Anyone elected president of the United States shouldn’t feel the need to boast. And especially to engage in a game of “mine is bigger than yours” with other national leaders. America, after all, continues to be the global Goliath.
However, President Donald Trump wants an Arch of Triumph. A couple weeks ago, reported the New York Times, he “showed off renderings and presented three models in different sizes, all of which looked similar to the Arc de Triomphe, France’s neoclassical monument that was finished in the 19th century. ‘Small, medium and large—whichever one, they look good,’ Mr. Trump said, holding out the models. ‘I happen to think the larger one looks, by far, the best’.” Apparently, the president wants to highlight his version with a winged statue of Lady Liberty. Unclear is how he plans to fund the enterprise, and whether he will comply with federal law governing new monuments.
He will have to go big to top the Parisian colossus, set on the famed Champs-Élysées at the intersection of three city arrondissements, or districts, and within two traffic circles from which a dozen avenues radiate outwards. The arch was commissioned by Emperor Napoleon in 1806 to celebrate his military victories but, with his ouster, took 30 years to complete. Included after World War I was the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The monument is one of Paris’ premier tourist sites.
However, there is an even more impressive, or at least larger, Arch of Triumph in, of all places, Pyongyang, North Korea. I visited the structure on both of my trips to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. (Taller, but significantly different in design, is Mexico City’s Monumento a la Revolución. Paris also hosts the much larger La Grande Arche de la Défense, essentially a monster cube, erected in 1989.) The DPRK authorities are proud of their copycat design, though the monument is more for “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung than the nation he founded. And the victories recorded are rather less impressive than the French list, amounting to, well, none.
Kim was a minor guerilla leader against Japan, unsurprisingly absent from those receiving Tokyo’s surrender on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Chosen by the Soviet Union to rule its occupation zone in the Korean peninsula’s north, he ruthlessly consolidated power. His surprise 1950 offensive against the Republic of Korea was routed by American and allied forces; he persevered only after the People’s Republic of China intervened, taking over the North’s defense. Since then, North Korea’s generals have accumulated impressive rows of medals, though for what successes no one knows. The DPRK military has engaged in occasional murderous attacks on American and South Korean personnel but has conquered no territory or anything else.
The U.S. obviously has more victories to celebrate. However, it doesn’t need an Arch of Triumph to feel proud. Indeed, America shouldn’t harken back to its monarchical pre-history to celebrate its emergence as the world’s greatest military power. Washington should be known for its humility and responsibility, not the ostentation with which it imposes its will upon other peoples.
Indeed, the seemingly miraculous creation of the United States, a democratic republic that rejected the pretensions of monarchy in a world of kingdoms and empires, was an implicit rebuke to grandiose human ambition. The sun, it was said, never set on the British Empire, but Americans ended London’s authority along North America’s Atlantic coast, eventually containing French and Spanish power as well while overspreading much of the continent. The worst epithets that could be hurled during the new nation’s often rambunctious political debates were that a politician desired the return of monarchy.
Although Americans ruthlessly asserted control against native populations, there initially was little interest in foreign conquest. Overseas adventurism only came decades later and generated bitter opposition when victorious Americans began behaving like the cruel, oppressive overlords they had displaced. Not until the 20th century did the U.S. join the old world in its wasteful and foolish slugfests. Briefly deluded by the odious President Woodrow Wilson, who imagined himself standing atop the globe and settling the world’s conflicts, the American people quickly recoiled from a “peace” treaty which yielded an even worse war a generation later. Who would want to celebrate such a geopolitical disaster as a “triumph” of any sort?
There was much to commemorate at the conclusion of World War II, a tragic outcome of Wilson’s maladroit intervention, but the overriding emotion was sorrow, not jubilation. Good had triumphed over evil, but only in alliance with evil, no less virulent if not quite as aggressive. America did not erect an Arch of Triumph but rather a collection of military cemeteries scattered across the lands where U.S. military personnel fought and died. As Secretary of State Colin Powell observed decades later, America had sent many of its youth abroad and in return “we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in.” There is no more impressive sight, simultaneously compelling and moving, than the serried rows of white crosses and other grave markers.
This is the best monument to America’s military victories. Washington should not be prosecuting wars to gain markets, enrich business, acquire territory, support dictators, enhance prestige, or even impose order. The U.S. should be a reluctant warrior, using military force as a last resort for compelling ends.
Moreover, while both government and public should honor those who guard against foreign dangers, and especially those killed or injured when doing so, Americans should also recognize and contemplate the tragedy incorporated in every official victory. Walk the seemingly endless ranks of graves and reflect on the lives squandered. Consider the consequences: the loves lost, friendships ended, ideas unimagined, cures undeveloped, inventions undiscovered, championships unclaimed, games unplayed, hopes abandoned, jobs unperformed, tasks undone, opportunities unfulfilled, and dreams unsatisfied. Out of terrible calamity came painful recovery, survivors moving ahead, enhancing their lives, improving their communities, confronting their futures, and rebuilding their world.
The best battlefield and war commemorations do this at least to some degree. The Vietnam War memorial famously lists those killed, allowing them to connect from beyond with those left behind. The Okinawa Peace Memorial Park, located on the site of the final World War II battle for the Japanese island, lists the names of the roughly 200,000 people, Japanese civilians as well as combatants of both sides, who died in the ferocious contest that lasted nearly three months. Some of the World War I French battlefields which I visited earlier this year included antique stereography machines overflowing with unsentimental, unsettling glass negatives featuring the horrors of a war a century later.
The Arc de Triomphe, and its North Korean copy, are grand but ultimately unsatisfying for anyone with the slightest moral sense. The French celebrate serial aggression by an egotistical monster responsible for mass death and destruction across the European continent, reaching all the way to Moscow. Indeed, Napoleon’s sarcophagus enjoys a separate place of honor, surrounded by acclamations of his multiple victories. (Imagine a similar structure in Berlin for one or another 20th century German leader!)
The North Koreans or, more accurately, the Kim dynasty and its subjects, acclaim someone who went from minor insurgent to bloody invader, responsible for ruining the entire Korean peninsula, and his own land in particular. To halt his aggression, the U.S. left virtually nothing of importance in North Korea standing or undamaged. His rule yielded an impoverished country that even today routinely receives among the lowest ratings for human liberty on earth. These are triumphs only in the deranged minds of wannabe conquerors and emperors.
America’s victories are generally better, but then, only relatively. Who today would defend seizing half of Mexico in an aggressive war launched on a cynical pretext with the frank goal of grabbing territory, especially in the case of California? Or killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos in order to suppress a domestic independence movement and replace Spain as their foreign overseer? Or World War I, in which the U.S. allied with the country, Serbia, which triggered four horrific years of conflict with an act of state terrorism, the murder of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne? Even in battles against unalloyed aggression, World War II and the Korean War, the U.S. targeted civilians in devastating air attacks, which included use of nuclear weapons. Vietnam and Iraq can’t even be counted as victories and they resulted in horrendous death tolls, killing the very people who were supposed to be liberated. Today the Trump administration appears to be plotting a regime change war in Venezuela while concocting a military justification for murdering alleged drug runners. Yet it is Americans who are demanding the illicit substances provided. Which of these grand and glorious achievements does Trump plan to celebrate with his Arch of Triumph?
During his first term Donald Trump was tagged as a Jacksonian, a unilateralist willing to fight but generally opposed to interfering in other nations’ affairs. Winning still obviously mattered, but many of his voters believed he would be launching fewer wars than had his aggressive predecessors. Almost anything would appear to be a significant improvement over the war-happy neocons and progressive social engineers, who differed more in rhetoric than policy. They wanted to govern the world and cared little about the cost, in lives, liberty, and wealth, to Americans.
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President Joe Biden carried on this tradition, insisting that he was literally running the world—which evidently meant that his aides were building expensive castles in the sky in his fading name. Trump, in the 2024 campaign, attracted voters who believed in defending America first. However, the new president now looks a lot like the old one, insisting that he, too, is running the world.
While ostentatiously campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump illegally bombed Iran and continued Biden’s war on Yemen, backed Israeli aggression against Iran and slaughter in Gaza, promised to defend Qatar and apparently offered to protect Saudi Arabia too, escalated U.S. involvement in NATO’s proxy war against Russia, and turned Latin American drug enforcement into a real battle, likely as cover for launching regime change strikes against Venezuela. At least the latter is located in Washington’s traditional sphere of interest. The president failed to even pretend that the other interventions put the United States first.
Americans don’t need a new monument to glorify the many wars fought in their name but against their interest. Rather, Americans should celebrate what makes this nation worth defending. And that is best secured by staying out of other countries’ conflicts. How about building an Arch of Peace, listing the wars which the U.S. studiously avoided, and the resulting benefits for all Americans?
