‘Are Americans Ready For War?’ Good Question. Chilling Answer.

We were exchanging small talk with a group of friends and someone asked whether I had done something — read a certain book, seen a movie they had seen, done my gardening, etc. — and I jocularly, albeit with a bit of seriousness the comment deserved, responded that I had been too busy staving off World War III. A strange pall dropped over the conversation, just for a few seconds but long enough to be a materially noticeable phenomenon, as our friends were almost certain that I had gone around the bend and that maybe I should just be humored along like the most famous (and dangerous) Alzheimer’s patient at liberty today. The attitude, not expressed in words but clearly palpable, was that anyone who would be talking openly, with no trace of embarrassment whatsoever, about even the possibility of another World War certainly should not be allowed to be out in polite company to express such outlandish thoughts.

Those were certainly reasonable attitudes considering I am just a used-up old lawyer with not a shred of pretense of being an expert on foreign relations, warfare or any similar areas.

However, when a person who has spent his life studying and writing about those areas and who asks, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, the blunt question “Are Americans Ready For War?," perhaps it would behoove us to listen carefully to his words and the evidence he cites in support of his answer to that question:

No!

It is also significant to note that the speaker of these thoughts, Mark Helprin, is the author of a recent novel, The Oceans and the Stars, as described by the Journal:

The book, which went on sale on Oct. 3, relates fictional circumstances that became far easier to credit four days later. Mr. Helprin’s novel imagines a war launched by Iran against the U.S. and Israel, a political class that views national security exclusively as a means of gaining electoral advantage, a perpetually irritable American president whose chief goal is to avoid blame, and an army of terrorists capable of savagery so repellent that Western elites refuse to contemplate it.

I hasten to add that this will not be a review of this incredible novel, which I consider a masterful treatment of the kind of mindset which gave us the unspeakable savagery of October 7, although I plan to attempt that (daunting) task at some time in the future. What I do hope for this brief post is that it will introduce this most important interview with this master of the flow of history, of the history of warfare, of the absolute necessity for strong leadership in times of “The Gathering Storm”, as Sir Winston phrased it, like we are in at present as he expresses his alarm at the current state of our political “leadership” and the military.

Mr Helprin’s Bona Fides as an Expert in Foreign Relations and Warfare

Before proceeding with a fuller discussion of this interview and the lessons it imparts, it is helpful to note this passage from this column to illustrate the foundation upon which Helprin’s views are based. From the article:

In Mr. Helprin’s office I indulge my habit of scanning other people’s bookshelves, noting row after row of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings, Janes Fighting Ships, Strategic Survey and other technical journals one seldom encounters outside university libraries. “I’ve been reading those cover to cover since the 1960s,” he says. No reader of “The Oceans and the Stars,” or of his many essays and op-eds on war and defense, is likely to doubt him.

Having read his recent novel I can certainly attest to the accuracy of that last statement.

“I Told You So”

The interview got off to a quick start when Mr. Helprin reminded the interviewer of an op-ed he had written in the Wall Street Journal in 1995 in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and six years before September 11, 2001. To say that that column was prescient is to understate the fact, and it should be read in its entirety in order to fully appreciate how uncannily he “saw something others didn’t” in the words of the interviewer. The column was entitled "What to Do About Terrorism, Really," and is accessible here. It is difficult to pick out just one or two passages from this excellent piece of analysis, but the concluding paragraphs are remarkably prophetic in view of the butchery inflicted upon Israel on October 7, 2023, particularly these words:

Terrorism continues, and will continue, because terrorists and their supporters make distinctions of class and race and other divisions of mankind, subordinating the humanity of their victims to the politicical smoke that thinly masks acts of pure bloodlust.

Words spoken 28 years before the massacre in Israel which precisely define the motivations of the Hamas animals: “pure bloodlust.”

A Bastion Strategy

Helprin points to “America’s humiliating 2021 retreat from Afghanistan, a colossal exhibition of weakness and confusion and almost certainly a catalyst of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s attack on Israel.” Because of our faltering in the Middle East, he says, we need to adopt a “bastion strategy”, in which the bastion is the Western Hemisphere. Under the Monroe Doctrine, he reminds us, “Russia, China and other nations may not interfere in this half of the globe, but we may interfere in theirs.” He also feels that while China is the more immediate threat, Europe is “more valuable” for these reasons:

“Our economic relationships to the European nations, which are the greatest other than those with Canada and Mexico. Not just trade, but the interplay of science and culture. We are, in so many ways, joined to Europe as we are to nowhere else. Also physically, in terms of a position in Earth’s geography: If the North Atlantic is controlled by hostile powers, if it falls under Russian dominance, then we’re pretty much”—again—“done for.”

After a detailed discussion of the bizarrely convoluted problem of China vs. Taiwan, Helprin concludes with some very sobering thoughts about where we are headed in the 2020s and what must be done to save America.

“Stop Doing Stupid Things”

But back to the 2020s. Why is the number of men willing to fight and die for the United States decreasing? Mr. Helprin mentions an education system that trains young people to distrust their country and a military bureaucracy enthralled by woke ideology.

So what can we do about that in the short term? Without pausing Mr. Helprin says: “We can depoliticize the military completely.”

That won’t be easy, I say. “It might not be so hard,” he replies. “You don’t have to do anything. You just have to stop doing stupid things. The military is a million education programs meant to indoctrinate and train. Exclude, from all that indoctrination and training, anything having to do with ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ ”—he signals quotation marks—“anything having to do with racism, anything about how bad America is, the ‘gender’ crap, all that. Just stop doing it.”

The Good, The Courage and Well-Steeled Resolve — Or Götterdämmerung?

He concludes on a somewhat brighter note, at least comparatively, with these words:

What about the long term? Very little about today’s cultural landscape suggests that America’s political class and citizenry understand the threats or are prepared to counter them with force. What’s going to get us ready? “A strong leader on a white horse isn’t going to do it,” Mr. Helprin says. “The only way that can happen, I think, unfortunately, is distress and defeat. A depression, a big loss in a war, invasion, Gotterdammerung.”

He trails off. It’s a solemn thought. “Still,” he says, “there is so much good in this country, so much courage that we may yet summon well steeled resolve.”

Götterdämmerung? “A collapse (as of a society or regime) marked by catastrophic violence and disorder.” Is that what it is going to take to save our beloved Nation from the juvenile Marxists wreaking havoc on campuses all across the country? From the 30% of those polled who openly declare their support for a barely functioning, dementia ridden, corrupt political hack? From the thousands of sworn enemies of America and terrorists being not only “let in” to our country, but invited in by this criminal administration? From those young people who should be our future, who are publicly advocating in favor of the pack of animals who slaughtered 1,200 citizens of one of our two staunchest allies in the world?

It is easier to just be comfy cozy and be horrified at even the suggestion that such an outcome might be in our future or in our children's future. But it seems to me that when a fellow citizen with the credentials of Mark Helprin uses such terminology it might be in our self-interest to give him our serious and undivided attention. After all, he was prophetic about September 11. He was prophetic about October 7. We can only pray he is not so prophetic this time or we will be, in his words, “done for.”