Foreign Policy - War and Peace

In the closing pages of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Prince Andrei lies wounded on the battlefield of Borodino and suddenly understands the grotesque disproportion between the grand strategies drawn on maps in St. Petersburg and the fragile, bleeding reality of a single human life. Russ McAlmond did not need to read Tolstoy to learn that truth.

He lived it as an eighteen-year-old who enlisted in downtown Portland and left Oregon to be sent overseas across the Pacific. He had a rifle in his hands and the knowledge that the decisions made by distant men in Washington could end his life—or the lives of the men sleeping in the racks beside him—before sunrise.

McAlmond joined the Marines in 1970, at the ragged end of the Vietnam era, and served three years of active duty, much of it forward-deployed. He came home with some disabilities and carried back the permanent, quiet weight that every combat veteran recognizes: the understanding that war is not a continuation of policy by other means, as Clausewitz coolly phrased it, but a moral catastrophe that must be entered only when it is critical to the survival of the nation's future as a free country.

Tolstoy wrote that history is the sum of countless individual wills, not the puppetry of great men.

McAlmond’s foreign policy vision begins there—with the individual will of the nineteen-year-old rifleman, the twenty-year-old corpsman, the twenty-one-year-old pilot who raises her right hand and volunteers to stand in the breach.

When Congress debates intervention, McAlmond insists the first question must never be “What do the allies want?” or “How will the markets react?” or “What does the think-tank consensus say?” The first and overriding question must be the one Tolstoy’s soldiers implicitly asked on every battlefield: Is this cause worthy of the life of even one of these young men and women?

Because Russ McAlmond has been that young man, that number on original orders that represents him without knowing who he really is. He knows the stakes in a way no staff memo can convey. He has watched friends’ names appear on casualty lists. He has seen the ripple of grief move through families and hometowns.

That intimate, irreversible knowledge is the lens through which he will judge every future call to arms. He is not a dove. He believes America must remain unambiguously the strongest military power on earth—because predators respect only strength, and peace is preserved by deterrence, and weakness invites aggression.

Yet he is equally certain that strength misused becomes suicide. He will demand that any authorization for military force contain precise objectives and public accounting of progress toward victory or withdrawal.

No more forever wars launched by vague resolutions and sustained by bureaucratic inertia.

Like Tolstoy’s Kutuzov, who understood that sometimes the wisest strategy is to let the enemy defeat himself, McAlmond believes American power is most effective when it is restrained, deliberate, and overwhelming only when unavoidable. When it is unavoidable—when the nation’s survival or the prevention of genocide truly requires it—he will vote to unleash that power without hesitation or apology.

But he will never forget the human arithmetic Tolstoy laid bare: every grand strategic design is paid for in blood measured one life at a time.

Oregon has the opportunity to send to the United States Senate a man who has already paid part of that price himself - a Marine combat infantryman who knows exactly what it feels like to be the chip placed on the geopolitical table by the DC politicians who may never have risked their own lives for the country. 

Russ will carry the memory of every Marine, Soldier, Sailor, Airman, and Guardian who never came home into the committee rooms and onto the Senate floor. He will insist that America wages war only when the cause is as just as the sacrifice is terrible—and that we seek peace not because we are weak, but because we are strong enough to bear its cost.

But the only victory worth winning, the only cause worthy of an American rifleman’s life, is the one that springs from love — love of country, love of liberty, love of the young men and women who raise their right hands and stand ready to pay the ultimate price.

Semper Fidelis.