Friday, August 29, 2025
Bring Back Absolute Victory
This, too, reflects a clarity that modern Western leaders often lack: the resolve to act decisively, to bear the weight of terrible decisions in pursuit of peace and justice. Truman's choice was not only militarily sound but morally defensible. The bombings were not, as many armchair critics have argued over the decades, a cheap form of ethical utilitarianism; Truman's decision to bomb was simply reflective of how real war-and-peace decisions must be made in the heat of the moment, when the stakes are the highest.
It is fashionable now to question the morality of Truman's decision from the safety of the present. But it is an act of historical myopia to pretend that the atomic bombings were gratuitous or overly callous. They were not. They were the tragic price of a brutal victory and the necessary cost of hard-fought peace.
War, we know, is hell. Indeed, that is a very good reason to avoid starting wars in the first place. But once upon a time, Western societies understood that once a horrific war has been initiated, there can be no substitute for absolute victory. That lesson has long been forgotten. It is past time to learn it once again.
And, from Ed Morrissey:
That is a lesson that has been lost over the last 80 years. We see the results everywhere, but especially in the Middle East, and especially in Gaza. When someone starts a war -- especially those with insanely tyrannical belief systems -- there is nothing that can be done but to fight it until absolute and utter vanquishing of such enemies. Giangreco reminds us, as Frank does as well, that the world was blessed with leadership in 1945 that understood that doctrine ... rather than the leadership caste of the West in our time.
