David Gelernter has a fascinating piece in The Weekly Standard on Ronald Reagan and his courage in facing down the Soviets and the Western pacifists. Gelernter draws a parallel between that fight and today’s war, and notes that Western pacifism has been on the wrong side of history since World War I:

Nowadays Swedish demonstrators wave signs reading “USA-murderers” and “War is terrorism.” In 1982, Italian demonstrators brandished signs reading “Reagan brings war to Italy” and “Reagan executioner.” During the First World War, the British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote, “I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal”; in the mid-1930s, British prime minister Stanley Baldwin was reported to be “for peace at any price,” and in 1938, the politician Thomas Jones (Baldwin’s close friend) wrote that “we have to convince the world that for peace we are prepared to go to absurd lengths.” Same theme from World War I through this afternoon: The United States (and Britain) are guilty; war is evil no matter what; peace must be preserved whatever the cost.

Peace must be preserved at any cost: that is the worldview of the left today. Unfortunately, what they fail to recognize is that, by definition, peace can’t be unilateral. When an enemy wants war, no amount of hope and yearning will bring peace. Considering we now face an enemy whose stated goal is the complete destruction of Western society, today’s peace movement, if successful, will do little more than postpone the inevitable conflict until our opponents have a stronger hand. We may credit the left with “good intentions,” but what if those good intentions lead to our ultimate destruction?