As our great nation begins its countdown to the November 5 presidential election, words of wisdom from three great heroes of history of come to mind.
The first, from America's Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, reminds us that:
"Government is itself an art, one of the subtlest of the arts. It is neither business, nor technology, nor applied science. It is the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness."
While technically we have been living "in peace and with reasonable happiness," China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have been very much on the warpath, even if our government has been reluctant to admit it. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), led by President Xi Jinping, with North Korea in tow, has openly been prosecuting a "People's War" – "the asymmetric challenge from the tactical and military to the strategic and political" -- since at least 2019, when, already then, he tried to blame China's declining economy on America, and not on him.
In addition, Xi has repeatedly lied to America about not building military bases on artificial islands in the South China Sea; about the human-to human transmissibility of the Wuhan virus, Covid-19; and, through the Chinese Embassy spokesman, Liu Pengyu, that the 2023 spy balloon was just a weather balloon. Xi has, in the meantime, been poisoning more than 100,000 in America each year with fentanyl – more than all the soldiers killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam combined.
The Chinese Communist Party has also been buying up US farmland, especially near military bases; genetically engineering rats in a secret laboratory in California to carry deadly bio-warfare viruses; sending thousands of military-aged men through America's open borders in groups, possibly as future saboteurs; secretly planting surveillance or sabotage equipment in the electrical grid and shipping cranes sent to America, and entrenching TikTok as a "Trojan Horse" to spy on Americans and spread anti-US propaganda. These are just a few of the antics that the CCP has produced, in addition to years of industrial-scale espionage and trillions in intellectual property theft.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, in January, testified that:
"China's hackers are positioning on American infrastructure in preparation to wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities. If or when China decides the time has come to strike, they're not focused solely on political or military targets. We can see from where they position themselves, across civilian infrastructure, that low blows aren't just a possibility in the event of a conflict. Low blows against civilians are part of China's plan....
"And they don't just hit our security and economy. They target our freedoms, reaching inside our borders, across America, to silence, coerce, and threaten our citizens and residents."
Russia, for its part, remains positioned to take over Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltic states and from there possibly the rest of Europe. To those in the US who say that our open borders are a greater requirement than defending Ukraine, it is important to remind them that it will be far more costly to confront Russia then instead of now. If Russia is allowed to win, what will be concluded universally, especially after America's surrender in Afghanistan, that the US plainly lost. That, in turn, would be viewed by America's adversaries as a green light to move in.
Iran, on the verge of acquiring as many nuclear weapons as it likes, has at least one hypersonic missile, continues its calls for "Death to America" and is poised in Latin America to attack the US.
We are living, it seems, on the edge of a volcano.
The second great hero, Patrick Henry, said:
"I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past."
The past has shown, as Henry goes on to say, that every effort to accommodate the adversary -- then Britain -- has failed. Appeasement apparently did not work any better in 1775 than in 2024. Aggressors aggress; that is what they "do" -– unless someone stops them. Our "lamp" has shown us time and again that trying to fend off war by, for instance, giving Adolf Hitler the Sudetenland, is only seen as the faintheartedness it is and quickly brings war on.
The third words of wisdom we all would do well to heed come from Confucius:
"A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it is committing another mistake."
The US, it would seem, has already used up all its mistake-credits: borders that provide no ability to know who is coming in; elections that provide no ability to verify who is voting; bills that have to be passed to "find out what is in [them]."
One can only hope that going forward, America's leaders will bear in mind the wisdom of these three exceptional men.
Lawrence Kadish serves on the Board of Governors of Gatestone Institute.
Solomon