, Bush, too, will be seen as a hero for battling world terrorism.
His detractors will be scorned for their cowardice.
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