Nobody is immune to the wishful thinking that has led us to this pass. One of the most intelligent men of all time, Albert Einstein, dedicated much of his life to campaigning against what he called “the military mentality”. In 1932, on the eve of the Nazi takeover in Germany, the great physicist warned the West to embrace disarmament in the Leftist American magazine The Nation: “The introduction of compulsory military service is therefore, to my mind, the prime cause of the moral decay of the white race, which threatens not merely the survival of our civilisation but our very existence. This curse, along with great social blessings, started with the French Revolution, and before long dragged all the other nations in its train.” Yet what the democracies needed in the 1930s, as in our day, was not disarmament but a defence strong enough to deter aggression from whatever quarter.

After the Second World War, Einstein immediately began campaigning against the nuclear weapons that he and other scientists had created in order, as he said, “to prevent the enemies of mankind from achieving it ahead of us, which, given the mentality of the Nazis, would have meant inconceivable destruction and the enslavement of the rest of the world”. Quite rightly, he denounced the Western Allies for failing the Jews who had survived the Holocaust, especially the British: “It is sheer irony when the British Foreign Minister [Ernest Bevin] tells the poor lot of European Jews that they should remain in Europe because their genius is needed there, and, on the other hand, advises them not to try to get to the head of the queue lest they might incur new hatred and persecution. Well, I am afraid they cannot help it: with their six million dead they have been pushed to the head of the queue, of the queue of Nazi victims, much against their will.” But Einstein was wrong, utterly wrong, when he attacked the United States for its Cold War stance in a famous article on “The Military Mentality” for The American Scholar in 1947: “I must frankly confess that the foreign policy of the United States since the termination of hostilities has reminded me, sometimes irresistibly, of the attitude of Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II . . . It is characteristic of the military mentality that non-human factors (atom bombs, strategic bases, weapons of all sorts, the possession of raw materials, etc.) are held essential, while the human being, his desires and thoughts—in short, the psychological factors—are considered unimportant and secondary.”

The genius Einstein was misled here by his own experience of the Nazis. He feared that America might follow his native Germany’s path to perdition; he mistook the anti-Communism of Joseph McCarthy and his ilk for fascism; and he underestimated the determination of a free country to use its military might properly. The pride of Americans in their armed forces, the fascination for their technological prowess, the mystique that surrounded the Cold War “military-industrial complex”—none of it had anything in common with the daemonic Nazi cult of war. As an intellectual, Einstein could not hide his distaste for the cultural manifestations of America’s superpower status, but with hindsight we can see that they were the mood music needed to lighten the burden of policing the world. Without the wisdom of that “greatest generation” of veterans, the United States has struggled to preserve the unity of purpose necessary to defend and nurture freedom across the globe.