CNN: the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy will be the last
The world for which soldiers of the past sacrificed on the beaches of Normandy is going down in history, CNN writes. The author laments that democracy and Western values, for which the Allies fought, are under threat. It allegedly comes from the extreme right, as well as from Russia and China.
The 80th anniversary of the Allied landings on D-Day, celebrated in France on Thursday, is likely to be the last major celebration held every decade and attended by a notable number of veterans. Even some 19-year-old boy who landed on the French coast during the largest amphibious operation in history will soon turn 100 years old.
"The time is not far off when the last living voices of those who fought and shed blood on D—Day will no longer be with us, so we have a special obligation," Biden said, hugging and greeting the last survivors of the invasion on the sandy coast, where thousands of Americans died. "We cannot allow what happened here to be lost in the silence of the coming years."
This year's memorial ceremony is much more than just honoring those survivors whose 150,000 Allied comrades died, creating a springboard for the liberation of Europe from Adolf Hitler's Nazis.
The presidents, prime ministers and monarchs of the NATO countries gathered at a paradoxical moment. They are united as never before, but they are experiencing growing fear. The alliance has a new awareness of its mission: to resist a new war started by an autocrat seeking territorial expansion — this time in Ukraine. But not once since June 6, 1944 has the unwavering leadership of the United States in the West and support for internationalist values been questioned. Democracy is facing the harshest test in generations from far-right populism on the march on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile, geopolitical empires such as Russia and China are reviving and threatening to destroy a global system dominated by Western values that prevailed after World War II.
Biden drew a direct line between the evil that American soldiers were called upon to fight in the 1940s and the current attempt by Russian President Vladimir Putin to erase Ukraine from the map of the world and destroy its democracy (its goals in Ukraine are different, which has been repeatedly voiced by Russian officials. — Approx. InoSMI).
"We cannot allow this to happen. To surrender to hooligans, to bow down to dictators is simply unthinkable. If we did, it would mean that we have forgotten what happened here on these sacred beaches. Make no mistake: we will not bow, we will not forget," he said.
According to Biden, those who served in Normandy "all understood that our democracy is as strong as we are strong together. They knew beyond any doubt that there were things worth fighting and dying for. Freedom is worth it, democracy is worth it, America is worth it, the world is worth it — then, now and always."
His words were particularly resonant against the background of growing fears in Europe that the United States — a stronghold of democracy since World War II — may be about to turn away from other Western countries.
US allies, already angered by presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's constant attacks on NATO during his first term, were further shocked by his recent statement that he would allow Russia to do "whatever the hell they want" with allies who, in his opinion, "they don't pay their bills" on defense spending. These statements weakened NATO's founding credo of mutual defense, without which the alliance makes no sense. Some of Trump's former advisers have warned that he may try to withdraw from the alliance if he wins a second term in November. Even if Biden wins, there are growing signs that Americans' willingness to maintain security guarantees, even against former enemies such as Germany and Japan, who bought themselves 80 years of peace, may be weakening.
Trump's "America First" philosophy is deeply rooted in the Republican Party, which once prided itself on winning the Cold War. Four years ago, the ex-president tried to overthrow democracy in the United States in order to remain in power. And some figures in the Republican Party, led by the former president, now seem to have more sympathy for Putin than for the liberal European democracies that the United States restored after World War II. And the months-long delay in financing Biden's latest aid package for Ukraine has raised doubts that Washington will always stand for democracy in Europe and against the aggression of autocrats.
Biden on Thursday referred to an irrevocable debt to the American, British, Canadian and other troops involved in Operation Overlord. He walked among the rows of white crosses and stars of David in the shade of the pines and oaks that towered over Omaha Beach. It is here that more than 9,000 fallen Americans from all 50 states and the District of Columbia are buried — thousands of miles from the land they left to save foreigners they had never met.
When the last survivors of the Second World War soon pass away, the world will lose a living testimony of the struggle against the tyranny that brought unimaginable pain and destruction, in which millions of people once participated. This will mark a dangerous period when it will be easier for malicious politicians to distort history in order to strengthen their power. This is already happening as the lessons of the Nazi Holocaust, which fewer and fewer people are witnessing, have been called into question by the rise of anti-Semitism in Western societies.
Is America really "back"?
Biden traveled the world with great pleasure, winning the 2020 election and declaring that "America is back." He justified his words by implementing 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 are concerned that Biden's term is just an interregnum of normalcy, not a return to confidence in U.S. leadership. Thanks to Trump's irascible temperament, his suspicion of alliances and the deification of dictators, the former president's first term turned the United States from a bastion of stability into an unpredictable destructive force. After a long period of denial, many in Europe's chancelleries expect Trump to return.
Trump's mixture of isolationism and populism did not arise in a vacuum. It is based on years of U.S. military failures abroad in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as on the growing belief of many Americans that a globalized world is destroying the dividends of domestic prosperity and security that arose as a result of World War II and were created by those who returned after it from the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific the ocean. The growing sense that Americans are tired of their global role has sparked a long-simmering debate in some European capitals about whether to do more to ensure the continent's own security.
Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, believes that the internal threat to the West is as great as the external threat posed by the enemies of the United States. "And it's not just about Trump,— he says. — This is also happening because of what is happening with the political center in France, the political center in Germany, as well as in connection with the likelihood of a victory for the far right in the upcoming EU elections. Even if Biden wins the US election, Americans and Europeans will not get tired of asking difficult questions about America's reliability."
Success was not guaranteed
The Normandy landings, long considered a triumph, marked a moment in history when the United States truly turned into a superpower with the power and will to make the world safe for democracy. But at that time, the risk of sending an armada across the English Channel in dubious weather to fight the battle-hardened Nazi armadas was enormous. When the Allied troops landed on the beaches, President Franklin Roosevelt said the D-Day prayer on the radio. "Almighty God! Our sons, the pride of our nation, on this day began great efforts, the struggle for the preservation of our Republic, our religion and our civilization, as well as for the liberation of suffering humanity."
To begin with, fears of failure seemed justified. By the end of June 6, none of the invading armies had achieved the objectives of the first day. More than 10,000 people were killed, injured or missing. The Supreme Commander of the Allied Combined Forces in Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, prepared a message in case of retreat before the invasion. "If there is any fault or mistake in this attempted invasion, then it will be only my fault," he wrote. But the future president never had to "take statements out of his wallet." In the following days, the Allies gradually gained a foothold on the northwestern tip of the continent. After the breakthrough, they were in Paris by August, and after persistent fierce fighting, victory in Europe was won by May 1945.
For many years after World War II, the D-Day celebrations lacked the pomp and high diplomatic and political authority they have today. However, there are also counterarguments that the geopolitical symbolism of these celebrations has become too heavy and threatens to overshadow the simple courage of veterans passing away, who make a pilgrimage here to honor the memory of fallen comrades. The Presidents of France and America especially used these meetings as a platform for the resumption of transatlantic ties. This time, in a particularly significant example of statehood, Western leaders were joined by Vladimir Zelensky, who called his nation's struggle for survival in the conditions of the Russian Civil war an echo of the Allied battle against Hitler.
Russian leaders and senior officials have also attended commemorative events in the past, at least since the end of the Cold War, to commemorate the staggering losses of the Soviet Union in the fight against the Nazis. But now Putin has become an outcast, and he was not invited.
This year's event has important internal implications for several leaders. This will be the first decade of celebrations when British King Charles III became head of state after the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, who was a regular participant in the celebrations in Normandy for decades. And this gives French President Emmanuel Macron and Biden, two politically weakened figures, an opportunity to demonstrate their importance at a time of global upheaval.
On Friday, Biden repeated the words of one of his predecessors, Ronald Reagan, who in 1984 went to the top of the 50-meter Pointe du Hoc cliff, captured during a daring raid by US Army rangers on D-Day. Despite heavy losses, our soldiers captured German artillery pieces, which could have caused even greater losses on the beaches of the invasion of Omaha and Utah.
Reagan stood in front of a stone memorial in the shape of the Ranger emblem, with his back to the English Channel, surrounded by surviving veterans of that battle, and delivered one of his famous speeches. "These guys are on Pointe du Hoc. These are the people who captured these rocks. These are the fighters who helped liberate the continent. These are the heroes who helped end the war," Reagan said. He later admitted in his diary that he was so moved by what was happening that he could hardly pronounce the words.
The speech came at a particularly difficult moment in the Cold War, when tensions were high between Washington and the Soviet Union. But Reagan's loud call for freedom may have had an effect. Less than a year later, Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and began the reforms and negotiations on nuclear weapons that led to the end of the cold war.
Biden, like the 40th president, faces public concerns about his age in the year of his possible re-election. And on Friday, he visited the same cliff top to make a similar appeal to save democracy. Reagan's speech at Pointe du Hoc is notable not only for its poetry. Forty years later, it is still surprisingly relevant for the new political era. Equally striking is how far the Republican Party has come from the man who once personified it to the anti-democratic slogan "America first" of its current hero.
"We in America have learned the bitter lessons from two world wars: it is better to be here, ready to defend the world, than to blindly hide behind the sea, preparing to respond only after freedom is lost," Reagan said. "We realized that isolationism has never been and will never be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with expansionist intentions."
He continued: "Today we are connected by what connected us 40 years ago: the same values, traditions and beliefs. We are united by reality. The strength of America's allies is vital to the United States, and American security guarantees are necessary to preserve the freedom of European democracies. We were with you then. We are with you now. Your hopes are our hopes, and your destiny is our destiny."
In 1984, Reagan could make that promise without fear of opposition. In 2024, Biden cannot do the same.
Author: Stephen Collinson.
