The new generations have often redone the paths that led their ancestors to destruction. Today America’s elites are retreating from harsh diplomacy, disarming the military and appeasing their nation’s rivals, just as their ancestors did after WWI.

At the time, the democratic world was reeling from the bloodshed of the Great War and the ravages of an influenza pandemic. In Russia, Italy, Germany and Japan, dictatorships have emerged from the rubble.

Yet Britain and France held the preponderance of economic and military power – until the elites in London and Paris broke down. As George Kennan noted, it was not the ordinary citizen who abandoned the King and the Country or the Third Republic; it is the best and the brightest who have lost heart. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the United States trusted treaties that prohibited war and proceeded to dismantle American naval power in the name of world peace.

>>> US military strength index

Democracies were only choked when dictatorships marched in Ethiopia, Albania and Manchuria. In 1936, Adolf Hitler sent 22,000 troops to the Rhineland. Panzer Commander Heinz Guderian later said his orders were to withdraw if a single French regiment showed up. The French never came. The totalitarians were marching. Eventually, the road of passivity and appeasement led to another world war.

Today, the military power of dictatorships is strengthening. A new axis has formed: China, Russia and Iran. And democracy is retreating again – in the South China Sea, in Ukraine, in Afghanistan and in the Middle East.

The lessons of the 20th century in deterrence, tough diplomacy and military force have been lost in a miasma of awakened multilateralism and what Mark Helprin calls “performative diplomacy”. How else to explain the obsession of the Biden administration to relaunch the 2015 nuclear agreement, which Tehran considers a simple speed bump on its road to Persian hegemony at the crossroads of three continents?

While the Oxford Union pledged never to fight for Britain in 1933, our own Secretary of State invited the United Nations Human Rights Council (whose members include the China, Russia, Cuba and Venezuela) to determine whether the United States is an irreparably racist nation. Our elites believe they exist to, at best, manage America’s decline.

We are disarming again. The Biden administration’s defense budget proposal for fiscal 2022 is less than the minimum 3% increase over inflation needed to meet current demands and prepare for future challenges.

To cope with this constrained budget, the administration has decided to limit naval construction resources, to reduce the training available to the army, to shorten the number of in-flight refuellers essential to the current generation of Air fighters. Strength and further reduce the size of the Marine Corps. . In its current state, the US military is only marginally capable of meeting the challenges that lie ahead, and Russia and China will continue to aggressively modernize and expand their armed forces. New budgetary constraints will only hamper our ability to respond.

>>> Improvement of the national defense authorization law for fiscal year 2022

As the Commander-in-Chief declares climate change the greatest threat to American security and forces the military to tighten their belts and distract themselves with witch hunts for “extremists” in the ranks, the People’s Liberation Army Daily says China must go to war with America. Taiwan is now in the crosshairs, and with it, the sea and air routes that control access to Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, Australia and India.

If we don’t wake up, we face an unimaginable cataclysm more destructive than any conflict we have ever seen. Our way of life and thousands of years of Western progress and tolerance are at stake. Ordinary Americans who have not given in are still here. We need them to save us again. Winston Churchill warned that the most lamentable words in the English language are “too late”. We still have time, but it is running out.