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CNN
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The new world, where the greatest generation was sacrificed in the bloody waves on the shores of Normandy, is fading into history with the last of its veteran soldiers.
The 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, commemorated by President Joe Biden in France on Thursday, will be the last major decennial commemoration attended by a significant number of veterans. Even the 19-year-old who came ashore in the largest amphibious invasion in history will soon be 100 years old.
This year’s memorial ceremony is much more than an emotional farewell to the surviving comrades of the more than 150,000 Allied soldiers who established a bridgehead for the liberation of Europe from Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.
NATO presidents, prime ministers and monarchs come together at a time of contradiction. They show unusual unity, yet insecurity is growing. The alliance feels a renewed sense of mission to oppose a new war started by a territorial expansionist tyrant, this time in Ukraine. But never since June 6, 1944, has America’s unwavering leadership in the West and its support for internationalist values been more questioned. Democracies face their toughest test in generations, from far-right populism on both sides of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, geopolitical empires like Russia and China are resurgent, threatening to erase the world system dominated by Western values that have reigned since World War II.
European nations, already shaken by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s constant attacks on NATO during his first term, were further shaken by his recent comments that he would let Russia “do whatever it wants” with allies who he believes “don’t pay” for their defense. The comments undermine NATO’s fundamental principle of mutual self-defense, without which the alliance is meaningless. Some of Trump’s former advisers have warned that he could try to pull the U.S. out of NATO if re-elected in November. Even if Biden wins, there are growing signs that Americans are less willing to maintain security guarantees, even from former enemies such as Germany and Japan that provided 80 years of peace.
Trump’s “America First” philosophy is deeply rooted in a Republican Party that once prided itself on winning the Cold War. Some of the former president’s party’s leaders now seem more sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin than to the liberal European democracies the U.S. rebuilt after World War II. And a months-long delay in funding Biden’s latest Ukraine bailout has raised questions about whether the U.S. will always stand up for European democracies and oppose the encroachments of dictators.
On Thursday, Biden will address the unpayable debt owed to U.S., British, Canadian and other troops who served in Operation Overlord. He will walk among the rows of white crosses and Stars of David shaded by pine and oak trees overlooking Omaha Beach, the final resting place of more than 9,000 Americans from all 50 states and the District of Columbia who died thousands of miles from their homes to rescue foreigners they never met.
Biden was excited to travel the world after winning the 2020 election and declaring that “America is back.” He was true to his word, providing the most effective leadership of the Western alliance since President George H. W. Bush at the end of the Cold War. But many foreign leaders worry that Biden’s term in office will be an interregnum to normalcy, rather than a return to certainty of American leadership. With his erratic temperament, transactional suspicions of alliances, and worship of autocrats, Trump’s first term transformed the United States from a bastion of stability into an unpredictable force of chaos. After a long period of denial, many in European prime ministerial offices are hopeful that Trump will return.
Trump’s blend of isolationism and populism didn’t come about in a vacuum. It grew out of years of U.S. military failure overseas, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and a growing conviction among many Americans that a globalized world is eroding the dividends of domestic prosperity and security that came from World War II and were built by men returning from battlefields in Europe and the Pacific. A growing sense of American fatigue with its global role has stoked a belated debate in some European capitals that the continent should do more to ensure its own security.
Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, believes that internal threats to the West are as great as external threats posed by America’s enemies. “And it’s not just about Trump,” he says. “It’s also about what’s happening to the political center in France and Germany, and the likely gains for the far right in the upcoming EU elections. Even if Biden wins, Americans and Europeans have difficult questions about the credibility of the United States.”
The Normandy landings have long been considered a triumph, the moment in history when the United States truly emerged as a superpower with the power and will to make the world safe for democracy. But the risks of sending a fleet across the English Channel in treacherous weather to attack battle-hardened Nazi forces were enormous at the time. As Allied forces landed on the shores, President Franklin Roosevelt recited the Normandy landing prayer over the radio: “Almighty God, our sons, the pride of our nation, have today embarked on a great endeavor, the struggle to defend our Republic, our religion, our civilization, and to liberate a suffering humanity.”
To begin with, fears of failure appear to have been justified. By the end of the day on June 6, none of the invading forces had achieved their first day’s objectives. More than 10,000 were dead, wounded, or missing. General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, had prepared a message before the invasion in case of withdrawal. “If there is any blame or fault in this endeavor, it rests solely with me,” he wrote. But the future president didn’t need to reach out of his wallet for his words. In the days that followed, Allied forces slowly gained a foothold on the northwestern tip of the continent. After the breakthrough, they reached Paris in August, and after often fierce fighting, they secured victory in Europe by May 1945.
For many years after World War II, the anniversary of the Normandy landings lacked the fanfare and diplomatic and political significance it enjoys today. There are also arguments that it has become too weighted with geopolitical symbolism, threatening to overshadow the sheer bravery of a dwindling group of veterans who make the pilgrimage to commemorate their fallen comrades. But the presidents of France and the United States, among others, have used the gathering as a platform to renew transatlantic ties. Now, in a particularly important national move, Western leaders will be joined by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has framed his country’s fight for survival after the Russian invasion as an echo of the Allied fight against Hitler.
Since at least the end of the Cold War, Russian leaders and senior officials have attended ceremonies commemorating the Soviet Union’s enormous losses in the fight against the Nazis, but Putin is now a pariah and has not been invited.
This year’s ceremony will be significant for several of the country’s leaders: It will be the first once-in-a-decade ceremony to welcome Britain’s King Charles III as head of state since the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, a fixture of Normandy for decades. It will also give politically weakened French President Emmanuel Macron and President Biden a chance to demonstrate their statesmanship at a time of global turmoil.
On Friday, Biden will be echoing the words of one of his predecessors, Ronald Reagan, who visited Pointe du Hoc, the 100-foot-high cliff that U.S. Army Rangers scaled in a daring raid on the day of the Normandy landings in 1984. Though they suffered heavy losses, the Rangers seized German artillery that could have sparked further carnage on the invasion beaches of Omaha and Utah.
With his back to the water, surrounded by veterans who had survived the attack, Reagan stood before a stone monument bearing the Rangers’ crest and delivered one of the greatest presidential speeches of all time: “These were the boys of Pointe du Hoc. They were the men who held the cliffs. They were the brave men who helped liberate a continent. They were the heroes who helped end the war,” Reagan said. He later wrote in his diary that he was so moved he was speechless.
The speech came at a particularly tense time in the Cold War, when tensions were running high between Washington and the Soviet Union, but Reagan’s clarion call for freedom may have been influential: Less than a year later, Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and initiated the reforms and nuclear arms negotiations that led to the end of the Cold War.
Biden, like the 40th president, is facing age concerns in a reelection year, and on Friday he’ll visit the same clifftop and make a similar call to defend democracy. Reagan’s Pont-du-Hoc speech is notable not only for its poetry — forty years later, it remains startlingly relevant in a new political era — but also for how far the Republican Party has come from the man who once personified the party to the anti-democratic America Firstism of its current hero.
“We in America learned the bitter lessons of two world wars that it is better to be here defending the peace than to blindly flee across oceans and then scramble to react after our freedoms have been lost,” Reagan said. “We learned that isolationism has never been and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments bent on expansionism.”
He continued: “We are bound today by what bound us 40 years ago: the same loyalties, traditions and beliefs. We are bound by reality: the strength of America’s allies is essential to America, and American security is essential to the continued freedom of European democracies. We were with you then, and we are with you now. Your hopes are our hopes, and your destiny is our destiny.”
Reagan could make that promise without fear of contradiction in 1984. Biden cannot do the same in 2024.
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