Former Veterans Administration Secretary
Robert Wilkie Speech
"American Crossroads: National Security and
Foreign Policy in the 2024 Election"
November 9, 2023
It is important that we are here and thank you to the Helms Center and the Vandenberg Coalition for bringing me home.
It is propitious that we are in the heart of Carolina. Ten miles down the road is NC Hwy 24, the most important byway in America. At the eastern end of HWY 24 sits 40% of the entire United States Marine Corps. Here on its western terminus sits the largest military installation in the world—home of the most decorated of all American combat units the 82nd Airborne Division.
Nothing happens anywhere in the world without his small part of North Carolina being touched, because chances are if America is called to arms—nine times out of ten it will be the paratroopers of Fort bragg and the Marines of Camp Lejeune and Cherry point who will be the talons of the eagle.
That is why I want to speak about our common history in this part of Carolina, a time almost forty five years ago when I was starting high school, and my father was commanding artillery at Fort Bragg.
Remember your high school yearbook? They are filled with the idyls of youth—football games, proms, and notes from best friends forever. My 1980 high school yearbook was no different except for one picture.
The photography club snapped a shot of a massive billboard on BRAGG BOULEVARD opposite the entrance to the home of the All-American Division. The message was —IRAN, LET OUR PEOPLE GO. That is what we had become, a nation reduced to begging Tehran’s theocratic fanatics to release U.S. diplomats and soldiers.
I remember being at a JV football game the week the hostages were taken and overhearing my history teacher say, “Anyone who wants us can have us”. That one chilling observation has stayed with me for almost half a century.
In the 1970s, the world assumed that the United States was in inevitable decline riven by problems at home and indecisiveness abroad. The crime was out of control. Oil prices had tripled, and gas lines were everywhere. Americans learned a new word: stagflation.
The defense budget tanked; there was no fuel for vehicles and no money for training. Overseas, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and Cuban proxies were rampaging through southern Africa.
We have returned to that jungle albeit with threats greater than the sclerotic Soviet Union ever was—this time with a cultural assault on the very meaning of America.
So let us be clear about what is at stake. China and its junior partners, Russia and Iran, seek nothing less than the overthrow and destruction of the United States as the world’s most powerful country and leader of the liberal world order.
And we have seen the horror they intend for the West in Ukraine and Israel.
We are witness to the death of thousands of Israeli men women and babies.
As 5000 rockets rained down on Israel, the world’s oldest hatred — anti-Semitism — reared its head in places once thought unimaginable. Mobs excoriated Jews on college campuses in New York, Los Angeles, Boston and in the city council of Chicago.
How has such an unbridled sentiment in favor of terrorism and murder become acceptable in polite and academic society?
As Ben Shapiro notes, “How has it infused the halls of Oxford and the streets of London? How is it that in the United Kingdom the heart that bore parliamentary democracy and classical liberalism, 100,000 people take to the streets to declare their support for Hamas terrorists and their like minded allies? How is it that blood is spattered on the White Huse gates and people like the President of my university call for equal dialogue. Why does the mainstream media ignore the oldest prejudice while editorialists preach a moral relativism between Hamas terrorists murdering Jews and the Israel Defense Forces who protect innocent lives.
The answer is simple: the West is ashamed of itself. And this shame has led it down the road of blind cultural masochism. The West has decided that in order to avoid the shame of racism and ethnocentricity we must assume, everyone is the same.
Shapiro is right. “People who kill babies for the crime of being Jews are not like us. People who paraglide into electronic dance music festivals and gleefully rape women, murder 260 people, and drag innocents back to their hellholes in Gaza are not like us.”
The London Telegraph put it this way:
“The attack on Israel by the monsters of Hamas occurred not because Muslims and Jews are destined, by religious necessity, to be at each other’s throats, but because Hamas’s biggest supporters in Iran – a country run by thugs, and deemed so even by its own people – had become concerned that the rulers of Saudi Arabia would continue the journey to peace with Israel.
These are truly attacks on all of us. America’s foundation and identity as a defender of equality and freedoms are uniquely tied to the history of the Jewish people and the nation of Israel. The same “woke” voices who decry the existence of the Jewish people also have the United States in their sights.
In his 1790 letter to the Touro synagogue, George Washington signaled a new dawn for Western civilization – that those whose survival and perseverance laid the intellectual and spiritual foundation for western religion, literature, and art, the renaissance, and the enlightenment were welcome in a new land.
He wrote:
‘It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights…the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance…May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants – while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.’
Washington was not preaching mere tolerance; he was calling for revolutionary acceptance. The late Charles Krauthammer argued that Washington saw America as the new Jerusalem, where peoples of the world could converge in peace, worship in freedom, and enjoy the greatest of unchartered rights – the right to be left alone.
Harry Truman took up Washington’s charge that the United States was built upon the foundations of freedom erected by the Jewish people, saying:
The fundamental basis of this Nation’s law was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings that we get from Exodus, from Isaiah and Saint Paul.
Since the re-establishment of the Jewish State in 1948, one force after another, has tried to push Israel into the sea. The late Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Lord Jonathon Sacks, had it right: ”The Jewish people in its very being constitutes a living protest against a world of hatred, violence, and war.” But the drive to genocide has never been about Israel alone — it is about the Jews on every continent but it is about us.
We must stand against the savagery of the mullahs, or what will this country become? This is not a Jewish problem; it’s a question of humanity.
If we don’t stand, if we don’t proclaim the greatness and goodness of the American nation, one day they will come for us and there will be new billboards on Bragg Boulevard.