Preserving American Security and Freedom

When President Woodrow Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress on April 2, 1917, to call for a declaration of war against Germany, there was a just and reasonable cause for Congress to authorize that war. German submarines had been sinking boats in the Atlantic Ocean and killing Americans on board.

But Wilson had a grander vision of why America should go to war.

The headline in the Washington Herald the next day said: "President Asks for War Declaration."

"He pointed to the democratization of Russia, and declared the new Russia was a fit partner for a 'League of Honor,'" said the first sentence in the Herald's story about Wilson's speech.

"He declared that the United States proposed to fight for 'the ultimate peace of the world, and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included,'" reported the Herald. "And he placed the entrance of the United States into the war on the broad humanitarian basis that 'the world must be made safe for democracy.'"

"I am not now thinking of the loss of property involved, immense and serious as that is, but only of the wanton and wholesale destruction of the lives of noncombatants, men, women, and children, engaged in pursuits which have always, even in the darkest periods of modern history, been deemed innocent and legitimate," Wilson said of the German attacks on civilian ships.

"Property can be paid for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people cannot be," he said. "The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind. It is a war against all nations. American ships have been sunk, American lives taken, in ways which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of, but the ships and people of other neutral and friendly nations have been sunk and overwhelmed in the waters in the same way."

Wilson then turned from this realistic explanation of why America needed to defend itself against German aggression to applauding the revolution in Russia that had just overturned that nation's tsarist government.

"Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future of peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia?" said Wilson. "Russia was known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all the intimate relationships of her people that spoke their natural instinct, their habitual attitude towards life.

"The autocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, long as it had stood and terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, character, or purpose; and now it has been shaken off and the great, generous Russian people have been added in all their naive majesty and might to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for justice, and for peace."

The same month Wilson delivered this speech, Vladimir Lenin arrived back in Russia, according to Britannica. Lenin, who founded the Russian Communist Party, had been living in exile in Switzerland and had returned to Russia through Germany with the aid of the German government, according to History.com.

By that October, Lenin's Bolsheviks had seized control of the Russian government, and five years later, the Soviet Union was established, according to Britannica. The country that Wilson saw as an emerging democracy became a tyrannical force and enemy of freedom for decades.

It was 88 years after Wilson gave his speech to Congress, in which he described the Russian Revolution as having added the Russian people "to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for justice, and for peace," that President George W. Bush gave his second inaugural address. It was also less than four years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States that were carried out by al-Qaeda, which was then based in Afghanistan.

In his second inaugural address, Bush called for spreading democracy around the world.

"For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny, prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder, violence will gather and multiply in destructive power and cross the most defended borders and raise a mortal threat," said Bush.

"We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion," he said. "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

"So, it is the policy of the United States," Bush said, "to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

After the 9/11 attacks, the United States launched a just and necessary war in Taliban-run Afghanistan, which had provided sanctuary to al-Qaeda.

Almost 10 years after the attacks -- in May 2011 -- U.S. forces raided a compound in Pakistan where al-Qaeda's terrorist leader Osama bin Laden was then hiding, as reported on the FBI's webpage on bin Laden. They killed him.

Ten years later, in August 2021, the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan. That same month, under President Joe Biden, U.S. forces completed their withdrawal from that country.

Bush's vision for "the expansion of freedom in all the world" did not work in Afghanistan.

Going forward, the foreign policy of the United States should not aim to change the nature of other nations. It should aim to preserve the security and freedom of this nation.

To find out more about Terence P. Jeffrey and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

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