America’s Three-Front War

By Lee Edwards

Sunday, October 29, 2023

 

What do Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan have in common? They constitute a three-front war being waged between America and its allies and a genocidal axis of Iran, Russia, and Communist China. Each front is crucial to America’s interests. Terrorists everywhere, particularly in Iran, are weighing America’s response to Hamas’s no-limits invasion of Israel. Russia’s Vladimir Putin is hoping that America will use the Israeli crisis as an excuse to halt further aid to Ukraine, ensuring its defeat. China’s Xi Jinping will ramp up pressure on Taiwan, believing that a three-front war is one front too many for an America weary of its heavy responsibilities as the leader of the free world.

 

But there can be no equivocation — America must provide the necessary offensive weapons for all three embattled countries. In an exemplary display of bipartisanship, the Biden administration and Congress have pledged to give Israel “all it needs” to defeat Hamas. If that means increasing the U.S. defense budget, now at a manageable 3.1 percent of the GDP, so be it. Those who want to freeze U.S. aid to Ukraine must answer the question: “What price freedom?” As for Taiwan, Congress should revise the Taiwan Relations Act, so as to allow the U.S. to provide offensive as well as defensive weapons to that island democracy.

 

The stakes of the three-front war confronting America are as high as in any conflict since World War II. What we do will determine the future of each nation and the cause of freedom around the world. We can look for guidance to Barry Goldwater, a founding father of the conservative movement, who wrote in The Conscience of a Conservative: “There is no difficulty in identifying the day’s overriding political challenge: it is to preserve and extend freedom.” That was true in 1960, at the height of the Cold War, and it is just as true today in our fractured world.

 

As with every aspect of U.S. foreign policy, we must balance pragmatism and idealism. Idealism says that we must keep faith with three long-time friends and allies: Israel since 1948 and U.S. recognition; Ukraine since 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet empire; and Taiwan since World War II when, as the Republic of China, it tied up 1 million Japanese troops on mainland China.

 

Pragmatism says we must help Israel in pursuit of peace and stability in the Middle East; bring about a decisive Ukrainian victory that would discourage further imperial acts by Russia; and preserve the independence of Taiwan, a key link in the South China Sea (and manufacturer of 91 percent of the semiconductors used in advanced computing).

 

The present three-front war calls to mind the Cold War that occupied us for more than four decades in that it is ideological as well as geopolitical. And the ideology is America’s historic adversary: Communism.

 

Two decades ago, Michael Waller, writing for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, updated Georgetown professor Stefan Possony’s ground-breaking study, “International Terrorism: The Communist Connection.” Waller verified Possony’s conclusion: that the Soviet Union had conducted a decades-long cultivation and infiltration of Islamic terrorist organizations in the Middle East. The study estimated that Moscow had expended millions of dollars as part of its global campaign to wage “wars of national liberation.” Updating Possony, Waller described these Soviet efforts as essential to the formation of Hezbollah and Hamas. We can be certain that would-be terrorists who interacted with the Soviets would have studied Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first head of what became the KGB, who declared: “We stand for organized terror — this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity.” Bolshevik founder Vladimir Lenin was equally blunt: “The onslaught on the enemy must be pressed with the greatest vigor; attack, not defense, must be the slogan of the masses; the ruthless extermination of the enemy will be their task.”

 

It is no coincidence that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was ordered by Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel, who lamented that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” His invasion of Ukraine, seizure of Crimea, and occupation of two regions of Georgia are all part of his plan to reconstruct an empire initiated by Lenin.

 

Communist China’s ever bolder displays of military strength by sea and air are intended to intimidate Taiwan and are straight out of the Chinese Communist Party’s playbook. Acquisition of Taiwan is a major goal of the CCP, which must constantly demonstrate its power to stay in power. At the same time, the CCP continues its genocidal policy of eliminating Uyghur religion and culture in Western China.

 

In his famous TV address, “A Time for Choosing,” Ronald Reagan noted that peace could be easily obtained through surrender, but that was not the American way. “We face,” he warned, “the most evil enemy mankind has known,” clearly referring to Communism. He quoted Winston Churchill: “When great forces are on the move in the world” we learn what we are truly made of. And like it or not, they “spell duty.”

 

America is at another time of testing and choosing. Those who hate us and revile us and wish to bury us believe they can outlast us. They have been wrong in the past. What shall it be today? Can we wage a three-front war against evil? Of course, we can. As President Reagan said in his first inaugural address, “With God’s help, we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us. And after all, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are Americans.”