Some things are worth fighting for. And dying for. Few Americans dispute that proposition this week as President Clinton pays homage to the men who died on the beaches of Normandy 50 years ago so that America could remain secure. Americans embraced World War II as a holy campaign against tyranny, and Franklin Roosevelt saw clearly that the advance of German and Japanese armies, even oceans away, directly threatened the American way of life. Adolf Hitler believed that the United States had no stomach for the fight_a mistake tyrants have repeated far too often, from North Korea's Kim Il Sung, who invaded South Korea in 1950, to Saddam Hussein, who attempted to annex Kuwait in 1990.
Too often, aggressors have underestimated America's resolve, and the result has been wars that might have been avoided and American lives that might have been saved. As Kim Il Sung's North Korea openly defies the world community and proceeds to develop nuclear weapons, it is one lesson that bears remembering. Yet the question is: Is it already too late? Bill Clinton has retreated from nearly every line that he has drawn in the sand, from Mogadishu to Port-au Prince to Beijing. He squandered the authority of his office on fruitless pleas to tiny Singapore not to cane a convicted American vandal. Who can blame Pyongyang for believing that America has lost its will, that America will flinch again and allow North Korea to develop nuclear weapons rather than risk confronting a bully?
Yet this line may be worth holding. America is again threatened: by the potential for North Korea to export nuclear weapons to terrorists and other rogue regimes around the world and by the arms race that would ensue in Asia as other countries in the region responded to a renewed Korean threat and a collapse of American credibility. An arms race could easily destroy the stable but delicate balance of Asian power that relies on the presence of U.S. forces. And the result could be another unwanted war in which many thousands of Americans would almost certainly die, along with the world's best hope for sustained economic growth.
Kim Il Sung has blustered and taunted in the face of American threats to impose economic sanctions. He and the rest of the world are waiting not for more American threats but to see whether this line will hold, whether this time America will not cave in to intimidation and whether this is an issue Americans will fight for, if they have to. John Kennedy, in his Cuban missile face-off with Nikita Khrushchev, understood that to prevent war he had to show he was willing to fight. If America's current leaders aren't, the world can bid farewell to an era of U.S. leadership, and this world of nations will become a more dangerous and unpredictable place. As Bill Clinton in Normandy basks in the glory of a victorious war, he may notice that America's freedom and prosperity were not won at the negotiating table.
