Robert Wilkie | Danube Institute Speech 2026

TRANSCRIPT

I was telling John O. Sullivan, and I learned this business at the feet of one of the titans of the conservative movement in the 20th century, Senator Jess Helms of North Carolina. Who once said that there are only three B’s in public speaking: boldly, briefing, and gone. I thought about that when I decided to change half of the subject of my remarks as speaker’s privilege.

And taking a risk in the presence of blessed St. Steven looking down on this beautiful city and also the presence of great scholar like John O. Sullivan, I am not a baleo college dawn. I have spent an entire career in and around the armed forces of the United States. I was born in khaki diapers, but I am a partisan of that civilizational continuum that began in Jerusalem and moved to Athens and Rome, with London, and then to the great young American colossus.

I was thinking the other day, in 1942, the chief of staff of the United States Army, General George C. Marshall, took a trip to Hollywood and he asked the famous film director Frank Kaplan to come up with a series of films for the American people entitled Why We Fight. And one of the narrators of those films was a 30-year-old captain of cavalry named Ronald Reag. The purpose of the film was to remind Americans of their unique history and why that history argued for them to do everything they could to sacrifice in defense of that history to defeat monstrous tyrannies.

In a country of 180 million people, two-thirds of the American populace saw those films. I changed my speech because I think, given the subject, we should discuss the why because it begs a question. To defend an idea that began in the Judean desert 3,000 years ago, the idea of the West, does the West even understand what the West is? How can one defend our civilization, one, if it can’t be defined, and two, if it can’t be defended rhetorically?

I’ll give you an example from the late lamented Biden administration. Take him two months. Mr. Blanken visited our last frontier, Alaska, and he was meeting with his Chinese counterpart. For the first 30 minutes of the conference, the Chinese counterpart, his foreign minister Mr. blink, all he did was quote speeches from Kla Harris and Joe Biden describing America as a racist present country responsible for all the ills of the world.

Now, had that been Richard Nelson on the other side of the table or break, responsible? The United States of America is not to be lectured by a country that has murdered 100 million of its own people since 1949. In a microcosm, they represented what has been wrong with our culture for many decades now.

Here, it helps that I hail from the most European of American cities, the city of New Orleans, founded by the French. They planted the flag that only the French would build a city on a malaria swamp 5t below sea level. They brought with them Roman Christendom and their successors, the Spanish, the southern laws of death steel. Young Abe Lincoln first witnessed the horrors of human bondage on our streets. Miraculously in the 1850s New Orleans Simmon Jew and the United States Senate de himself painted most of his masterpieces at his mother’s home on the Alleian fields. Louisie Armstrong, William Faulner, and Tennessee Williams gave their genius to the world. The statue of St. John Paul looks directly at Andrew Jackson. A mile from Andrew Jackson stands a memorial to the largest human being of the 20th century, Winston Churchill.

In 1886 in New Orleans, young Theodore Roosevelt warned that societies that cultivate patriotism in the present when keeping alive the memory of what we owe to the patriotism of the past fill an indispensable role in our young. No country, including the United States, will accomplish very much for the world unless it elevates itself.

Donald Trump in a famous but sadly forgotten speech in Warsaw in 2017 channeled the rough writer when he said that defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail. The fundamental question remains whether the west itself has the will to survive.

We are here in a bastion, a bastion of this idea that began with Homer, Virgil, Ducid, Cicero, Bach, Shakespeare, Nicolanga, Burke, Jefferson. The late historian David McCulla noted that the reverence for these western giants reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand up for. Indifference to history isn’t just being sitting out. Bars is an expression of 3,000 years of memory that Chester described as the democracy of the dead that refuses to submit to a small and arrogant oligarchy of those who happen to be walking in the house. Aaron was even a little sick of it when he said that the westerner is a man who accepts nothing unreservedly in our civilization except the liberty allows him to create, to criticize, and the chance it offers to improve.

We are now told with unrestrained fury that to reject our tethered to the past despite we are surrendering our posterity to what professor James Henkins of Harvard calls the devouring machine of ignorance and spite that in recent years has been cutting off the people of the west from their own history and making them ashamed. We have seen spread through our schools and institutions a malicious form of humility that is indistinguishable from self-hatred.

This is the humility that humiliates, that seeks to blind Westerners to their magnificent traditions and rub our noses like misbehaving dogs in our worst defenses.

In the United States, visit presidential homes at Mount Vernon, Montichello, and Mount Peelar, and you will be surprised to learn that Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were nothing more than cardboard cutouts of signing and greed, not the children of the Enlightenment who laid low the greatest empire in history and gave the world its ultimate manifestation of order, liberty, and open wide. To strike at a nation’s symbols is to question that nation’s reason for being there. Our heroes have been torn aunder and our history’s feathers shot.

Today, voices on the American right unabashedly denounce Winston Churchill as equally responsible for World War II as Adolf Hitler. The same people that argue that Ukraine must be subsumed into holy Russia because Russia is a civilization state, perhaps because Russia produces poets and pianists, Guten Mau’s pieties about the family with the patriarch in every Orthodox Christmas, a patriarch whom people in this part of the world know is probably on the payroll of the secret police just as his father, grandfather, and his greatgrandfather was on the payroll of the crop. Meanwhile, leader of Russia actively persecutes Protestants, evangelicals, Pentecostalists, and Greek Catholics. Professor John Mshimer has even argued that the invasion of the Ukraine is to bolt of the United States and its allies.

I experienced this type of madness firsthand as the leader of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the second largest department in the government of the United States. The department was formed in the aftermath of our great mid9th century cataclysm, the civil war. It was birthed in the most biblically righteous speech of American president ever came, the second inaugural of Abraham Lincoln, which was delivered a mere four weeks before his own Martin. Most westerners have heard the words, with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right. Let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphans and secure for us and our posterity a just and lasting peace for all nations.

Lincoln’s charges are blazing on every VA hospital across America. For three years, I’ve lost the speaker of the house’s efforts to rip Abraham Lincoln’s words down because the great emancipator at its merit, not to mention 21st century leftist pressure groups speech he gave in March of 1865. Saddam Lincoln’s words were non-inclusive in the such.

Nowhere is this inter intersectional madness more apparent than the case of Israel. When the left of the United States and Europe sees Israel, they see critical race theory. When Israel battles Hamas, that is what they see. As the Jewish people rose in response to the bloodiest days since the Holocaust, the world’s oldest hatred reared its places and places once fought under the hedgehog. These are truly attacks on all of us.

Western identity is tied to the history of the Jewish people and to the nation of Israel. Harry Truman upon recognizing the new Jewish state sent a note to David Vanbury the lion of the desert by saying that the fundamental basis of America’s law was given to Moses on the mount. The fundamental basis of our bill of rights comes from the teaching that we inherit from Exodus, from Isaiah. It seems, ladies and gentlemen, Israel did not exist the United Nations would go about sir who is an active agent of Hamas. Forty percent of the general assembly resolutions of the last decade have been about Israel.

Israel is the only permanent agenda item on the docket of the UN Human Rights Council, a council that says nothing when the human eraser, the disgraceful doof basher Assad kills 800,000 Muslims, when the Pakistanis turned 1 million Muslims over to the clutches of the Taliban, when the Chinese imprison 1 million weaguer Muslims in a concentration camp system that would be the envy of Joseph Stalin. It is only when the Jews are at the ball that the UN becomes aged.

That Turtle Bay is now aided in its war on the Jewish people by the powers of the West is a further obscenity. Two weeks ago, the new axis of evil paraded their solidarity at the entrance of China gate, looking out on the square where communist soldiers massacred thousands of their fellow citizens in 1989. Here in Hungary, the scenes are familiar. Masses of goostepping soldiers marching aside empty ballistic missiles and fighter aircraft that, like the Chinese army, has never been tested in battle, unless of course like the people’s liberation army killing your own people counts as com.

Side by side with Xi or Iran’s theocratic fanatics, Korea’s porcene dark age dictator, and Vladimir Putin representing his prison of peoples, the only personage missing from the roads gallery was the late Fidel Casper, although members of Baptist Policy Pure were somewhere in the background. The message was clear. The West is no longer declining. The West is dead. The liberal world order policed by the United States and before that by the British Empire is over.

That display, ladies and gentlemen, was a fundamental assault on historical truth. Xi rebranded the end of the war in the Pacific as the war of resistance against Japanese aggression, with the Communist Party of China as the sole author of the period of Jan’s defeat. G thus claims glory for the new order, glory that is a fabrication. But you wipe out the Coleman Tom’s lead in the victory over the Japanese that you have graced Taiwan to you.

What is not a fabrication is China’s hegemonic ambition buttressed by traditional Russian savagery and aided by what our dear friend Sebastian Gorer calls this fascist era. At least she understands that one controls the past, one controls the present. As Melissa you’ll know about our fellow Southerner William Faulner, he was a little more eloquent. He said the past is never dead. In fact, it is not even the past.

I do not need to go into a military history of the current Russia-Ukraine conflict with an audience like this, and I will discuss more of that in the panel, but I do want to talk about it for a minute. Putin has been waging a hybrid war on the West for decades: assassinations, cyber attacks, weaponizing migration to destabilize his neighbors. But he crossed the threshold two weeks ago. For the first time since 1949, NATO forces engaged Russians in NATO territory. Polish, Dutch, and Italian warplanes were scrambled to intercept more than 20 Russian drones that had entered Polish airspace. Russian drones and missiles also struck the EU and NATO locations from K. There is no precedent of what happened in the skies over Poland, but one thing is clear: Putin’s appetite for escalating risk is mounted.

Before I go further, let me knock down one vision with sugar. As Russia’s death toll reaches 10 times the number of Americans who perished in my own father’s decadel long war in Vietnam, and as Putin unleashes traditional Russian savry on civilians because he stalemated on the battlefield, he wants you to believe that the West is responsible for the barbaric acts in Ukraine, that rounds of NATO enlargement made Russia insecure, forcing it to lash out.

The argument has two basic forms. First, NATO is a defensive alliance, and its military capabilities have been shrinking, as you all know, exponentially since 1989. NATO has been a variant, but not a constant source of tension. The Kremlin’s complaints about the alliance tend to spike only after democracy breaks out in the former Soviet sphere.

Recently with the election of that highlights the second point. Since Putin fears democracy and the threat it poses to his regime and not expansion, taking the latter off the table will not quell his rapacious appetite. The declared goal of the invasion, denazification of Ukraine, is a code for the endgame: anti-democratic regime change while restored Russia’s trade. Ukraine is the white machine.

Putin is also rewriting history. You know that better than anyone here. Denazification is a continuation of the Russian lie that even won the second world war and is still entitled to the spoils of it. Peruse any Kremlin approved history and you will not read that it was the industrial strength and wealth of the United States and British Empire, waging a global as opposed to a continental war, that kept the Soviet Union afloat in the wake of Stalin’s diplomatic and military blunders, his own alliance with Adolf Hitler and his psychotic massacre of the Red Army’s office.

You have seen this act in Budast before: remove the popular government and stall the puppet, just as the Soviet did across Eastern Europe with its tanks, with the notable exception of certain countries in the east of Europe which are rapidly expanding their military capabilities in the face of increased Russian aggression. There is a sense, according to Mr. Sullivan’s friend in London caught him with the Telegraph, that the richest European nations are sleepwalking toward disaster. He said that last week.

Even though Denmark, which has also faced a broad Islamic extremism, has punched above its own weight in sounding the alarm as much as a little country like that can. Prime Minister Frederickson said last week that Europe’s Western Europe’s meddled thinking is compounded by the distinct lack of urgency regarding attempts to prepare for a future confrontation with Russia.

In London and Paris, the main priority appears to be working out which domestic spending programs such as fixing potholes in Paris come from reducing the defense budget, while Eastern Europe is contemplating military training for only able-bodied males. Even little Lithuania can now put twice as many troops into the field as the combined armies of the United Kingdom and Germany, the fifth and fourth largest economies on the planet.

So whether the United States, British history is the answer for that. Lord Cher writing in 1908 compliment was able to contrast the differences in strategic outlook between the global British superpowers and its European centric arrival Poland Germany. He wrote that the issues confronting Berlin were simple and stable compared to those affecting our worldwide empire, and they are purely military, whereas there is hardly any point on the surface of the government which can change ownership and certainly not a modification in the relative power of two font states can take place without affecting the national strategy of the British Isles.

Substitute Britain for America. It is America with interest in preserving stability of Europe and the Pacific. Our basic strategic posture has not changed since Thomas Jefferson’s presence. The protection of the liberal world order is essential for the continued safety and prosperity of the American nation. The freedom to navigate the global commons was expanded beyond 19th century sea lanes and now includes airspace and cyber. Britain’s Georgian and Victorian strategic imperative was to prevent a single power from dominating the European continent. In the United States, this means preventing one nation or a combination of nations from dominating any one of the continents.

During a rivalry with the Soviet Union, the prospect of defending the commons was conceptually easy. However, the rise of China’s Russia and militant insul convinced many, particularly on the new right, that the world is far too complicated for traditional strategic thinking and that we must again retreat behind our vast oceans or at best withdraw from all parts of the world except the Pacific. Who cares who controls the wheat fields of Ukraine?

America walking away is a prescription for national citizen. Golden warns that when someone tells you over and over again he wants to kill you, believe him. We had better believe X Putin and the Maltes or we reject 3,000 years of human progress that began at that moment when Abraham emerged from his tent in the Judeian desert.

I will close with one last note from Mr. Trish speaking in 1948. He said, “There was never more more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left the world from the previous struggle. The malice of the wicked was enforced by the weakness of the rights. We have reached that point again. We still have time to stave off disaster by confronting the malice of the wicked before someone utters the two most lamentable words in the English language, too late.”

Thank you all again for your great work.