June 6, 2024, marks the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings.
We’re now four generations removed from that fateful day, and only a handful of its veterans are still alive to remind us of the lessons America should learn from that war.
Before World War 2, America was isolationist, and caught up in “America First” shortsightedness.
America didn’t enter the war until directly attacked at Pearl Harbor. Germany declared war on the U.S. three days later.
After World War 2, a succession of U.S. administrations fostered a global “rules based” order that enabled the world to rebuild and prevented the outbreak of another global war. Those presidents also fought a series of “preventive” wars, which were uniformly unpopular with the American public and usually career-ending for those presidents.
Harry Truman, who presided over the last months of World War 2, took America into the unpopular Korean War that forced him into retirement. Twenty years after World War 2 ended, LBJ led America into the Vietnam War, intending to prevent communism from spreading into Southeast Asia and threatening India. Even more unpopular than Korea, that war forced him into retirement.
From these experiences, America’s presidents have learned to be cautious about sending U.S. forces into combat. In the 1990s, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton thwarted aggression in Kuwait and Kosovo by relying on air power, avoiding the casualties of ground combat.
But in 2001, another direct attack on the U.S. aroused the American public, and George W. Bush took advantage of public anger to fight an elective war in Iraq with U.S. ground troops. He went into retirement as another unpopular president.
Approaching the 2024 election, Americans focused on inflation and other domestic issues are overlooking a serious foreign policy danger. The candidates are starkly different. Biden is supporting Ukraine, while Trump and his party embrace shortsighted “America First” isolationism.
The lesson of World War 2 is that appeasing aggressive dictators is dangerous. But polls showing Trump and the GOP ahead suggest current generations of Americans have learned nothing from the blood sacrifices of their fathers and grandfathers.