What We Might Remember This Memorial Day

[Geee]

National Review:


The world is a better place because Adolf Hitler did not preserve his conquest of the European continent, and because the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of Hideki Tojo and his militarists imploded at Midway, Guadalcanal, and Okinawa. Italy and the Mediterranean were far better off without Benito Mussolini and his mad plans for a renewed but debased Roman Empire, which ended on his own Italian soil at exotic-named places like Anzio and Monte Cassino.

The dream of Soviet rulers from Stalin to Brezhnev was a global gulag overseen from the blood-stained Communist Kremlin. It ended only through the 50-year deterrence of the American military. South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan are somehow still free and independent — and would not be without American carriers, jets, and submarines.


Our generation’s own rogues’ gallery of killers — Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Manuel Noriega, and the Taliban — have lost their tyrannies. If South America chooses to become Communist, it will be by its own volition and not because of an unfettered cross-border invasion from Cuba, Nicaragua, or Venezuela. Even our enemies can export or import oil freely from the Middle East without worries of armed intervention or piracy — as long as an American carrier is nearby in the Gulf.