Mitch McConnell

Peace Through Strength Award Acceptance Address

delivered 7 December 2024, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California

[NOT AR AUTHENTICATED -- CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY]

Well thank you very much, Fred. And I particularly appreciated your mentioning Ted Olson. We were generally on the same side of things, but -- the only case that I'm ever familiar with, that had my name on it, before the Supreme Court, he was arguing the other side. Not surprisingly, he won and I lost. He way an extraordinary human being and I thank you for mentioning him -- a noble public servant, a real lawyer's lawyer. He leaves a tremendous legacy and he'[ll] be dearly missed.

Secretary Austin, thank you for your decades of honorable service, in and out of uniform, to the nation we both love.

I’m glad to be with all of you. And I’m so honored by this recognition.

I believe in American primacy and in the power of alliances. I make no apology for these beliefs, and I trace them directly to the example of our 40th President.

President Reagan’s leadership was a source both of professional wisdom and personal inspiration to me. I suspect the same is true for so many of you here today. Even in the climactic moments of a struggle that defined half a century, the consummate cold warrior spoke for posterity.

President Reagan knew that the principles that guided the West’s triumph were not to be discarded with the rubble of Soviet tyranny. He called our attention to the old adage that America is great because it is good, "and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."^1,2

And just as greatness follows goodness, he reminded us of another principle, no less important: peace through strength.

The value of these lessons is timeless. But as we all know, their endurance is hardly certain.

At the Reagan Library, I’m preaching to the choir. But in Washington, as we face down a new era of great power competition, influential voices want to leave the lessons of the last such competition, the Cold War, at the door.

At both ends of our politics, a dangerous fiction is taking hold -- that America’s primacy and the fruits of our leadership are self-sustaining. Even as allies across NATO and the Indo-Pacific renew their own commitments to hard power, to interoperability, and to collective defense, some now question America’s own role at the center of these force-multiplying institutions and partnerships.

Within the party Ronald Reagan once led so capably, it is increasingly fashionable to suggest that the sort of global leadership he modeled is no longer America’s place. But let’s be absolutely clear: America will not be made great again by those who are content to manage our decline.

So how do we turn back this tide? How do we renew a firm American commitment to peace through strength? As I take on my next role as Chairman of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, these are some of the questions I’ll be focused on.

The answers will be rooted in the centrality of hard power and the importance of alliances and partnerships -- things our 40th President understood well.

It’ll mean standing with friends in need -- whether they’re resisting neo-Soviet imperialism in Ukraine, Iran-backed terrorist slaughter in Israel, or PRC hegemony in the Indo-Pacific.

And we’ll have to bring back into focus another lesson of President Reagan’s leadership: the link between capability and credibility. The 40th Commander-in-Chief knew that changing Soviet behavior required both the military capability to prevent or punish hostile action and the will to exercise this power and follow through on threats.

Today, the United States has given the world reason to doubt both our capability and our credibility. For years, we’ve neglected our military readiness, the depth of our magazine, and our defense industrial base. We’ve allowed our deterrent capabilities to atrophy. And we’ve let hesitation and half-measures drain the potency of the capabilities we have maintained.

Rebuilding this mechanism of deterrence and influence begins with generational investments in the national defense enterprise. We are right to call out the growing alignment and coordination of China, Russia, and Iran. They represent the gravest combined threat to U.S. security since the Cold War -- or even the Second World War. But if we mean what we say, then we ought to invest accordingly. As the bipartisan National Defense Strategy Commission recently argued, a challenge this great requires an effort at least on par with that of the Cold War.

Put that in perspective. In 1945, America had just finished pouring untold human sacrifice, and a material investment reaching 37% of our GDP, into winning the Second World War. Over the course of the Cold War, we invested nearly 14% of GDP during Korea, over 9 percent during Vietnam, and 6 percent in 1986. Today, we spend roughly 3% of our GDP on defense, barely half of the Reagan buildup that buried the Soviet Union. In this House of Reagan, I should point out that even Jimmy Carter invested more in defense than America does today.

There is no escaping the fact that quantity has a quality all its own. The sort of great power war America’s military must prepare for today would entail staggering requirements we haven’t seen since World War II. The Pentagon is not equipped to meet the demands of protracted or multi-theater conflict. Neither is our defense industrial base.

Blame for this chronic deficiency is plentiful. It begins with anemic defense budget requests that encourage using critical munitions as bill-payers for other priorities. And, of course, Congress bears blame for the glacial pace of appropriations. Consistent demand signals for critical capabilities are a square-one requirement.

At the same time, the need for interceptors and long-range munitions is obvious. The demand from both American forces and our allies and partners isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Industry partners should recognize it and plan accordingly.

Patriotic companies have more work to do to expand production capacity. And they need to do it today, rather than wait for contracts we all know are coming. We need to adopt new technologies more quickly and expand production capacity at the same time.

This is not the time for idle, abstract promises. The challenges before us require serious, sustained commitments and durable solutions. The threat of simultaneous conflict in multiple theaters is real. And half-measures are not enough. As Admiral Harold Stark, CNO through the early months of the last war in the Pacific, put it: "Dollars cannot buy yesterday."

The task before us is urgent. We can’t afford to miss opportunities to restore American hard power and industrial capacity before conflicts ignite. We need to be investing -- yesterday -- in long-range fires, munitions, air and missile defenses, shipbuilding, and more.

It’s all well and good to spend time talking about grave threats. But our enemies care much more about what we do than what we say. Merely invoking ‘peace through strength’ is not enough. We have an obligation to provide for the common defense. And it calls us to actually build and maintain that strength.

Unless we’re willing to spend the necessary resources to address them, talk is cheap. And a defense authorization bill that fails to set topline funding above the President’s request would be a tragic missed opportunity we would likely come to regret. A re-run of the Budget Control Act’s harm to military readiness would be a devastating abdication of our responsibility.

We need to make the sort of investments in American primacy and hard power that the world hasn’t seen since Ronald Reagan was calling the shots. And it’s not just proud Reagan Republicans saying so. By the Institute’s latest survey, the American people understand intuitively what this particularly dangerous world demands of its greatest military and the arsenal of democracy.

A clear majority -- seventeen points greater than just two years ago -- agrees that America should be more engaged and take the lead. And -- surely to the dismay of proponents of  "managed decline" or ‘leading from behind" -- when asked what objectives the U.S. military should be prepared to achieve if faced with simultaneous major-power conflicts, the largest share said: "victory."

These citizens have it exactly right. America shouldn’t play for a tie. And to accept decline is to invite defeat.

The American people’s message echoes a chapter of history that Washington would do well to brush up on. Think back to 1940. Isolationism had already lost its grip on American public opinion. In the Nazi conquests of Poland and France, and in the blitz over London, Americans saw an aggressor who wouldn’t stop at the water’s edge.

They saw their own security and prosperity hanging in the balance. And they said so. Overwhelming majorities of Americans told pollsters they supported massive new investments in defense and even the institution of the draft. But as we know, their leaders didn’t feel the same urgency.

At critical moments, their President waited for events to force his hand. Meanwhile, the anti-intervention bloc in Congress continued to protest equipping frontline allies and partners to fight back and scoffed at the notion that war overseas threatened America’s interests.

That is...until 83 years ago, today.

Arthur Vandenberg, one of the Senate’s staunchest anti-interventionists, confessed that December 7th, 1941 "ended isolationism for any realist." And thank God it did -- American industry already had its work cut out for it after years of neglect for military might.

It is reckless to assume once again that we can buy readiness overnight. It is dangerous to pretend that America’s credibility is divisible. President Reagan knew better than to wait for calamity to force his hand.

So should we.

^{1 Extended quotation: "That shrewdest of all observers of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, put it eloquently after he had gone on a search for the secret of America's greatness and genius -- and he said: 'Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the greatness and the genius of America. America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.'" [Source: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreaganevilempire.htm]}

^{2  In his speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, Reagan attributed the quotation -- as many have and continue to do, -- to Alex de Tocqueville's monumental study Democracy in America. However, the authenticity of that attribution has been challenged.}

Original Text Source: republicanleader.senate.gov

Page Created: 12/13/24

U.S. Copyright Status: Text = Uncertain.