In Ankara, democratically elected Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoan has moved his country away from its previously secular and Western orientation and toward Islamism and America’s enemies. Europe is partly responsible, as it has rejected the Turks’ requests for membership in the European Union for more than a decade. If Europe says no to Turkey, and America says no to Turkey, then perhaps one day soon, it will be Iran or Russia eating a Turkey sandwich. The United States should be doing what it can in terms of diplomatic, political, and economic incentives to move Turkey back to a pro-Western stance. “Who lost Turkey?” might be as devastating a question as “Who lost Egypt?”
And in Tripoli, because of Obama and the Europeans’ failure to guide Libya’s revolution, the Islamists are running wild and may turn that nation into a base for al-Qaeda and other terrorists—a base much closer to Europe and the United States than was Afghanistan. It may not be too late to try to move Libya to a more pro-Western orientation. If Gadhafi were able to see the virtues of working with the United States, his successors may as well, but the United States must move fast to get in there before the militants become completely entrenched.
In dealing with terrorism more broadly, Team Obama has seen the virtues of using sophisticated drones to locate, identify, and take out terrorist suspects around the world—until it allowed the biggest state sponsor of terror, Iran, to get its hands on one. Once Tehran was assumed to have passed off the drone technology to Moscow, Beijing, and who knows who else, our stealth technology was rendered more vulnerable. Former vice president Dick Cheney reported that he heard that Obama was presented with three options to either recover or destroy the drone before the Iranians could take possession of it. Cheney said Obama rejected all three. Permitting Tehran to get the drone was the quintessential example of Obama redistributing American power to the world. Take one of our most high-tech defenses and give it to a sworn enemy? Why not? America’s greatness belongs to everyone!
Nuclear proliferation also remains a major problem, with the nuclear pipeline constantly flowing among Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, and Venezuela, among other rogue nations. The sensitive job of identifying and securing nuclear materials and enforcing international protocols against their transfer ought to be of the highest priority for the next administration.
Furthermore, Obama chose to kill high-level al-Qaeda terrorists rather than deal with the legal hassles of interrogation and detention, but he has opted to keep open the detainee facilities at both Guantánamo Bay and Bagram, Afghanistan. Capturing terrorist suspects and subjecting them to aggressive interrogation can yield valuable intelligence that disrupts terrorist attacks and saves American lives—as it has over the past ten years. In some cases, killing them may be the right choice; in others, capturing and interrogating them may be wiser. We desperately need a coherent legal framework and detainee policy going forward. We need something beyond Barack Obama and Eric Holder sitting a bunch of al-Qaeda terrorists in a circle and playing Duck, Duck, Goose to decide who goes where.
There are many other areas of the world that are crying out for greater U.S. attention, such as Latin America, which continues to be roiled by leftists, drug cartels, migration issues, and the growing influence of China there, and Africa, which continues to struggle with the AIDS epidemic, rampant corruption, grinding poverty, and spreading Islamism. Since we’re broke, we’re severely constrained in terms of what we can do in those regions, but we should use diplomatic and political levers to try to guide greater pro-democratic, pro-market outcomes that will eventually help to alleviate some of their seemingly intractable problems.
The United States also needs to put the United Nations back in its proper place. While the body has its uses, particularly with some refugee missions, it is a scandal-plagued viper’s pit of tyrant love and rampant anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. It’s also hyper-resistant to any kind of reform that would bring greater effectiveness, greater transparency, greater accountability, and less moral relativism. While the United States should remain in the UN, we should make clear that we will use the body when possible but we will not be used by it. International organizations will have our leadership and participation, but only when it serves our interests.
The days of a servile, apologetic, groveling, and weak America need to come to a close. And a new day of strong, vibrant, unapologetic, muscular American global leadership must dawn. In this new world, enemies will once again respect and fear us, allies will trust us, and those who want to challenge us will think twice. Good-bye, kook foreign policy; hello to the Happy Warrior approach.
The Battle Cry of the Happy Warrior
* * *
Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I attack.
—Marshal Ferdinand Foch, France, 1914
In 1977, Margaret Thatcher, then the leader of the opposition in Great Britain, delivered a major speech to the Zurich Economic Society. By then, it was clear to almost everyone that under the “old” Labour government, Britain was weak, flailing, lost, crushed by deadening statism. The country was broke and held hostage by its powerful unions, which used paralyzing strikes to extort huge demands. Garbage piled up on every corner, courtesy of striking sanitation workers. Dead bodies rotted in the open air, thanks to striking grave-diggers. Inefficient state-run industries and suffocating regulations had turned the once-great empire into a socialist Third World backwater. The moment was ripe for a strong leader who refused to resign herself and her nation to such a fate. The moment was ripe for someone to reverse the economic stagnation caused by the corrosive effects of socialism and to tell the truth about what reversing national decline would require. The moment was ripe for an alternative based on pro-growth capitalism, individual freedom, and moral leadership. The moment was right for Margaret Thatcher, Happy Warrior.
“Where the state is too powerful,” she said, “efficiency suffers and morality is threatened. Britain in the last two or three years provides a case study of why collectivism will not work. It shows that ‘progressive’ theory was not progressive. On the contrary, it proved retrograde in practice. That is a lesson that democrats all over the world should heed.”
Thatcher didn’t shrink from making the brutally honest case against socialism: “In the end,” she had thundered, “the real case against socialism is not its economic inefficiency, though on all sides there is evidence of that. Much more fundamental is its basic immorality.”
Ah, a leader who was unafraid to make the moral case for the free market! A leader who rejected declinism with every fiber of her being and who made it her life’s work to reverse it by cutting taxes, restraining spending, privatizing industries, deregulating, reining in inflation, subduing the unions, and flexing British military muscle. The dislocation was severe and the political opposition intense; at its lowest, her job approval sank to 23 percent. She was, however, ultimately vindicated by a long, sustained cycle of economic growth and national optimism. In the end, she had defied the critics, cowards, thugs, and defeatists to do what they had deemed impossible: she had restored Britain’s greatness.
In her Zurich speech, Thatcher also did something as critical as laying out a policy program. She hit a powerfully sunny note: “Yet I face the future with optimism. Our ills are creating their own antibodies. Just as success generates problems, so failure breeds the will to fight back and the body politic strives to restore itself.”
Thatcher struck a chord that made her and her political soul mate, President Reagan, extremely effective reformers. They believed in their nations. They believed in their people. And they believed in the regenerative dynamism of liberty. In times of crisis, we have always created our own antibodies for survival, mending, and a return to full health. This is why Obama will fail when it comes to his single biggest goal. He wanted to be a transformational president, but instead he has been merely a transitional one because he always refused to take into account the larger view of
how his short-term disruptions to the American dream would be judged by history once they’d been completely undone in the ensuing years, which is almost a certainty.
The great American comeback begins with each of us. It’s up to us to make the “what the @$%&! just happened?” moment an anomaly in American history, a brief aberration that did a lot of damage but is fixable with the right leadership and policies. The circumstances of today’s American crisis are different from those faced by Reagan and Thatcher, but the basic challenge is largely the same: to reverse corrosive leftism and its attendant decline. We need to take this “what the @$%&! just happened” moment and turn it into a question on Jeopardy! under the category “Weird American Acid Trips.”
But we’ve got to move fast. Time is not on our side as the tentacles of kookdom wrap themselves around our governing institutions, private sector, and every other aspect of our lives. After an unmistakable electoral repudiation of Obama, his leftist agenda, and those who pushed it, the next key to unleashing America is to get the rest of us to uproot the toxic and ravenous nanny state, replace it with the limited government, economically free model, and do the hard work of rallying the public to the comeback. None of this will be easy, and success is not guaranteed. The problems are immense, the entitlement culture is entrenched, and the kooks will not go down without a NatGeo Serengeti-style fight. But America still possesses huge strengths economically, politically, militarily, culturally, and constitutionally.
Most significant, it has us. At every major turning point—the founding, the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, the civil rights struggle, the malaise of the late 1970s—we have produced leaders who were prepared for the fight to restore the nation. But it was the American people who led the charge. We have always known that we don’t have to settle for anything less than the Founders’ ideal and that we don’t have to put up with con men and other sundry kooks as they butcher the Constitution. This time is no different. Team Obama and his wingmen moved with all deliberate speed, and so must we.
Most important, we must do it as Happy Warriors, infusing the ferocity of the mission with an optimistic, joyful love of America. Nattering nabobs of negativity don’t score big in battles over the future. Reagan and Thatcher succeeded largely because their messages were correct on policy and positive in attitude. We need to summon courage and selflessness. We need to tell the truth about what’s happened and what’s required—of all of us—to get us back on the rails. If we want America restored to AAA status in every way, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. Disaster may be all around us but, like Marshal Foch, we say, “Situation excellent.” And we attack.
This is our battle cry, Happy Warriors. It’s time to get back to the idea of Big America (as opposed to Big-Government America): high growth economically, powerful militarily, strong politically, dynamic culturally, and adventurous from sea to space. It’s time to reclaim American Exceptionalism—without exception.
The path toward national salvation will be arduous and long, but we must undertake it lest we truly do lose our exceptional country to the malign forces of redistributionism and degradation. On the day that exceptionalism was codified in the Declaration of Independence, the Liberty Bell rang out. A witness to history said, “It rang like it meant something.” This nation of reinvigorated Happy Warriors must do the hard work to get that Liberty Bell ringing like it means something again. We are, after all, the nation of renewal, opportunity, and reinvention.
At the end of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is told by Glinda the Good Witch that the power to go home was within her all along. And so it is with us. The ability to “fundamentally restore” America to its timeless principles has been with us all along. And like Dorothy, we had to learn that for ourselves. If we summon our true Happy Warrior spirit, grit, and determination, we can make America America again. We can go home again, and at the same time, America—our birthright, our heritage, our home—will return to us.
INDEX
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AARP, 130
Abbas, Mahmoud, 301
ABC News, 71
Abdullah, king of Saudi Arabia, 69, 137, 215, 355
Abdulmutallab, Umar Farouk, 220
ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), 34, 41, 68, 130, 166
Adbusters, 166
Afghanistan
Bagram Air Base as detention facility, 225, 357
Bush and, 207
need for foreign policy changes, 353, 354–55
Obama’s foreign policy and, 214, 218, 240–46, 306–7
AFL-CIO, 130, 166
Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 248
Alabama, 292
Al Arabiya television, 213
Alinsky, L. David, 43
Alinsky, Saul, 12, 40–42, 62–63, 167
Al-Maliki, Nouri, 348–49
Almari, Saleh, 230
Alternative Minimum Tax, 157
American Civil Liberties Union, 291
American Economic Journal, 155
American exceptionalism, 3–29
foundations of, 5, 7–8, 15–16
Happy Warrior concept and, 22–26
Left’s “virtuous” redistribution and, 7–10, 26–28
Obama on, 6
reclaiming of, 361
shattering of assumptions about, 3–4
socialism and, 10–11
U.S. citizens’ anger over Left’s statism, redistribution, and notion of American decline, 13–21
American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), 195
American International Group (AIG), 97
American Jobs Act, 177
AmeriCorps, 95
Amherst, Massachusetts, 227
Angelou, Maya, 74
anger. See also public opinion
of Left, 20–21
of U.S. citizens, 13–20
Apollo Alliance, 130
Arab Spring revolts, 247–48, 303. See also specific countries by name
Arizona, 290–92, 294, 295
Arizona State University, 218
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, 283
Assad, Bashar al-, 261–62
Associated Press, 56, 110–11, 221
Attack Watch website, 58
Attkisson, Sharyl, 58, 294–95
Audacity of Hope, The (Obama), 46
automobile industry, 67, 68, 99–102
Awlaki, Anwar al-, 214, 221, 236
Axelrod, David
background, 43
as Obama adviser, 45, 52
Obama’s political rise and, 33–37
Ayers, Bill, 258, 302
background, 12, 39, 40–41, 320
Occupy Wall Street and, 41, 167–68
Badi, Mohammed al-, 256–57
Bagram Air Base, as detention facility, 225, 357
Bahrain, 355
bailouts
of automobile companies, 99–102
of financial institutions, 97–99
balanced-budget amendment, proposed, 341–42
Ban Ki-Moon, 137
banks
bailouts of, 98
Community Reinvestment Act’s effect on lending by, 179–80
Barr, Roseanne, 153
Baucus, Max, 154
Bayh, Evan, 25
Beck, Glenn, 67, 165
Ben Ali, Zine el-Abidine, 247
Berkeley, California, 227
Bernstein, Jared, 171, 172
Biden, Joe
Afghanistan and, 242
“green jobs” and, 93
Iraq and, 239
Israel and, 301
on Obama, 12, 209
unemployment and, 148, 170–71
Bigelow, Kathryn, 235
bin al-Shibh, Ramzi, 226, 229
bin Laden, Osama, 230, 233–35
Black Pan
ther voter intimidation, 296
Black September movement, 264
Bloom, Ron, 67
Bloomberg, Michael, 153, 221
Bloomberg News, 100
“Blue Dog” Democrats, 25–26
Boehner, John
stimulus bill and, 90
taxes and, 158
U.S. debt and, 106, 120–21
Boeing Company, 178–79
Bolden, Charles, 215
Bolton, John, 26, 218–19
Boston Herald, 58
Boston Tea Party, 15
Bouazizi, Mohamed, 247
Bowles, Erskine, 115
Braun, Carol Moseley, 43
Breuer, Lanny, 296
Brewer, Jan, 290, 291
Brokaw, Tom, 75–76
Brown, Scott, 69
Browner, Carol, 66
Buckley, William F., 4
Buffett, Warren, 155, 158–61
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). See Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal
Burke, Dennis, 297
Bush, George H. W., 23, 337
Bush, George W.
counterterrorism policy, 219–36, 325
failure to cut entitlement spending, 85
freedom agenda for Middle East, 248
Gadhafi and, 265
Obama’s attack on foreign policy of, 207
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and, 28–29
TARP and, 97, 99
taxes and, 150, 151, 156
U.S. debt and, 112, 113
Cahyono, Widianto Hendro, 56
Cain, Herman, 336
Calderón, Felipe, 287, 292
California, 70
campaign financing, in 2008, 152–53
Canter, David, 43
Cantor, Eric, 118
cap and trade, 181, 182
capitalism and free market Bloom on, 67
Left’s disdain for, 40–41, 83, 188
moral case for, 319–20
Obama and, 320–22
Smith’s invisible hand and, 82
card check, 197
Carlos the Jackal, 264
What the (Bleep) Just Happened? Page 40