Secretary Wilkie Speech and the Grand Strategy Summit 2025 - Richard Nixon Foundation

TRANSCRIPT BEGINS AT 5:14:00

Well, it’s a return engagement. You just had me for an hour and now you’ve got me for a few more minutes.

First of all, I can never say enough what an honor it is for me to be associated with anything that brings us to the Nixon family and the Nixon legacy. Because when Richard Nixon entered the White House, there were 600,000 Americans in Southeast Asia. One was a young major from New Orleans, my father.

America was in retreat and facing its greatest internal crisis since the Civil War. But when Richard Nixon left office, my father was at home because one man believed that his mission was to create a generation of peace.

President Nixon secured a way out of a failed conflict without losing American prestige or power. He disengaged without losing the larger Cold War. Meeting Chairman Mao, he pulled China from the Soviet Union and exploited tensions between both of those communist powers.

Detente at a time of American weakness internally lowered tensions with Moscow to reduce pressure on our nation. He was the first to demand that Europe do more for its own defense and he kicked the Soviet Union out of the Middle East. Golda Meir noted that Richard Nixon was the greatest friend Israel ever had.

And with a divided America, he bought time. It was his strategic vision that laid the foundation for the collapse of the Soviet Union after his presidency.

In 1994, Bob Dole predicted that the second half of the 20th century would be known as the age of Nixon. Dole called Richard Nixon the most durable figure of our time. In his long career, he broke bread with or shared or stared down the likes of Winston Churchill, the man he called the largest human being of the 20th century, Charles de Gaulle, Conrad Adenauer, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, and Zhou Enlai, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and of course, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev.

President Nixon was a hero to the silent majority in America, people who believe in the dignity and importance of working hard, worshiping God, loving their families, and saluting the flag. Dole added that Nixon embodied the deepest feelings of the people he led. In his ultimate act of service, he became the century’s greatest architect of peace.

In 1942, the chief of staff of the United States Army, George Marshall, went to Hollywood and asked the great director Frank Capra to produce a series of films for the American people entitled Why We Fight. One of the narrators of those films was a young captain of cavalry named Ronald Reagan. And in the Pacific, a young Navy lieutenant, younger than Ronald Reagan, named Richard Nixon took those films to heart. Because he believed they reminded America of the most important part of that title: why.

Why demand sacrifice to defend this free republic against monstrous tyrannies?

In a nation of 140 million people, twothirds of Americans saw those films. Nixon was right. We have to discuss the why. It begs the question that to defend an idea that began in the Judeian desert 3,000 years ago, the idea of the West, does the West even understand what the West is? How can one defend civilization kinetically if it can’t be defined, much less defended rhetorically?

In 1886, a young Theodore Roosevelt said, “Societies that cultivate patriotism in the present by keeping alive the memory of what we owe to the patriotism of the past fill an indispensable role in this republic. No country will accomplish very much for the world at large unless it elevates itself.”

President Trump channeled Teddy in a remarkable but sadly forgotten speech that he delivered in Warsaw in 2017 when he said that defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also the will of our people to prevail. The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are the heirs of Thucydides and Cicero, Constantine, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Locke, Hans Christian Andersen, and Thomas Jefferson. The late David McCullough noted that reverence for these 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 ignorant, it is rude. Ours is an expression of 3,000 years of memory, what G.K. Chesterton described as the democracy of the dead that refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around. Raymond Aron put it simply: “The Westerner is the man who accepts nothing unreservedly in our civilization except the liberty it allows him to create, to criticize, and the chance it offers to improve.”

We are now told with unrestrained fury to reject our tether to the past. We are surrendering our posterity to what Professor James Hankins of Harvard calls the devouring machine of ignorance and spite that in recent years has been cutting off the people of the West from our own history and making us ashamed of it. We have seen spread through our schools, institutions, and populations a malicious form of humility indistinguishable from self-hatred.

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

In the United States, visit the presidential homes at Mount Vernon, Monticello, and Mount Pelier, and you will be surprised to learn that Washington, Jefferson, and Madison are nothing more than cardboard cutouts of slave drivers, not the children of the European Enlightenment who laid low the mightiest empire in history and gave the world its ultimate expression of ordered liberty under law. To strike at a nation’s symbols is to question the nation’s reason for being. Our heroes have been torn asunder and our history fetishized.

Voices on the American right now unabashedly denounce Winston Churchill as equally responsible for World War II as Adolf Hitler. These same people argue that Ukraine must be subsumed into holy Russia because Russia is somehow a civilization state. Why? Because Russia produces poets and pianists. Putin mouths pieties about the family with the patriarch of the Orthodox Church every Christmas, a patriarch whom our friends in Europe know is on the payroll of the secret police, as his father was, as his grandfather was, and his greatgrandfather was on the payroll of the Okrana.

Meanwhile, Putin is actively persecuting Catholics, Protestants, Evangelical Christians, and the Greek Orthodox. Professor John Mearsheimer, as well as Tucker and Candace and a whole host, even argue that the invasion of Ukraine is somehow the fault of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United States.

Nowhere is this intersectional madness more apparent than in the case of Israel. When the left sees Israel and Hamas, it sees nothing more than critical race theory. As the Jewish people rose in response to the bloodiest event since the Holocaust, the world’s oldest hatred reared its head in places once thought unimaginable. These are truly attacks on all of us.

Western identity is uniquely tied to the history of the Jewish people. Harry Truman, upon recognizing the new state in 1948, charged that the United States itself was built upon the truths of freedom erected in the Judeian desert. As he said, the fundamental basis of this nation’s law was given to Moses on the mount. The fundamental basis of our bill of rights comes from the teachings that we get from Exodus, from Isaiah, and St. Paul.

Ladies and gentlemen, if Israel did not exist, the United Nations would go out of business. UNRWA is an active agent of Hamas. Forty percent of the General Assembly resolutions in the last decade have been about one little country the size of New Jersey. Israel is the only permanent agenda item on the docket of the UN Human Rights Council, a council that says nothing when Bashar Assad murders 800,000 Muslims, when Pakistan forces 1 million Muslims back into the clutches of the Taliban, and is silent in seven languages when the communist Chinese imprison 1 million Uyghurs in concentration camps worthy of Joseph Stalin. Only when Jews are involved does the UN become interested.

That Turtle Bay is now aided in its war by some in the West is a further obscenity.

A few weeks ago, the new axis of evil paraded their solidarity at the entrance of Tiananmen Gate looking out over the square where the communists massacred thousands of their fellow citizens in 1989. Nixon would have seen this act before. Masses of goosestepping soldiers marching beside empty ballistic missiles and fighter aircraft that, like the Chinese army, have never been tested in battle, unless of course killing your own people counts as combat.

Side by side with Xi were the theocratic fanatics from Iran, Korea’s porcine dark age dictator, and Vladimir Putin representing his prison of peoples. The only personage missing from that rogue’s tableau was the late Fidel Castro. But never fear, the Havana Politburo was somewhere in the background. The message was clear. The West is no longer declining. It is dead. The liberal world order policed by the United States and before that by the British Empire is over.

This display was a fundamental assault on historical truth. Xi rebranded the war in the Pacific as the war of resistance to Japanese aggression with the Communist Party as the sole author of Japan’s defeat. Xi thus claims glory for the new order, a glory that is a fabrication. Wipe out the Kuomintang’s lead role in victory and you have erased Taiwan’s reason for being.

What is not a fabrication is Chinese hegemonic ambition buttressed by traditional Russian savagery and aided by what Dr. Sebastian Gorka calls Islamofascist Iran. At least she understands that one who controls the past controls the present. My fellow Southerner, the blessed William Faulkner, was more eloquent: the past is never dead. In fact, it is not even the past.

Putin has been waging hybrid war on the West for decades, mounting assassinations, cyber attacks, and weaponizing migration to destabilize his neighbors. But he crossed a threshold. 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 EU and NATO legations in Kiev. There is no precedent for what happened in the skies over Poland. One thing is clear: Vladimir Putin’s appetite for escalating risk is mounting.

But before I go any further, let me knock down one revisionist shibboleth. As Russia’s death toll reaches 10 times the number of Americans who perished in my own father’s decadelong war in Vietnam, and as Putin unleashes traditional Russian savagery on civilians because he is stalemated on the battlefield, he wants you to believe that little nations like the Netherlands and Estonia and Latvia are responsible for his barbaric acts in Ukraine because they advocated the expansion of NATO, thus creating an insecure Russia and forcing it to lash out.

The argument has two key flaws. First, NATO is a defensive alliance and has sadly been shrinking exponentially in terms of its military capabilities since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Kremlin’s complaints about the alliance tend to spike only after democracy breaks out in Russia’s near abroad.

Secondly, Putin fears democracy and the threat that it poses to his regime and not NATO expansion. Taking the latter off of the table will not quell his rapacious appetite. The declared goal of the invasion, the denazification of Ukraine, is a code for the endgame: anti-democratic regime change while restoring Russia’s faded empire. And Ukraine is the key.

Like Xi, Putin is rewriting history. Denazification is the continuation of a Russian lie that it alone won the Second World War and is still entitled to the spoils of victory. Peruse any Putin-approved Kremlin history and you will not read that it was the industrial strength and wealth of the United States and the 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 officer corps.

With the notable exceptions of countries like Poland, the Baltics, Finland, Sweden, and the renewed emphasis on defense of the Danes and the Dutch, which are rapidly expanding their military capabilities in the face of increased Russian aggression, there is almost a sense, according to London’s Daily Telegraph, that the largest European nations are sleepwalking toward disaster.

In London and Paris, the main priority appears to be working out which domestic spending programs, such as fixing potholes around Westminster, come from reducing the defense budget. While the nations I just mentioned, including all of Scandinavia, are dedicated to increasing their strength and capabilities.

Tiny Lithuania can put more troops in the field than the combined armies of Britain and Germany, the world’s fifth and fourth largest economies.

Richard Nixon knew that British history gives us the answer. Lord Esher, the confidant of King Edward VII, was able to contrast the differences in strategic outlook between the British global superpower and its European centric rival, Imperial Germany. Writing in 1904, Esher noted that the issues confronting Berlin were simple and stable compared with those affecting our worldwide empire, and they are purely military, whereas there is hardly any point on the earth’s surface which can change ownership and certainly not a modification in the relative power of two foreign states that can take place without affecting the national strategy of Great Britain.

Substitute Britain for America. It is America with interests in preserving stability in Europe and the Pacific. Our basic strategic posture has not changed since Thomas Jefferson’s presidency. 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 has expanded beyond our 19th century sea lanes to include air, space, and cyber. Britain’s Georgian and Victorian strategic imperative was to prevent a single power from dominating the European continent. For the United States, this means preventing one nation or a combination of nations from dominating any one of the commons.

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

Ladies and gentlemen, that is a prescription for national suicide. America’s military, economic, and cultural power is indispensable if we are to preserve our civilization.

Golda warned us that when someone tells you over and over again he wants to kill you, believe him. And we had better believe Xi, Putin, and the mullahs. We have come to this again. The control of the Eurasian landmass is once again control of the world. In partnership with Europe as much as the United States, it is incumbent upon us to rediscover our historic virtues and fulfill them, or if not betray 3,000 years of human progress.

Who is in charge of the clattering train? And the axles creak and the couplings strain, for the pace is hot and the points are near, and sleep hath deadened the driver’s ear, and the signals flash through the night in vain, because death is in charge of the clattering train. So recited Winston Churchill as the tide of appeasement overwhelmed the traditional good sense of the British people while Germany rearmed and Hitler swallowed central Europe piece by piece.

When the reckoning was finally tallied, over 40 million were dead. And the great man lamented, “There never was a war more easy to stop than that which is just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle. The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.”

So 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 most lamentable words in the English language: too late.

Dick Nixon would know what to do. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your kindness and attention. Thank you for being here, and thank you to the Nixon Foundation.

[Applause]