President Donald Trump issued a proclamation celebrating Victory in Europe Day (VE Day), marking the 80th anniversary of the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany on May 8, 1945. He stated “we celebrate the unmatched might, strength, and power of the American Armed Forces, and we commit to protecting our sacred birthright of liberty against all threats, foreign and domestic.” Earlier on Truth Social he had posted “Without the United States, the War would have been won by other Countries, and what a different World it would be” and that we had also won World War I, and for much the same reasons. In population, industrial output, and technological innovation, the U.S. has been a superpower for over a century. By 1908, the American economy was larger than Britain, France, and Germany combined, the nations that were considered the Great Powers. In 1942, the American economy was larger than the entire Axis coalition which included not just Germany, Italy, and Japan, but also a number of smaller countries and a great deal of captured territory.
President Trump has acknowledged the other allies, particularly the British, whose valiant stand against the Axis in the years before the U.S. entered the war saved civilization. That his first trade deal was signed with London maintains that special relationship. But without the “unmatched” strength of the Arsenal of Democracy which provided weapons to our allies as well as to our own forces, the war would have gone in a very different and terrifying direction.
Some 12 million Americans served in every corner of the globe. Though the war would not truly end until Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945; the campaign against the Nazi-led Axis was always top priority as it had the largest industrial base and most advanced technology. It had conquered much of Europe. Even so, the lower-priority campaign in the Pacific had turned the tide there by the end of 1942 with victories at Midway and Guadalcanal. We had the strength to triumph everywhere.
Why did Japan and Germany declare war on an America whose military potential was so great? An in-depth study of Axis thought leading up to WW II is provided by Harry Yeide’s new book Betting Against America. The Axis Powers’ View of the United States (Casemate, 2024). In short, Berlin and Tokyo believed that Americans had grown too soft and decadent to use their power. The Japanese built their strategy on the idea that after crippling the U.S. Navy in a first strike, they could fortify their island conquests to the point where Americans could not tolerate the casualties to take them. Nazi ideology had its own twist on this, believing “the country’s mixed races would prevent unity.” Thus, Hitler could confidently declared war on the U.S. four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Were the Axis thinkers wrong, or just premature? April 30 marked the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, an event that indicated what Thomas Engelhardt has called “the end of the victory culture” in America that the country had been running on since the end of WW II. The Left had worked hard to “disillusion” the children of the Greatest Generation through its control of higher education. The Vietnam War saw protests on college campuses even larger and more violent than the antisemitic, pro-terrorist protests we see today. But instead of Palestinian flags, it was Viet Cong flags, along with posters of Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, and Karl Marx. The calls for revolution, divestment from the “war machine” and surrender to the enemy are the same.
The U.S. obviously did not fight the Vietnam War like WW II or even the Korean War. This was not due to antiwar protests, but to “defense intellectuals” who sought restraint, de-escalation, and negotiated settlements rather than imposing outcomes by winning. With the world’s largest navy, we did not even blockade North Vietnam’s ports (as the Soviets assumed we would). It was war on the cheap, except for those on the front lines. We fought a “limited war” on the enemy’s terms. Only the fate of South Vietnam was at stake, the enemy’s survival was not in jeopardy so they could fight on and on until we got tired and left. Japan’s strategy worked.
A wry comment at the time was that to win we should turn the war over to the Israelis.
America is hated by the Left not for its failures, but for its success, which discredits every aspect of left-wing ideology. Thus, there is an embrace of every enemy regardless of its nature simply in the hope that it will take America down a peg or two. Engelhardt is still hoping that while “America is the last global superpower, the ride is over.” Russia and China are on the move. Yet, this view of the world does not fit the facts at all.
The journal Jacobin, named after the most extreme elements of the French Revolution (think guillotine), claims that Saigon did not “fall,” it was “liberated” by the Communists. As an academic economist in my early career, I had several Vietnamese refugees as students. Their horror stories about “liberation” are the stuff of nightmares, complete with plundering, extortion, rape, executions, and concentration camps. The “killing fields” of Cambodia were even worse. Liberation did not bring better days to Vietnam.Asia has been in an economic boom era. Compare the progress of those countries were communism was defeated with the dismal record of “liberated” Vietnam. South Korea is the 13th largest economy in the world. We defeated an invasion by China and posed a threat to North Korea that compelled Beijing to a ceasefire. South Korea’s GDP per capita on a Purchasing Power Parity basis is approximated $52,000 compared to Vietnam’s $15,000. Taiwan is over $55,000. Malaysia, where the British put down a communist insurgency is at $37,000, while the hyper-capitalist city-state Singapore is over $80,000.
There is no reason that South Vietnam could not have joined this wave of progress had it survived. I remember one of the Vietnamese “boat people” I had as a student. His notes from my lectures were better than my notes! The relative failure of Vietnam is not due to its people but to its institutions. The 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics went to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson for their studies of how social institutions affect economic success. In their book Why Nations Fail. The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Acemoglu and Robinson make much of the differences between North and South Korea, but the same can be applied to South Korea and Vietnam. The wider lesson for geopolitics is that where America has won, good things have followed and where it has lost, its failures harm millions of people for generations.
America recovered from Vietnam, electing President Ronald Reagan whose policies won the Cold War. The Soviets gained a naval base in Da Nang, only to lose much of its own empire across Central Asia and Eastern Europe (including Ukraine). Beijing learned an ideological lesson American leftists still have not (The New Republic still sponsors trips to Cuba) , adopting a version of capitalism that has given China more billionaires than there are in America. It is, however, a state-led capitalism similar to that of Nazi Germany which makes it a more capable and thus a more dangerous adversary. This is what makes Trump’s tariffs, reindustrialization, and naval buildup so vital. It is the 1930s again and just as then, we need to prepare for a dangerous world and reject those voices calling for us to give up our role as the lead nation in the lead civilization of the modern world. Any generation can be great if it has the will to be.
