In a speech to be delivered Thursday night at the Reagan Library in California, Nebraska GOP senator Ben Sasse takes aim at isolationists on the left and the right.
“The American people don’t like feckless leaders who humiliate the nation, as the last and current administrations did in bowing to the Taliban,” Sasse will say, according to speech excerpts previewed by National Review. “The American people don’t like defeat. But defeat is exactly where the loud isolationists — long of the left and now of the right — have demanded we go.”
“The catastrophe in Afghanistan is a stark example of how defeat-ism at home produces chaos abroad,” Sasse continues. “The new isolationists present themselves as hardheaded realists, but it’s not true. They’re the ones with stars in their eyes as they ostrich-see only one side of a balance sheet. They pretend that retreat from the world can focus us on ‘nation-building at home,’ and that this can come at no cost. But in reality, national security involves actual trade-offs. And the retreat they champion comes at a hard, high price.”
Sasse goes on to warn that the “defining national security question of the next two decades is whether we will have a second ‘American Century,’ or whether it will be a [Chinese Communist Party]–led order.”
Some more excerpts of the speech (which may be viewed live starting at 9:00 p.m. Eastern here):
Since the earliest days of the Progressive Movement a hundred years ago, we’ve always had a “Blame America First” crowd that was ready to tell us why America was evil, then why America could not possibly beat the Soviets, why America could never be anything more than the sum of her sins. What’s different now is that we have so many on the Right who have joined them. More false prophets of pessimism, just from a different heretical sect. But fundamentally, they have the same message. In the 2016 Presidential campaign, you had two candidates with wildly different solutions, but their fundamental diagnosis was the same: “The system is rigged, you’re getting screwed, you’re a victim, this country is going down the tubes.”
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The prophets of doom tradition has always told us that our problems are too big, too insurmountable. They tell us we have no agency. They tell us we’re powerless. And when people feel powerless, when we identify as the victims of our stories — instead of the children of heroes and the authors of our own destiny — we slip into the lazy, comfortable slouch of decline. You hear it everywhere today: “We’re backsliding as a nation,” “our core is rotten,” “we need to turn inward,” “this country used to be great.” These stories are wrong — but they’re dominant today, and if they long dominate, in self-government, perception can become reality.
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Think how long it’s been since the American people have heard a big, optimistic, Reagan-like aspirational message. A 33-year-old American has only seen a Republican President win the popular vote once in her entire lifetime (and that was in the aftermath of 9/11 when the Dems decided to run a throwback anti-war candidate from the 1960s). Who is trying to win this woman’s vote? Shouldn’t the Republican party have something to say to her? We’ve got to do better. We’ve got to be speaking to people who tuned both parties out long ago. We’ve got to be speaking to men and women who can’t stand preach-to-the-choir-politics because in the real world they’re the ones getting things done.