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PREFACE

On January 20, 2009, the United States inaugurated a new President with high hopes for the future and genuine good will—even from his political opponents. President Barack Obama had promised to transform America and the world. Within less than a year, the Nobel Prize was awarded to him on the basis of that promise alone. Seven years into his administration, there can be no question that he has succeeded in his transformational aspirations. In 2016, the world is a very different place than the one that existed when Mr. Obama was elected.

President Obama took office by telling America’s adversaries in his inaugural address that “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” At a NATO summit in April of the same year, he redefined traditional notions of American exceptionalism by stating: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” He told Europeans that “there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.” In Turkey, he said, “[t]he United States is still working through some of our own darker periods in our history.” He noted that “[o]ur country still struggles with the legacies of slavery and segregation, the past treatment of Native Americans.” In Cairo, he claimed that “fear and anger” from 9/11 “led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals.”

President Obama, as he boasted in January 2012, personally guided the process by which the United States massively cut its defense budget, yielding the smallest Army, Navy, and Marine Corps since before World War II. He said he would use the savings to “pay down our debt, and . . . to rebuild America.” Instead, the US budget deficit soared. I am certain he believed other nations would follow suit and engage in their own rounds of disarmament. They did not.

President Obama’s statements and actions suggest that he may have agreed with former diplomat Francis Fukuyama, who wrote in 1989, following the collapse of Communism, that “what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War. . .but. . .the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” I have no doubt that President Obama truly believed that by reaching out to our adversaries with humility and concessions, by acknowledging America’s sins and minimizing her historic role as an exceptional nation, and by unilaterally and drastically reducing her defense capability, he would earn goodwill and reciprocity from those he himself had labeled “corrupt and deceitful” leaders. Instead, the autocrats, tyrants, and terrorists were emboldened. China, Russia, and Iran engaged in significant arms buildups even as America drew down, cutting into and perhaps eliminating our military edge. At the same time, by force or threat thereof, in some cases using proxies, these nations grabbed territory in the South China Sea, Eastern Europe, and across the Middle East. At the same time, a well-organized Islamic terrorist group—ISIS—established a caliphate throughout vast swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria.

President Obama’s thinking is not new. America’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, addressed it in her famous speech to the Republican National Convention in Dallas on August 20, 1984. I remember it well, as I was fortunate enough to hear it from the convention floor where I was serving as a page. She called those that looked away from Soviet aggression and Iranian terrorism and found fault instead with US policy the “blame America first crowd.” She noted the wisdom of the “American people [who] know that it’s dangerous to blame ourselves for terrible problems that we did not cause.”

As a lawyer with an international practice and as an advisor to Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Scott Walker, and Ted Cruz, my travels have taken me to regions of the world that are in turmoil. I have seen firsthand the consequences of what the Obama White House itself calls the President’s “lead from behind” foreign policy. Since President Obama was sworn in, I have been to Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, Ukraine, the Republic of Georgia, Estonia, Israel, the Persian Gulf states, and various nations in Southeast Asia and Africa. In each of these places, the fallout of what Wall Street Journal editor Bret Stephens describes as “America in retreat” is apparent—and it is sad.

In Afghanistan, some young Afghan patriots, who chose to side with us after the 9/11 attacks, asked me if we would abandon their country as we had abandoned Iraq. At the American naval station in Guantánamo Bay, I sat next to the family members of 9/11 victims and watched as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators were led into a civilized courtroom to be defended by the best lawyers in America for their unspeakable acts of mass murder. As they watched the perpetrators of evil carry in their prayer rugs and beads, the family members wondered: Would the terrorists ever face justice for their crimes? Would they be moved to America and be given even more rights and more lenient incarceration, or possibly, would they even be released onto our streets?

In Kiev, Ukraine, my translator, a newly minted lawyer, explained to me that he and his friends were forced to crowdsource body armor when one of their college buddies volunteered to go to the eastern front to fight Russian regulars. He asked if the United States could send some of the Kevlar vests we were no longer using in Iraq to his friends. A reasonable request, but one which we have not satisfactorily answered. The Ukrainians are willing to fight for their own freedom—but unlike freedom fighters in the past, they have little access to the arsenal of democracy.

When I monitored polls for the free and fair presidential election in the Republic of Georgia, my driver had to take us on a circuitous route away from the frontlines in South Ossetia. He did this because Russian soldiers take pot shots from time to time at Georgians who get too close to the artificial border created by Vladimir Putin. Whether it is Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Baltics or, now, Syria, the Russian bear is on the move and the American eagle studiously looks away.

I have stood in a Kibbutz kindergarten in Israel near the border with Gaza that was shelled with Hamas’ Qassam rockets. I saw the Hezbollah entrenchments in Southern Lebanon from a watchtower in the Golan Heights. Our Israeli hosts struggled to understand the Obama administration’s naïve hope that Iran, which sponsors both Hamas and Hezbollah, would somehow become America’s geopolitical partner in the Middle East. In what is certainly the worst diplomatic deal since Munich, President Obama has paved the way for a nuclear Iran and given the mullahs over $100 billion dollars in sanctions relief as an incentive to agree to Western appeasement.

America’s closest ally in the Gulf is Kuwait. Twenty-six years after Saddam’s invasion and occupation of their country, the people of Kuwait remain grateful to the United States and United Kingdom and to President Bush and Prime Ministers Thatcher and Major for standing up for the principle that the powerful should not be able to change their borders at the expense of the weak. Businessmen with whom I spoke were incredulous that America had supported Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood followers as they attempted a rolling coup in Egypt. When General Sisi was elected President of Egypt on a platform of rooting out Islamic extremism, Washington was indifferent at best and hostile at worst. The Gulf Arabs were truly taken aback by such an approach to the clear and present danger of radical Islamists controlling the Arab world’s largest country and its cultural hub.

In Southeast Asia and Africa, the biggest untold story of the new century is the rise of China. For example, in one small Southeast Asian country, a land that owes its very existence to Western humanitarian intervention, China built the nation’s new Ministry of Defense building. It also seeks to install powerful radar systems to track the movement of American and allied shipping in the South Pacific. Throughout Africa, from Cape Town to Addis Ababa, China is building roads and government buildings and laying fiber-optic cables. It will soon control the continent’s infrastructure, mining, and agricultural sectors and even maintain military bases in harbors that were once famous ports of call for Western navies. Over two million Chinese nationals live in Africa and some argue that Africa is undergoing a stealth recolonization, this time directed from Beijing.

I have negotiated in Beijing with senior Chinese government officials. They appear entirely confident that America and the West are in decline, and that the twenty-first century will be theirs. Whether it is in the economic, cyber, military, or political arenas, China no longer bides its time. It creates artificial islands in the South China Sea that the White House orders the US Navy to avoid. It establishes an Air Identification Zone over Japanese-administered islands in the East China Sea that foreign—including American—airlines respect. It hacks the most personal data of every American that has served in the military or government without any repercussions. And it vetoes American-led human rights initiatives in international organizations without consequence.

Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, has surveyed a world transformed by President Obama’s policies and called it “a mess.” Robert Kagan looks at the “world America made” and fears that we may be watching it “drift away.” Less than four years ago Mitt Romney was mocked for warning of the rise of Islamic extremism in the Middle East and Africa and the resurgence of our long time geopolitical foe, Russia. Now even progressive publications ask, “Was Mitt right about everything?” Albright, Kagan, and Romney are all correct in their analysis. Frighteningly, at the same time that the world becomes ever more dangerous, this administration is decimating America’s unparalleled armed forces.

I have embarked with our courageous young sailors and aviators on the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis and visited our cutting-edge Virginia-class submarines and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. I walked the floors of one of the last subcontractors with the capacity to manufacture key components for those destroyers. Although our sailors and their equipment are still the best in the world, the United States Navy is in crisis. It is too small already and, under the Obama administration’s sequestration program, will shrink further. Given the demands with which we have tasked them, our sailors and their ships are stressed and stretched to the readiness breaking point. Some of our newer warships would be out-gunned by those of our competitors. Unless sequestration ends soon, our shipbuilding industrial base may wither to the extent that the next president will be unable to rebuild the fleet without purchasing warships from foreign contractors.

Unfortunately, it is not just the Navy that is suffering. President Obama’s hand-picked Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness recently said that the Army is at its smallest size since before World War II. If the cuts go any deeper, he stated, “they will become a matter of grave worry to us all.” The Marine Corps faces similar personnel cuts and is short of amphibious ships and landing craft to deliver them to the littoral battlefields. The Air Force is stretched so thin that America can no longer take air superiority for granted. If the mainstay of our bomber force, the B-52, were a person, it would qualify for Social Security. The service claims it can no longer afford the critical close air support provided by the A-10. It is unlikely that the service will ever receive enough of the over-budget F-35 Joint Strike Fighters to replace its current squadrons of F-15 and F-16 jet fighters.

In the 1930s, Winston Churchill, out of cabinet office and exiled to the political wilderness, saw the rising menace of the totalitarian regimes that would eventually form the axis powers. With little influence within the Conservative Party or Parliament, he went to the British people directly, through articles and speeches, to warn of the gathering storm. His prescient speeches were published in book form in 1938. The United States edition was aptly titled, While England Slept. His anthology of articles published the next year was chillingly called, Step by Step.

While it would be entirely immodest to compare this book or any of my writings to those of Sir Winston, he has long been a hero of mine in an Anglo-American pantheon that includes Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, and Thatcher. Churchill’s writings and speeches were what first inspired me to enter the editorial fray and write short pieces about the challenges I saw in my international travels and in my political work. This book is a compilation of those articles. Like this preface, the essays warn of the dangers that America faces, and how we should respond to them.

The United States must resume its role as the leader of the free world. Only in such a leadership role can America, as John F. Kennedy stated, “assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

To effectively lead and preserve peace, America must rebuild its defenses. Ronald Reagan believed, as did our ancient Roman forebears, that “we maintain the peace through our strength; weakness only invites aggression.” He was right, and his policy of “peace through strength” led to a decisive American victory in the Cold War. In the face of rising challenges around the world, it is time to return to a national security policy based on “peace through strength.” A strong America will be a nation that our allies will trust and our adversaries will not dare test. Only under those conditions will the United States lead the world in assuring the survival and success of liberty.

President Obama has indeed transformed America during his term in office. The country and the world have paid a heavy price for his approach to domestic and foreign policy. I remain, however, optimistic about our future. I am grateful to live in the United States at this time. I grew up in small-town America where the Fourth of July was celebrated with almost the same enthusiasm as Christmas. It was marked by block parties, bottle rockets, and parades. My friends and I had fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers who had worn the uniforms of our nation’s armed forces.

We knew that America was a winning nation. We also knew that when America won, free people around the world won. Although we grew up in the shadow of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Carter years—including the humiliating Iranian hostage crisis—we knew that America would come back. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president and our country and the world witnessed a rebirth of freedom that many believed they would never see. I am certain that that American people still believe in winning; that they still see our land as the “shining city upon a hill.” I am confident that the United States of America will make another such comeback—and that it will be soon.

ROBERT C. O’BRIEN

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

MAY 10, 2016