We Dare Not Tempt Them With Weakness

 

by: John Nantz
Published: April 17, 2024

 

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered his inaugural address and said, “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.”

Kennedy faced bleak prospects with world-wide communism on the march, championed by the great Russian bear with Khrushchev lashing the whip (the great butcher Stalin had barely been dead eight years), the coiling red dragon of Maoist China, and Warsaw Pact thralls. The great proxy war of the time was Vietnam. America’s youth were pressed into service and often fed into a meat grinder of political ineptitude and intransigence. It was America’s first major war run by the feckless denizens of the State Department and politicians whose blood ran pink.  

Cultural Marxism erupted throughout America’s social strata. Hippie protestors swelled the ranks of useful idiots, while American liberalism began to gleefully adopt the philosophies of the collectivist. Academe was earnestly inculcating the next generation of radicals, filling American government, Hollywood, and media with the ideological devotees of Mao, and Stalin. Their high priest was Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals and guru to Hillary Clinton.  

Little did Kennedy imagine that he’d face one of the most grave threats to civilization in history — the Cuban missile crisis — having first offered to the world an olive branch, “…to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.” From the U.S. arsenal alone, that destruction would have been accomplished by a nuclear stockpile 600,000 times as destructive as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — almost a year later in 1962, the Cuban blockade would take place. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists would set the Doomsday Clock to seven minutes to midnight. 

But, in 1961 Kennedy knew, instinctively, that an olive branch is meaningless where the sword lies impotent with rust and lack of skill to animate it. “We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.”  

Today, weakness abounds, and America’s sword lies in feeble, liver-spotted hands. Tyranny still marches on, and like the “man of wealth and taste” in The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil, evil wears many names. Israel knows him by the names Hamas and Iran. The conflict between the Israelis and Persians is as old as Isaac, the son of promise, and Ishmael, the son of the flesh. The sons and daughters of Ishmael have sold themselves in servitude to a false prophet and a false god who pits them in opposition to a people who’ve occupied the Levant for millennia and hold the land by right of Divine grant and conquest.  

Sunday, Iran embarked on open hostilities with Israel. There is no doubt Iran is emboldened by Biden’s breathtaking weakness. Some reports indicate Iran informed Turkey of the impeding missile and drone attacks with the U.S. (meaning the Biden Administration) counseling Iran to keep the operation “within certain limits.” Though the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), U.S. military, and Jordanians responded with incredible efficiency, destroying 99% of the hundreds of Iranian missiles, Israel should respond in proportion to the lives threatened by the fanatics in Tehran. 

As President Kennedy counseled in 1961, Israel should not “tempt them with weakness.” The Iranian attacks should redouble the Israeli determination to reassert it’s millennia-old claim to the Gaza Strip, and provide relief to its inhabitants, which are nothing more than human shields to the barbarians of Hamas and their overlords in Tehran.  

What Israel faces today is no different than what America faced during the cold war. In fact, the threat to Israel is far greater. And, America owes the same filial duty to support its only democratic friend in the Middle East. America cannot shirk its duty and very real interests in opposing the Islamist foe and ensuring the survival and success of liberty in Israel.  

The grand mistake of Vietnam was in failing to fight for a definable victory. In military terms, the complete and total annihilation of enemy forces and the destruction of his national fighting spirit. The communists were well aware of the impossibility of destroying the U.S. war machine, so they focused on America’s fighting spirit. They were largely successful through the use of their fellow travelers in the media, culture, and politics. We are no less subject to the machinations of international totalitarianism and their pawns in government and academe. 

Today, Israel is a far more critical component of our national interest than Vietnam in the 1960s, a relative backwater in South East Asia. At the time, Vietnam was rightly considered a critical domino in geopolitical strategy. Israel is not just critically important as the lone outpost of democracy in the Middle East, but is most importantly of critical religious and cultural importance to the U.S. Our democracy is founded on the Judeo-Christian principles revealed and developed during the history and within the geography of Israel’s promised land.  

Comparatively, U.S. interests in Ukraine are infinitesimal, beyond humanitarian interests concerning the sufferings of the Ukrainian people as pawns in a cruel game of politics, and a callous, but highly lucrative, military-industrial complex arms trade deals. 

Israel deserves the kind of American resolve demonstrated during the Cuban missile crisis. But, Biden is no Kennedy. He’s a husk. Currently, the Doomsday Clock is set at 90 seconds to midnight. Biden isn’t just a national disaster, he’s a global catastrophe. The destabilization in the Middle East is directly attributable to his ignoring one of Trump’s great achievements — the Abraham Accords. Democrats push the hands of the Doomsday Clock ever closer to midnight, as they weakly play their partisan small ball, while the rest of the world burns.