The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

by John McCain

I’ve been given more years than many, and had enough narrow escapes along the way to make me appreciate them, not just in memory, but while I lived them. Many an old geezer like me reaches his last years wishing he had lived more in the moment, had savored his days as they happened. Not me, friends. Not me. I have loved my life. All of it. I’ve wasted more than a few days on pursuits that might not have proved as important as they seemed to me at the time. Some things didn’t work out the way I hoped they would. I had difficult moments and a few disappointments. But, by God, I enjoyed it. Every damn day of it. I have lived with a will. I served a purpose greater than my own pleasure or advantage, but I meant to enjoy the experience, and I did. I meant to be amazed and excited and encouraged and useful, and I was.

America and the voters of Arizona have let me exercise my restlessness in their service. I had the great good fortune to spend sixty years in the employ of our country, defending our country’s security, advancing our country’s ideals, supporting our country’s indispensable contributions to the progress of humanity. It has not been perfect service, to be sure, and there were times when the country might have benefited from a little less of my help. But I’ve tried to deserve the privilege, and I have been repaid a thousand times over with adventure and discoveries, with good company, and with the satisfaction of serving something more important than myself, of being a bit player in the story of America, and the history we made. And I am so very grateful.

We have made mistakes. We haven’t always used our power wisely. We have abused it sometimes and we’ve been arrogant. But, as often as not, we recognized those wrongs, debated them openly, and tried to do better. And the good we have done for humanity surpasses the damage caused by our errors. We have sought to make the world more stable and secure, not just our own society. We have advanced norms and rules of international relations that have benefited all. We have stood up to tyrants for mistreating their people even when they didn’t threaten us, not always, but often. We don’t steal other people’s wealth. We don’t take their land. We don’t build walls to freedom and opportunity. We tear them down. To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is unpatriotic. American nationalism isn’t the same as in other countries. It isn’t nativist or imperial or xenophobic, or it shouldn’t be. Those attachments belong with other tired dogmas that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history. We live in a land made from ideals, not blood and soil. We are custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad. We have done great good in the world because we believed our ideals are the natural aspiration of all man...

it was all the harder after General Petraeus recognized the sacrifice made by two soldiers who had planned to become naturalized citizens at the ceremony, and were now represented by two pairs of boots on two chairs, having been killed in action two days before. “They died serving a country that was not yet theirs,” Petraeus observed. I wasn’t the only person there with a lump in his throat and eyes brimming with tears. I wish every American who out of ignorance or worse curses immigrants as criminals or a drain on the country’s resources or a threat to our “culture” could have been there. I would like them to know that immigrants, many of them having entered the country illegally, are making sacrifices for Americans that many Americans would not make for them.

I don’t want this to sound flip because it’s not as if I didn’t want to win. I did. I’m a very competitive person. But I just decided that if I was likely to lose and was going to run anyway, I shouldn’t be afraid of losing. I had something to say. I thought it was important that I say it. And I would see the damn thing through.

I was also on the receiving end of daily attacks from talk radio blowhards. They had some effect, but they aren’t as influential as they like their listeners to believe. They make quite a living from promoting polarization in the country, and scaring politicians who can only win races in gerrymandered districts. And when they’re in high dudgeon they can be amusing in an over-the-top, vaudevillian kind of way. They had been after me episodically for years, pounding my positions on campaign finance reform and immigration and other apostasies. I had learned to laugh it off. They could tie up our front-office phones for an hour or so by exhorting their listeners to give the traitor McCain a piece of their mind. But they had a negligible impact on my national popularity. In Florida, their antipathy toward me was frenzied. Even Mitt, the moderate former governor of Massachusetts, whom they would disparage four years later, was an acceptable alternative as long as I was in the race.

McCain on talk radio

There isn’t any way the loser in an election can criticize the press without appearing to be a sore loser. So I won’t complain here. Not much, anyway. Most of the coverage I received was fine. I didn’t agree with all of it. I disliked the criticism I received, although I earned some of it. I also understand why my opponent’s campaign made such good copy and attracted more attention than ours did. He was new news. I wasn’t. And most reporters were more aligned with his politics than mine. Above all, his success seemed to transcend political tribalism and represent real progress against the racism that had afflicted our society from its founding, and reporters, like most people, didn’t want to see that progress set back. The press had a finger on the scale for Obama, both in the primaries and the general election. They gave him more favorable attention than they gave his opponents. They defended him from attacks, unfair and fair, and criticized his opponents for making them. I don’t think that’s disputable or surprising. The favoritism wasn’t universal and it didn’t determine the outcome. It was just a challenge we had to factor into our decision making. I didn’t like it. But given the media environment we live in today, where we can restrict information gathering to sources that tell us only what we want to hear, where crackpot conspiracy websites like InfoWars and Breitbart, and Russian propagandists such as Russia Today and WikiLeaks, are taken more seriously by their cre...

She stumbled in some interviews, and had a few misjudgments in the glare of the ceaseless spotlight and unblinking cameras. Those missteps, too, are on me. She didn’t put herself on the ticket. I did. I asked her to go through an experience that was wearing me down, that wears every candidate down. I made mistakes and misjudgments, too. I said something wrong or inaccurate or poorly chosen from time to time. So did my opponent and his running mate, mistakes we attributed to the pressure and exhaustion of a national campaign. Ours were often overlooked or viewed less seriously than were Sarah’s because reporters and pundits generally assumed Barack, Joe, and I were better than our screwups. Sarah wasn’t given that allowance.

I was running because “my country saved me . . . and I can’t forget it. And I will fight for her for as long as I draw breath.”

Today, of course, Internet nuts and haters find willing recipients for their “ideas” on certain cable news and talk radio shows.

I’ve always believed that America offers opportunities to all who have the industry and will to seize it. Senator Obama believes that, too. But we both recognize that though we have come a long way from the old injustices that once stained our nation’s reputation and denied some Americans the full blessings of American citizenship, the memory of them still had the power to wound. A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation of Booker T. Washington to visit—to dine at the White House—was taken as an outrage in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African American to the presidency of the United States. Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on earth.

Some might read this and say to themselves, “Who gives a damn what happened to a terrorist after what they did on September 11?” But it’s not about them. It never was. What makes us exceptional? Our wealth? Our natural resources? Our military power? Our big, bountiful country? No, our founding ideals and our fidelity to them at home and in our conduct in the world make us exceptional. They are the source of our wealth and power. Living under the rule of law. Facing threats with confidence that our values make us stronger than our enemies. Acting as an example to other nations of how free people defend their liberty without sacrificing the moral conviction upon which it is based, respect for the dignity possessed by all God’s children, even our enemies. This is what made us the great nation we are.

Some argue that since our actions are not as horrifying as Al Qaeda’s, we should not be concerned. When did Al Qaeda become any type of standard by which we measure the morality of the United States? We are America, and our actions should be held to a higher standard, the ideals expressed in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Others argue that clear standards will limit the President’s ability to wage the War on Terror. Since clear standards only limit interrogation techniques, it is reasonable for me to assume that supporters of this argument desire to use coercion to acquire information from detainees. This is morally inconsistent with the Constitution and justice in war. It is unacceptable. Both of these arguments stem from the larger question, the most important question that this generation will answer. Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security? Terrorism inspires fear and suppresses ideals like freedom and individual rights. Overcoming the fear posed by terrorist threats is a tremendous test of our courage. Will we confront danger and adversity in order to preserve our ideals, or will our courage and commitment to individual rights wither at the prospect of sacrifice? My response is simple. If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is “America.”

The moral values and integrity of our nation, and the long, difficult, fraught history of our efforts to uphold them at home and abroad, are the test of every American generation. Will we act in this world with respect for our founding conviction that all people have equal dignity in the eyes of God and should be accorded the same respect by the laws and governments of men? That is the most important question history ever asks of us. Answering in the affirmative by our actions is the highest form of patriotism, and we cannot do that without access to the truth. The cruelty of our enemies doesn’t absolve us of this duty. This was never about them. It was about us.

paid a visit to the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, on station in the Arabian Sea, after that first visit to Afghanistan. Responding to the enthusiasm of a gung ho crowd of sailors and aviators, I said something I later regretted. “Next up, Baghdad!” I shouted, and was cheered. I was an advocate for invading Iraq, not because I believed that Saddam Hussein, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, was harboring al-Qaeda, but because I believed the U.S. intelligence community assessment that he had weapons of mass destruction, which he had proven willing to use in the past. He had refused to allow U.N. inspectors the access necessary to ascertain whether or not he had them. He was also as brutal a tyrant as any who lived, guilty of numerous atrocities, some of which he had committed when he believed the United States would not react. He routinely ordered his air defenses to shoot at U.S. overflights of Iraq. I also believed the overthrow of his regime and the establishment of an Arab democracy would strike as great a blow as any force of arms against extremism and despotism in the Middle East. But the principal reason for invading Iraq, that Saddam had WMD, was wrong. The war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it. None of that was known, of course, that day on the Roosevelt, when I was firm in my convictions, and self-assured. Even if we had been righ...

McCain on Iraq casus belli

The war against ISIS in Iraq was a long, hard slog, and for a time the administration was as guilty of hyping progress as the most imaginative briefers at the old “Five O’Clock Follies” in Saigon had been.

I believe that had U.S. forces retained a modest but effective presence in Iraq after 2011 many of these tragic events might have been avoided or mitigated. Would ISIS nihilists unleashed in the fury and slaughter of the Syrian civil war have extended their dystopian caliphate to Iraq had ten thousand or more Americans been in country? Probably, but with American advisors and airpower already on the scene and embedded with Iraqi security forces, I think their advance would have been blunted before they had seized so much territory and subjected millions to the nightmare of ISIS rule.

it. There they were, many of them after multiple combat deployments, aged beyond their years, having seen the worst and the best of humanity, having risked everything for our country and its causes, signing up to do it some more. My God, they are a blessing to this nation, a living rebuke to cynicism and empty patriotism.

It seems that I won’t be returning to Afghanistan anytime soon. I regret that very much. I think we have all had over the last year or so reason to wonder about the direction of our country and some of the people leading it. I would like to be again in the company of Americans who embody our nation’s greatness, and who know it is something more profound and dearer than a politician’s campaign slogan.

Up yours Donald!

I sensed that their ambitions weren’t quite that grand. They wanted an accountable government and economic opportunities. But of such desires sweeping revolutions can be made.

“Ambassador, with respect,” he began. “We’re not here to discuss the Palestinians. We’re here to talk about the Egyptian people. We want to focus these senators on our needs in this next period of our history.” Alas, that period of Egyptian history will be a chronicle of disappointments, an uprising against authoritarianism and injustice that opened a path to power for an Islamist party, the Muslim Brotherhood, which wouldn’t manage the transition to secular politics and brought disorder, intolerance, and another upheaval, which ended with a popularly supported military coup and a return of authoritarianism. But for a moment, in that abrupt dismissal by the young of the failed conventions of the old, we could glimpse what could have been, what should have been, and what I believe one day will be. We left for home encouraged by a genuine sense of promise, and eager to go back.

“Thank you, McCain! Thank you, Obama! We need freedom.” I suspect the NTC had played a role in organizing the cheerleaders, but I enjoyed the experience just the same, noting to my guide that I hadn’t had many occasions to hear my name and the President’s chanted by the same people. “It’s usually just one or the other of us,” I explained. “We don’t always have the same fans.”

Thank you McCain! Thank you Obama!

least, I was a Republican, a Reagan Republican. Still am. Not a Tea Party Republican. Not a Breitbart Republican. Not a talk radio or Fox News Republican. Not an isolationist, protectionist, immigrant-bashing, scapegoating, get-nothing-useful-done Republican. Not, as I am often dismissed by self-declared “real” conservatives, a RINO, Republican in Name Only. I’m a Reagan Republican, a proponent of lower taxes, less government, free markets, free trade, defense readiness, and democratic internationalism. I also believe government should respond to our biggest problems and prepare for our biggest future challenges, be as transparent as possible and as efficient as possible. There are a lot of government responsibilities that have needed to be reformed for decades, especially one of my pet peeves, our broken government acquisition system. I believe the same can be said about the rules of contemporary politics, the way redistricting is done in most of the country, and the explosion of unlimited and dark money in campaigns, an invitation to corruption made possible by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case, a mistake made by five justices who never ran for any office and were more naive than a cloistered nun about the corrupting effect of unlimited money in politics. I believe in the separation of powers, a press free to report without fear or favor, and free to infuriate politicians—including me—as they do. Lastly, I believe in principled compromises that mov...

the formula for success for any major piece of legislation. Don’t give up, be persistent. If you can’t get it done in this Congress, try again in the next. Give the impression that you’re going to make yourself as big a pain in the ass on the issue as you can until some accommodation to your view is made by negotiated compromise if possible or by a vote. Be alert to changes in the political environment. Strike hardest when external events give you an advantage. Make necessary compromises to build a bipartisan coalition in favor of it. Use your friendships to recruit as many influential members to your side as you can. Friends on both sides of the aisle will warn you about problems you might not be aware of, they’ll tell you who you can count on and who’s quietly working against you. Box in the cynics with public and media attention, make sure the more transactional politicians know there’s a cost to opposing the bill. Leave critical responsibilities to your hardest-nosed allies, and hope they’ll stand up to threats and reprisals. Be the most hard-nosed advocate yourself to set an example. Gather all the pressure you can to move the process along as quickly as possible, even if it ruffles important feathers. A lot of momentum for an issue is illusory and based on excessive faith in the media’s sustained attention to it and the potency of its public support. Get it done before your opponents figure out that’s not the case. And get a little lucky. That’s how the sausage gets ...

As long as you respect the rights and property of your fellow Americans, you are entitled to their respect, whether they give it to you or not. You have the same rights. You are protected by the same laws. You’re welcome to your opportunities. You’re welcome to America, land of the immigrant’s dream.

Here is one of the best illustrations of American exceptionalism I’ve ever heard, offered by an American President who believed this country was the most special place on earth, Ronald Wilson Reagan: America represents something universal in the human spirit. I received a letter not long ago from a man who said, “You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk.” But then he added, “Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.”

Anyone can become an American if they embrace our values. Anyone. You don’t even have to speak the language. As a practical matter, you’ll have an easier time of it here if you learn English. But even a common language isn’t essential to assimilation. Not in this country. Spanish has been spoken in Arizona centuries longer than English has. Plenty of Italian, Polish, Serbian, Russian, German, and every other kind of non-English-speaking immigrants came to this country and struggled to learn the language. They relied mostly or exclusively on their native tongue to talk with family and friends, and yet managed to communicate with English-speaking Americans, while their children grew up bilingual.

Unauthorized immigrants are not sucking up all the blue-collar jobs in the country as their most hyperbolic antagonists insist. They make up approximately 5 percent of the workforce.

Right now, Republicans are on the wrong side of that progress, and if we want to retain our competitiveness in the fastest-growing communities in the country we’ll stop letting the zealots drive the debate, and fix the problem that gives them their soapbox. We can begin by permanently legalizing the status of unauthorized immigrants who were brought here as children, the so-called Dreamers. America is the only country they know. It would be a surpassingly cruel act to deport them, and it would earn Republicans the enmity of not only Hispanic Americans, but the enmity of their neighbors and friends as well. Most Arizona high school seniors are Hispanic. Do you think most of them would consider voting for the party that pulled their friends out of school, took them away from their teams and clubs and neighborhoods, and put them on buses to Mexico?

Bashing illegal immigrants proved popular with conservative talk radio audiences, and if any industry enjoys beating dead horses, it’s conservative talk radio. Honestly, having to dream up more hyperbole on the same damn subject day after day would bore the hell out of me.

because the House Republican caucus, to John’s frequent frustration, is driven crazy by the incessant demands of the say-no-to-everything crowd otherwise known as the Freedom Caucus, and because more sensible Republicans are afraid of primary challenges, this acceptable solution to a solvable problem that impacts the lives of a great many souls never got a vote.

We briefly discussed Russia’s interference in the election, the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s and John Podesta’s emails, which U.S. intelligence services concurred had been part of a Kremlin attempt to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s chances and improve Trump’s. We speculated about what Putin hoped to gain by taking such a risk, and discussed how to dissuade him from similar mischief in the future. I’m of the opinion that unless Putin is made to regret his decision he will return to the scene of the crime again and again. Crime has most certainly paid for Vladimir Putin, while leaving his country underdeveloped and over-dependent on its oil and gas resources. I’ve heard it speculated that he might be the wealthiest person on earth, and every ruble of his wealth will have been stolen from the Russian people. Imposing sanctions on Putin and his closest confederates, freezing assets, travel bans, and financial and trade restrictions on Russian entities tied to the Kremlin are appropriate and helpful. But to make Putin deeply regret his assault on the foundation of our democracy—free and fair elections—we should seriously consider retaliating with the kinds of weapons he used. We are in an information war with Russia whether we want to recognize it or not, and in this war offense might be our best defense. We have cyber capabilities, too. They could be used to expose the epic scale of his regime’s corruption or to embarrass him in other ways. Although discussions o...

Why had I been given the dossier? That’s the first accusatory question in every budding conspiracy theory about my minor role in the controversy. The answer is too obvious for the paranoid to credit. I am known internationally to be a persistent critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime, and I have been for a long while. Wood and Steele likely assumed that my animosity toward Putin, which I unapologetically acknowledge, ensured that I would take their concerns seriously. They assumed correctly. Most Americans and Europeans believe that Putin changed around 2007, when he went from being a modernizing Russian leader the West could work with to a risk-taking autocrat and Russian nationalist who resented the West, especially the U.S. I think that’s a fallacy. At the risk of sounding self-congratulatory, I’ve been a realist about Russia and its corrupt strongman for over two decades. Putin and I have history, you could say, each of us having regularly made known our low opinion of the other. Yet we have never actually met.

Resentment and humiliation spread in Russia in the chaos, dislocation, and corruption of the erratic Yeltsin years, and eased the way for that striving, resentful KGB colonel, who seems to feel those emotions sharply and, to borrow an observation from Game of Thrones, used chaos as a ladder.

The Russian separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia had nearly severed the regions from Georgia. A quarter million Georgians had fled Abkhazia in 1993, and about a tenth that number had to leave South Ossetia in the same period. Territory in both regions was effectively ruled by Russia. The Putin cult of personality, that bare-chested, give-the-finger-to-the-West machismo he advertises to Russians living in Russia and abroad, that the West sneered at for years, was evident early on in those breakaway Georgian regions. On a congressional delegation trip to Georgia a few years after that first visit, when Saakashvili was president but before Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, we entered South Ossetia without our Georgian hosts, who were forbidden to enter. Although it was sovereign Georgian territory, it had a border crossing and border guards and a gregarious Russian puppet running the place, who handed each of us huge floral arrangements. We were taken to a nearby farmhouse where we met with a bunch of Russian colonels. The first sight that greeted us after our bus “crossed the border” was an immense billboard with a smiling Vladimir Putin looking down on us, and written in Russian above him “Our President.”

My last trip to Georgia had been in 2006. It was during that visit that we had gone into South Ossetia. Georgia’s problems with ethnic Russian separatists predated Saakashvili’s presidency, but they worsened after his election, a development at least partly attributable to Saakashvili’s pro-Western reputation and Moscow’s displeasure with democratic uprisings in the neighborhood.

I had by this time discovered the dubious pleasures of Twitter, and as I watched on cable TV the marchers in Moscow chant their anti-regime slogans, I tweeted the following, “Dear Vlad, The #ArabSpring is coming to a neighborhood near you.”

When he was asked about my mischievous insult on a televised call-in program a few days later, Putin unleashed quite a tirade. “Mr. McCain fought in Vietnam,” he observed. I think that he has enough blood of peaceful citizens on his hands. It must be impossible for him to live without these disgusting scenes anymore. . . . He was captured and they kept him not just in prison, but in a pit for several years. Anyone would go crazy. It wasn’t the first time I had heard that insult, and I laughed it off. Putin normally affects insouciance when he’s trying to offend a foreign critic who’s annoyed him.

In 2013, Putin had an op-ed published in the New York Times, warning the U.S. not to intervene in the Syrian war on the side of the Syrians murdered with chemical weapons, or the millions of Syrians killed, injured, and dislocated by the Assad regime. Two years later, Putin would deploy Russian soldiers to Syria to fight on behalf of the murderers. I asked and was allowed to publish a response to Putin in Pravda. I began by addressing the falsehood that I was anti-Russian. “I am pro-Russian,” I claimed. “I’m more pro-Russian than the regime that misrules you today. I make that claim because I respect your dignity and your right to self-determination. I believe you should live according to the dictates of your conscience, not your government. I believe that you deserve the opportunity to improve your lives in an economy that is built to last and benefits the many, not just the powerful few. You should be governed by a rule of law that is clear, consistently and impartially enforced and just. I make that claim because I believe the Russian people, no less than Americans, are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Much of the commentary in Washington about my op-ed was focused on the fact that it had been published on an online news site, Pravda.ru, and not in the old Communist Party organ, Pravda. Some analysts believed Russians would be offended by my criticism of the regime, despite the fact that the largest anti-regim...

Martin Luther King, Jr., had called it “the fierce urgency of now,” the transformational moment when aspirations for freedom must be realized, when the voice of a movement can’t be stilled, when the heart’s demands will not stand further delay. I saw it that night. I felt it. It was thrilling and affirming. If you told me I could choose to retain only a handful of memories from my long life, that night at the Maidan would be one of them. Ukraine’s politics might be complicated by competing ethnic loyalties, but that’s mostly because Russia stokes the anger and insecurities of ethnic Russians in Ukraine. There was nothing tribal about the Maidan that night. There were nationalist sentiments in evidence, of course, but in a common demand for independence from corruption, injustice, and imperial dominion. The fervent political movements of our age seem so often to be the workings of religious fanaticism or injured ethnic pride or dehumanizing ideologies of one kind or another, and the power seekers who profit from them. That night I witnessed a fervent mass movement for the universal ideals of freedom and justice. That’s what a European identity meant to those people. It was humankind I saw in that square, in all its impossibly resilient dignity, known to God, and striving to be recognized and answered to by the powerful forces who had set themselves above them. Those ideals were my cause, the cause that gave meaning to my eventful life, a life that might otherwise have been ...

We had arrived in Mariupol soon after the Obama administration announced new sanctions against Russia for interference in the 2016 election. Russia had not announced retaliatory measures yet. We would later learn that was because President-elect Trump’s incoming national security advisor, retired lieutenant general Mike Flynn, had urged the Russian ambassador in Washington not to impose new sanctions, presumably implying that once the new administration was in office they would reconsider the sanctions the White House had just announced. If that was indeed what happened, it was a terrible thing to do. A ruthless adversary had tried to sabotage our elections, aggravating our political divisions and worsening our government’s dysfunction. Sparing Putin any serious penalty for his assault on our democracy doesn’t just encourage further aggression, it tells the victims and potential victims of Russian aggression in Ukraine and Georgia, the Baltics, Poland, Moldova, and Montenegro, and in Russia itself, that the United States, the greatest power in the world, couldn’t be relied on to defend its own democracy. It’s a colossal strategic mistake, and a stain on our honor. In the last decade, I’ve traveled to all the countries named above, save Russia, and many others in the neighborhood. They are all scared of what Russia plans for them, and though they will never say it publicly, worried that the U.S. won’t help defend them when it comes. Putin’s kleptocracy has left the sluggish...

We must appreciate the limits of our power, but we cannot allow ourselves to question the rightness and goodness of the West. We must understand and learn from our mistakes, but we cannot be paralyzed by fear. We cannot give up on ourselves and on each other. That is the definition of decadence. And that is how world orders really do decline and fall. This is exactly what our adversaries want. This is their goal. They have no meaningful allies, so they seek to sow dissent among us and divide us from each other. They know that their power and influence are inferior to ours, so they seek to subvert us, and erode our resolve to resist, and terrorize us into passivity. They know they have little to offer the world beyond selfishness and fear, so they seek to undermine our confidence in ourselves and our belief in our own values. We must take our own side in this fight. We must be vigilant. We must persevere. And through it all, we must never, never cease to believe in the moral superiority of our own values—that we stand for truth against falsehood, freedom against tyranny, right against injustice, hope against despair . . . and that even though we will inevitably take losses and suffer setbacks, through it all, so long as people of goodwill and courage refuse to lose faith in the West, it will endure.

I believe the United States has a special responsibility to champion human rights in all places, for all peoples, and at all times. I’ve believed that all my life.

It’s who we are. The right to life and liberty, to be governed by consent and ruled by laws, to have equal justice and protection of property, these values are the core of our national identity. And it is fidelity to them—not ethnicity or religion, culture or class—that makes one an American.

The character of states can’t be separated from their conduct in the world. Governments that protect the rights of their citizens are more likely to play a peaceful, constructive role in world affairs. Governments that are unjust, that cheat, lie, steal, and use violence against their own people are more likely to do the same to other nations.

Often the very act of supporting human rights overseas compels us to make our own “shining city upon a hill” worthier of such a boast.

Exposing our hypocrisy to the world played a part in forcing change in America, helping convince leaders to adopt laws that oblige us to live up to our values. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Detainee Treatment Act forty years later were to an extent a response to accusations that our proselytizing on behalf of the God-given dignity of all people was cynical.

it’s fair to also observe, that for all our disagreements I never doubted President Obama shared the seventy-five-year bipartisan consensus that American leadership of the free world was a moral obligation and a practical necessity. I think he tried to defer some of the responsibilities of that leadership, which weakened it. But I never believed he thought we should abandon it. I’m not sure what to make of President Trump’s convictions. At times as a candidate and as President, he has appeared to be more than merely a realpolitik adherent. He seemed to mock the idea that America has any business at all promoting its values abroad. I don’t know if that is sincerely his view or if he believes that the global progress of democracy and the rule of law should be only a distant, notional goal of American statecraft. He threatened to deliberately kill the spouses and children of terrorists, implying that an atrocity of that magnitude would show the world America’s toughness. His lack of empathy for refugees, innocent, persecuted, desperate men, women, and children, is disturbing. The way he speaks about them is appalling, as if welfare or terrorism were the only purposes they could have in coming to our country.

I have never once gone to Hanoi and not raised human rights issues with my hosts. They would be surprised if I didn’t or if any American on an official visit didn’t appeal for greater freedom and justice in that country. That’s what visiting American officials do. The world expects us to be concerned with the condition of humanity. We should be proud of that reputation. I’m not sure the President understands that.

it is a moral failure to believe tyranny and injustice are the inevitable tragedies of man’s fallen nature, that there are some places in the world that will not change or aren’t worth the effort to make better. They can be changed. They have been. And not only by force of arms as with Germany or Japan, but peacefully with international pressure and support. Every independent democratic country in the world once had a government less just and accountable, whether it was monarchical, dictatorial, or imperial. Progress toward a freer, more just world is the history of the world. Change doesn’t always proceed as quickly as we want it to, but it comes. We were once the world’s only democratic republic and now we’re one of more than a hundred. The ranks of free nations have swelled thanks in large part to the example, leadership, and support of the United States. And thanks to all those people and organizations in every corner of the world, the philosophers, the politicians, the activists, and the ordinary decent men and women who throughout history have not let injustice stand without trying to right it.