Message to the American people
On the death of Stalin, common goals, and Dwight Eisenhower's message to America today
It is a rare and cruel thing, but the world sometimes becomes a better place when one person dies. Such a day happened on March 5, 1953, when Joseph Stalin left our mortal realm. Stalin bore responsibility for probably more than a million political killings and millions of other deaths by starvation. He placed himself beyond redemption.
■ The month following Stalin’s death, then-President Dwight Eisenhower delivered a speech centered on the opportunity for peace. In it, Eisenhower -- who rose to fame by achieving military victory in Europe -- identified five “precepts” to distinguish the United States from the Soviet Union.
■ Eisenhower was right on his first point: “No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be an enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.” That much remains true today; some governments and pockets of powerful people may favor creating enemies, but it is un-American to think of entire peoples as our enemies.
■ Eisenhower was right on his second point: “No nation’s security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow nations.” Nobody alive today has earned the credentials to repudiate Eisenhower’s observation. He won the European theater in World War II, and none of us have done even a shred as much. And he did it by leading an Allied force.
■ He was speaking in the context of Soviet imperialism, but his third point remains valid today: “Any nation’s right to a form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.” As does his fourth: “Any nation’s attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.”
■ Eisenhower’s fifth point might have been his most idealistic, and at the same time, his most accurate look into the future: “A nation’s hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.” We live in a world where power projection has been flattened in many ways, from long-range drones to a growing nuclear club to the massively asymmetrical power of cyberwarfare.
■ He was speaking nearly 73 years ago, but it’s hard not to conclude that, intentionally or not, Eisenhower was speaking directly to us today.