We should rejoice in Trump’s military parade

Today, you can choose to follow your inner adolescent and search for one of the Soros-funded “No Kings” protests cropping up wherever the number of Democrats is high and the collective IQ is low. Alternatively, you can pop down to the draining swamp of Washington, DC and watch the United States Army commemorate its 250th anniversary with a snazzy military parade among patriotically inclined Americans.

If you think I have loaded the dice somewhat with charged rhetoric, you’re right. The whole “No Kings” wheeze is just anxious left-wing grandstanding that is as desperate as it is ineffectual. There is no Saint George Floyd around to act as a pretext this time.

I have no doubt that those protests will be lavishly covered by the Irrelevant Media Complex. But no amount of exposure or repetition can conceal the fact that the rationale for the protests is entirely spurious. America has no king. Since 1776, it never has. The ostensible reason for the outrage is that Trump is actually, notwithstanding the Lilliputian interference of pantywaist district court judges, proceeding to do what he was elected to do: deport the criminals who are here illegally. And yes, if you are here illegally, you are, ipso facto (Latin for “obviously”) a criminal.

But what about the army parade? Some portion of the cohort who will be making a nuisance of itself acting out at the protests today are skirling about how “militaristic” and bombastic the panoply is.

I think they miss the point. The motto of Donald Trump’s foreign policy is the same as Ronald Reagan’s: “Peace Through Strength.” You don’t maintain the former without possessing the latter. Moreover, the latter only works if its essential puissance is widely appreciated.

I suppose there is a ritualistic, even atavistic, side to this phenomenon. But that fact does not at all detract from its reality and impressiveness. Spectacle is an important arrow in the quiver of robust foreign policy. If Teddy Roosevelt was right that one should “walk softly and carry a big stick,” such perambulations are only effective if its would-be adversaries can descry the size of the bludgeon.

There is also the element of cultural self-confidence. Barack Obama started America down the path of self-abasement and cringing, guilt-sodden apology. We were no more “exceptional” than the Hottentots, you see, and every other civilization had greater claim to admiration than our own.

Donald Trump has reversed that dynamic, injected some much needed (trigger warning!) manliness into the metabolism of the public sphere.

We’re not doing exotic pronouns anymore. We’ve jettisoned the hothouse perversions of gender obsession, sending the word back where it belongs, to grammar. Our new generals do not say that “white rage” is an existential military problem. We’re taking our governing spirit from poems like Kipling’s “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” not something by Ibram X. Kendi, Code Pink or the Palestinian Youth Movement.

In particular, new Trumpian dispensation is realist, not utopian. It understands what Kipling meant:

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed, They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe…

Perhaps it is merely a sign of our fallen nature, but it is nonetheless true that in this world – as distinct from the fantasy world of utopia – possession of strong weapons may facilitate war, but pacifism precipitates it. This is a morsel of antique wisdom we neglect to our peril.

The AD 4th century Roman military historian Vegetius expressed this truth with admirable pithiness: Si vis pacem, para bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Which is why I rejoice in the spectacle of Trump’s bristling military spectacle this afternoon. It will be a show of strength, moral as well as military, whose goal is to affirm the will to peace. Hurrah!