Every Generation Responsible For Securing America’s Freedom

I’m delighted that The Washington Times is taking up the call of America’s founding with a series of essays on The Federalist Papers. This project reminds me of the day I arrived at West Point as a cadet, when I was issued a copy of the 85 essays penned by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay. I quickly realized then that The Federalist Papers were relevant not only for undergraduates, but also for everyone else interested in America’s experiment in freedom. All these years later, they remain a crucial source of wisdom for the Trump administration’s foreign policy — a policy well-grounded in America’s founding principles.

The first purpose of America’s government is security for our people, which requires a strong military. At our founding, the United States didn’t even have a standing army and so was unable to defend itself. Without such a force — and, one day, officers to lead it from places like West Point — Federalist No. 25 told us America would be vulnerable to invasion. “We must receive the blow, before we are even prepared to return it.” And the possibility of attack was very real because the union was surrounded “from Maine to Georgia” by foreign powers.

Today, America has strategic interests around the world. Unfortunately, prior administrations allowed our military readiness to weaken, endangering our security. The Trump administration has worked to reverse this, including by rebuilding our armed forces, engaging our NATO allies to increase defense spending by $400 billion and focusing our efforts on great-power competitors such as Russia and China.

Another lesson from The Federalist Papers is that a secure, strong America is good for the world. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 1, if freedom fails in America, it would be “considered the general misfortune of mankind.” It was up to America to settle “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

And America has proved without a doubt that mankind is capable of self-government. The framework established by our Constitution and explained in The Federalist Papers is grounded in the self-evident truth that all men and women are created equal. The State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights found that, from the design of the Constitution to the fight to end slavery to constitutional amendments protecting the rights of women and racial minorities to the long struggle for civil rights, by realizing the ideals of our founding, America has served as a beacon to the world.

Read the rest from Mike Pompeo HERE

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