When did America lose its backbone? How did we become a nation of whiners?
This is the country that saved the world from Adolf Hitler, rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan, blockaded Cuba to prevent Soviet missiles in this hemisphere and knocked back the Taliban after 9/11. We have the world’s greatest military and largest economy, with almost 30 percent of all economic activity despite having only 5 percent of the world’s people.
The North Korean regime is one of the worst on earth on every score, from the way it treats its people to the complete lack of human rights. Human Rights Watch and the United Nations say that its lack of human rights is “without parallel in the contemporary world. They include extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape … and other sexual violence … There is no independent media or religious freedom.” Plus, the U.N. now reports North Korea is in league with the Iranians, supplying them with chemical-weapon components.
{mosads}The president, in a policy that echoed previous presidents, laid down a bright line that North Korea cannot have nuclear weapons with intercontinental ballistic missiles. He has added fresh sanctions to North Korea, worked with the Chinese to put pressure on the North, and said in no uncertain terms he means business.
Incredibly, a gaggle of politicians and editorial boards then condemned the president for going overboard. Most Americans now think that we are too tough on North Korea, even while agreeing it’s a heinous rogue regime that cannot be allowed to hold onto nukes. Where is the backbone of America to stare down and isolate this dictator? Rather than support a tough policy to which past presidents gave lip service, elites ran for cover, attacking America for taking a “dangerous” approach to this madman.
Iran has never stopped spreading regional terrorism, has continued to hold onto hostages and is using the Syrian civil war to establish new military presence abutting Israel. The Iran nuclear deal was rammed through despite minority support in Congress and almost no public support at all. The minute that the president suggests standing up to Iran, possibly decertifying the deal, the press goes wild and the elites say we can’t waste the benefits of this incredible deal, even if it allows the Iranians to build intercontinental ballistic missiles and sell their oil on the world marketplace while chanting “Death to America” and repressing their own people.
Another issue the president raised was that NATO members needed to pay their fair share of the collective defense. Again, the press and elites portrayed the president as abandoning the entire NATO alliance, parsing every word in every speech. It turned out that nothing happened other than that our allies, especially the Germans, agreed to up their contributions.
Then, the president said he was going to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to, of all places, its capital. Every other recent president said he was going to do that, but didn’t. Elites and the media sounded the alarm, again, that the entire Mideast would be in flames in no time. Once again, nothing happened and the world moved on.
Now, this same president has suggested raising some tariffs on steel and aluminum. I can’t say whether, overall, it is a good or a bad policy, and the auto and aircraft industries are rightly concerned, but it is a policy meant to benefit workers in some of the hardest-hit areas of the country as opposed to big business, which just received hundreds of billions of dollars of tax breaks. In addition, it is well documented that China is dumping steel in America, costing us jobs here, and so we need a wedge to solve, not ignore, that problem.
Once again, the media and elites have the fire trucks rolling down the streets in full alarm, fearing trade wars, as though the U.S. has the weakest economy on the planet. The U.S. economy is the strongest it has been in more than a generation. The huge trade deficits we run with trading partners like China mean that it’s those countries which are dependent on America’s competitive weakness to create jobs, not the other way around.
Time and time again, the pattern is the same — America seems to be afraid to take on dictators, theocratic regimes, partners who take advantage of us and countries with beggar-thy-neighbor economic policies. The fear of challenging these losing arrangements is so high that, rather than support our country, elites wind up supporting dictators and others who have found America, in the last 25 years, to be an easy mark.
The country has gone through some incredibly sobering experiences, from the loss of the Vietnam war, the morass in Iraq and Afghanistan and the 2009 financial crisis, that have left our national consciousness scarred. Americans have always been a can-do people, and yet these events have so battered the national psyche that today’s reflexive reaction to advancing our interests seems to be fear rather than confidence.
We can’t let past failures prevent us from standing up for what is right, challenging the status quo or establishing bargaining chips to use to negotiate better deals. Regardless of who is president, we have got to stop the endless whining that reinforces a cycle of fear and paralysis. It’s a real world out there and we need to strengthen that part of our national character that has always enabled this country to stand tall and be the one reliable fighter and righter of wrongs in a world that is always producing the next dictator, the next moocher state, and the next ideology that threatens to plunge everything into chaos.
Mark Penn is chairman of the Harris Poll and was pollster and senior adviser to Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton from 1995 to 2008.