The Left's Exit Strategy, Phases One and Two

The new majority party has in recent years specialized in exits, calls for exits, calls for exit strategies. When in power, even in only the legislative branches, they've been able to make the quickest exit their strategy, and to then execute their strategy without further analysis or historical review, as happened in 1973.

Then, as now, the forces of liberty were winning the war. Then, as now, the costs remained high. Then, as now, our defeat, allegedly unintended, was unarguably self-inflicted.

The most visible costs of our loss in 1973 were in the killing fields of Cambodia and blood red tides of the South China seas as our friends and colleagues, allies and wards fell as dominoes. An under-examined subject for eventual honest review is the effect of that loss on the remaining 26 years of the struggle with the communist monolith. Would the eventual defeat of the evil empire have consumed all those years, those lives, if defeat had spoken a language different from our own? What of the struggles in Central America, in Afghanistan, Lebanon and the greater middle east, southeastern Europe? Would each later card have played out of the same deck if the northern communists and their Soviet and Chinese backers had instead lost to the forces of democracy in the South?

Post-cold war, what might be different today with a democratic and capitalist South Vietnam amongst, perhaps leading, the nations of southeastern Asia. What of China, North Korea?

Today, those same leaders of the rush to exit in many cases, their progeny in others, seek another exit. Today, the effects are not likely to be measured just among the peoples of a different hemisphere.

Today, they are here.