President Obama has dangerously surrendered the nation’s
global leadership, but it can be ours again—if we choose his successor wisely.
By DICK CHENEY And LIZ CHENEY
In 1983, as the U.S. confronted the threat posed by the
Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan explained
America’s unique responsibility. “It is up to us in our time,” he said, “to
choose, and choose wisely, between the hard but necessary task of preserving
peace and freedom, and the temptation to ignore our duty and blindly hope for
the best while the enemies of freedom grow stronger day by day.” It was up to
us then—as it is now—because we are the exceptional nation. America has
guaranteed freedom, security and peace for a larger share of humanity than any
other nation in all of history. There is no other like us. There never has
been.
Born of
the revolutionary ideal that we are “endowed by our Creator with certain
inalienable rights,” we were, first, an example to the world of freedom’s
possibilities. During World War II, we became freedom’s defender, at the end of
the Cold War, the world’s sole superpower. We did not seek the position. It is
ours because of our ideals and our power, and the power of our ideals. As
British historian Andrew
Roberts has
observed, “In the debate over whether America was born great, achieved
greatness or had greatness thrust upon her, the only possible conclusion must
be: all three.”
No other
nation, international body or “community of nations” can do what we do. It
isn’t just our involvement in world events that has been essential for the
triumph of freedom. It is our leadership. For the better part of a century,
security and freedom for millions of people around the globe have depended on
America’s military, economic, political and diplomatic might. For the most
part, until the administration of Barack
Obama, we
delivered.
Since Franklin
Roosevelt proclaimed
us the “Arsenal of Democracy” in 1940, Republican and Democratic presidents
alike have understood the indispensable nature of American power. Presidents
from Truman to Nixon, from
Kennedy to Reagan, knew that America’s strength had to be safeguarded, her
supremacy maintained. In the 1940s American leadership was essential to victory
in World War II, and the liberation of millions from the grip of fascism. In
the Cold War American leadership guaranteed the survival of freedom, the
liberation of Eastern Europe and the defeat of Soviet totalitarianism. In this
century it will be essential for the defeat of militant Islam.
Yet
despite the explosive spread of terrorist ideology and organizations, the
establishment of an Islamic State caliphate in the heart of the Middle East,
the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and increasing threats from Iran, China,
North Korea and Russia, President Obama has departed from this 75-year, largely
bipartisan tradition of ensuring America’s pre-eminence and strength.
He has
abandoned Iraq, leaving a vacuum that is being tragically and ominously filled
by our enemies. He is on course to forsake Afghanistan as well.
He has
made dangerous cuts to America’s military. Combined with the sequestration
mandated in the Budget Control Act of 2011, these cuts have, according to
former Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno, left
the Army as unready as it has been at any other time in its history. Chief of
Naval Operations Jonathan
Greenert has
testified that “naval readiness is at its lowest point in many years.”
According to Air Force Chief of Staff Mark Welsh, the
current aircraft fleet is “now the smallest and oldest in the history of our
service.”
For seven
decades, both Republican and Democratic presidents have understood the
importance of ensuring the supremacy of America’s nuclear arsenal. President
Obama seems not to. He has advocated cutting our nuclear force in the naïve
hope that this will persuade rogue regimes to do the same. He has imposed
limits on our ability to modernize and maintain nuclear weapons. He has reduced
the nation’s missile-defense capabilities.
He says
that he is committed to preventing nuclear proliferation. For more than 45
years, presidents of both parties have recognized that the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty is vital in this effort. Signed by 190 countries,
including Iran, the NPT has been arguably the single most effective
multilateral arms-control agreement in history. President Obama stands ready to
gut it. Among the many dangerous deficiencies in his nuclear deal with Iran is
the irreversible damage it will do to the international nonproliferation regime
contained in the NPT.
Allowing
the Iranians to continue to enrich uranium and agreeing to the removal of all
restraints on their nuclear program in a few short years virtually guarantees
that they will become a nuclear-weapons state, thus undermining the fundamental
agreement at the heart of the NPT. President Obama is unraveling this international
structure as part of an agreement that provides a pathway for the world’s worst
state-sponsor of terror to acquire nuclear weapons.
Nearly
everything the president has told us about his Iranian agreement is false. He
has said it will prevent the Iranians from acquiring nuclear weapons, but it
will actually facilitate and legitimize an Iranian nuclear arsenal. He has said
this deal will stop nuclear proliferation, but it will actually accelerate it,
as nations across the Middle East work to acquire their own weapons in response
to America’s unwillingness to stop the Iranian nuclear program.
President
Obama told us he would never accept a deal based on trust. Members of his
administration, including his secretary of energy and deputy national-security
adviser, said the nuclear deal would be verifiable with “anywhere, anytime”
inspections. Instead, the Obama deal provides the Iranians with months to delay
inspections and fails to address past clandestine work at military sites.
Inspections at these sites are covered in secret deals, which is historic,
though not in the way the president claims. Under the reported provisions of
the secret deals, the Iranians get to inspect themselves for these past
infractions. Inevitably these provisions will be cited by the Iranians as a
precedent when they are caught cheating in the future.
The
president has tried to sell this bad deal by claiming that there is no
alternative, save war. In fact, this agreement makes war more, not less,
likely. In addition to accelerating the spread of nuclear weapons across the
Middle East, it will provide the Iranians with hundreds of billions of dollars
in sanctions relief, which even the Obama administration admits likely will be
used to fund terror. The deal also removes restrictions on Iran’s ballistic
missile program; lifts the ban on conventional weapons sales; and lifts
sanctions on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, on the Quds Force, and on Quds
Force Commander Qassem Soleimani. Under Mr. Soleimani’s leadership, the Quds Force
sows violence and supports terror across the Middle East and has been
responsible for the deaths of American service members in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A vote
for the Obama nuclear deal is not a vote for peace or security. It is a vote
for an agreement that facilitates Tehran’s deadly objectives with potentially
catastrophic consequences for the United States and our allies.
The Obama
nuclear agreement with Iran is tragically reminiscent of British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain’s Munich agreement in 1938. Each was negotiated from a position of
weakness by a leader willing to concede nearly everything to appease an
ideological dictator. Hitler got
Czechoslovakia. The mullahs in Tehran get billions of dollars and a pathway to
a nuclear arsenal. Munich led to World War II. The Obama agreement will lead to
a nuclear-armed Iran, a nuclear-arms race in the Middle East and, more than
likely, the first use of a nuclear weapon since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The U.S.
Congress should reject this deal and reimpose the sanctions that brought Iran
to the table in the first place. It is possible to prevent Iran from attaining
a nuclear weapon, but only if the U.S. negotiates from a position of strength,
refuses to concede fundamental points and recognizes that the use of military
force will be required if diplomacy fails to convince Iran to abandon its quest
for nuclear weapons.
As
America faces a world of rising security threats, we must resolve to take
action and shouldn’t lose hope. Just as one president has left a path of
destruction in his wake, one president can rescue us. The right person in the
Oval Office can restore America’s strength and alliances, defeat our enemies,
and keep us safe. It won’t be easy. There is a path forward, but there are
difficult decisions to be made and very little time.
We are
living in what columnist Charles Krauthammer has
called “a hinge point of history.” It will take a president equal to this
moment to lead us through. America needs a president who recognizes that
everything the nation must do requires having a U.S. military with capabilities
that are second to none—on land, in the air, at sea, in space and in
cyberspace. The peace and security of the world and the survival of our freedom
depend on it. We must choose wisely.
As
citizens, we have another obligation. We have a duty to protect our ideals and
our freedoms by safeguarding our history. We must ensure that our children know
the truth about who we are, what we’ve done, and why it is uniquely America’s
duty to be freedom’s defender.
They
should know about the boys of Pointe du Hoc and Doolittle’s
Raiders, the battles of Midway and Iwo Jima. They should learn about the
courage of the young Americans who fought the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge
and the Japanese on Okinawa. They should learn why America was right to end the
war by dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and about the
fundamental decency of a nation that established the Truman
Doctrine, the
Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
They need to know about the horror of the Holocaust, and what it means to
promise “never again.”
They
should know that once there was an empire so evil and bereft of truth it had to
build a wall to keep its citizens in, and that the free world, led by America,
defeated it. They need to know about the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11,
the courage of the first responders and the heroism of the passengers on Flight
93. They should understand what kind of world militant Islam will create if we
don’t defeat it.
They
should learn about great men like George C. Marshall andDwight Eisenhower and
Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. We must teach them what it took to prevail over
evil in the 20th century and what it will take in the 21st. We must make sure
they understand that it is the brave men and women of the U.S. armed forces who
defend our freedom and secure it for millions of others as well.
Our
children need to know that they are citizens of the most powerful, good and
honorable nation in the history of mankind—the exceptional nation. They must
know that they are the inheritors of a great legacy and a great duty. Ordinary
Americans have done heroic things to guarantee freedom’s survival. Now, it is
up to us. Speaking at Omaha Beach on the 40th anniversary of the D-Day
landings, President Reagan put it this way, “We will always remember. We will
always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free.”
Mr. Cheney, former vice president of the United States, and Ms.
Cheney are the authors of “Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful
America,” from which this article was adapted; the book is being published
Sept. 1 by Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions.
