George Washington wanted to justly secure the attachments of all good men because he didn’t simply want to dominate the British — he wanted to form a nation. Lincoln gave the sober Second Inaugural Address instead of a blustery, Hegseth-style speech of raining death upon the women and children, because he wanted to heal a nation. Our victory in World War II was secured not only with an atomic bomb but also with the Marshall Plan and the decades-long commitment of men and resources to develop democracies in Japan and Germany. And even in America’s failed wars launched with idealistic aims, like Vietnam and the Iraq war, our defeats were often related to a failure to fully comprehend that peoples in other countries have their own passions and ideals, that they might not simply be projections of our own desires, wanting what we want them to want, and loathing what we want them to loathe. When Stephen Miller talked about our troops not fighting with their hands tied behind their backs, he was referring to a popular conservative myth about the Vietnam War, that we might have won had we only exercised less restraint. We dropped millions of tons of bombs and left at least 2 million civilians dead, but perhaps if we’d really gone scorched earth and killed 2 million more, the Vietnamese would have loved us and embraced the rulers we foisted upon them. Anyone who took our founding ideals seriously, though, would know that was a particularly vile form of folly. The line between ambition and obsession can be much thinner than one might imagine Don. You would be well served to look down and see exactly where you are standing.
