Today is Memorial Day, the day we set aside to give thanks to the US soldiers who died while serving. Because of their selfless actions, we are able to enjoy today as a holiday in the safety and comfort of our great country. Above all, we should be thankful that their selflessness has secured our freedom for nearly 250 years and counting. Without those who fought and died in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and World War II, we would be nothing. The great US experiment would have failed, and we would likely be unable to live, speak, and write freely like we do today. Those soldiers should have our unending thanks.
If the four aforementioned wars were the only wars in our country’s history, there would be little more to say. Our history, unfortunately, includes many more wars that did not secure our freedom. In fact, some of those wars hurt our freedom. The Spanish-American War, World War I, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War all likely did more harm than good. We cannot blame the soldiers that fought and died in these wars for the carelessness of the politicians who got us into them. In fact, many of those who died in these wars were draftees who wanted nothing to do with the wars. Every soldier that died, regardless of the merits of the war, deserves our thanks, but we should not let our thanks prevent us from seeing the injustice of those wars.
Defensive wars are just wars. A defensive war is a war fought by the defender to preserve the defender’s inalienable rights. The Revolutionary War was a defensive war because its aim was to secure the inalienable rights of the colonists against the tyrannical British Empire. To the US, World War II was a defensive war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Vietnam War was not a defensive war for the US because our rights were never at risk. In fact, getting involved in Vietnam increased the chances of a far larger war with the USSR or the PRC, which would have put our inalienable rights directly in the crosshairs. Drafting and sending our soldiers to bleed and die in Vietnam was incredibly unjust. Those soldiers should have been able to live free in the US, but their lives were cut short by force.
The same can be said of World War I. Again, the US was not at risk and there was little popular support for entering the war, but many politicians wanted to get involved anyway. The war was close to a stalemate before the US entered, but the US drastically changed the balance of the war. Within about 18 months, the US pushed the Allies to victory. But this drastic power shift led to a bigger problem. The Treaty of Versailles that ended the war was punitive on the losers and it is widely recognized to be a primary contributor to National Socialism’s rise in Germany. With National Socialism came Hitler, and then the Holocaust and World War II. If the US had not gotten into World War I and so definitively changed the balance of power against Germany, the war’s conclusion likely would have been more even-handed. If this had happened, Germany would have been too stable for a lunatic like Hitler to take control, and many of the 20th century’s atrocities may have been averted.
Wars can have devastating and unforeseen consequences and it is not worth rolling the dice. It can be easy to get caught up in current events and lose sight of what makes a war just. If our rights are not immediately at risk, then we should not send our soldiers to risk their rights. The more we keep this in mind, the fewer the solders we will need to remember next Memorial Day, because they will be celebrating the day with us instead.