The question of whether it was better to be feared or loved was put forth in Robert DeNiro’s directorial debut The Bronx Tale between the two main characters of the movie. This question could be posed about America’s foreign policy under the leadership of our latest president. Joe Biden has brought forth the normality he promised in the area of foreign policy. Being normal is a humble and apologetic posture to the rest of the world, from our last president is what Joe means by normal.

He wants to be loved. He is in that category of people who shy away from confrontation and just simply want the world to love them. This is the crowd that doesn’t feel comfortable being confrontational with our friends and enemies. They feel we need to fall in line with the rest of the world and not stand out the way Donald Trump did according to Democrats. They are clueless to the notion that being feared has its benefits. How being feared by the rest of the world because of our strength and power helps keep this unstable world together. It was Trump’s unpredictability that kept the world in check.

The effect of being feared becomes paradoxical when America uses its force for good in the world. That is the part the “loved” crowd doesn’t get. They look at the glass as half empty instead of half full. They always measure America through the prism of our mistakes and never see the good that is done by us for the rest of the world with our confrontation. They ignore that America’s projection of fear to the world has stopped evil within the planet. They can’t face the truth that a loving America could ever have done that.

With all this peace, love, and happiness it was fear and only fear that ended World War II and saved millions of more lives in the process. After showing Japan why they should fear us, it was that fear that put an end to one of humankind’s darkest moments. We did not try to love those kamikaze pilots into submission; we made them fear us. After fishing Saddam Hussein out of a spider hole in the Arabian desert, it was fear that made de facto leader Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya put down his weapons of mass destruction program and become more civilized.

When the president of Liberia took over the African country through fraud, it was fear that made President Charles Taylor flee and leave that democracy alone. When he stared off the African coast and saw that American battleship on his front porch, fear brought peace to our African friends. Our friends who built a democracy from the hard toils of our freed American slaves. Somehow, I feel if we parked a cruise ship on that coast, we might not have had the success that fear afforded us and our old friends in Africa.

After four years of Joe Biden, we have seen his “normal” approach and desire to be loved by NATO and so much of the world fail. We now see a world on fire. We see a tinderbox of a planet burning under Joe’s love and “back to normalcy” style of leadership. We see millions of foreigners just walking right across our southern border. We see two new wars and another one brewing in the Taiwan Strait. What America has learned watching one term of Biden, and one term of Trump, is that it is clearly better to be feared than loved.

C. Rich

CRich@AmericaSpeaksInk.com

C. Rich

C. Rich is the voice behind America Speaks Ink, home to the America First Movement. As an author, poet, freelance ghostwriter, and blogger, C. Rich brings a “baked-in” perspective shaped by growing up on the streets and beaches of South Florida in the 1970s-1980s and brings a quintessential Generation-X point of view.

Rich’s writing journey began in 2008 with coverage of the Casey Anthony trial and has since evolved into a wide-ranging exploration of politics, culture, and the issues that define our times. Follow C. Rich’s writing odyssey here at America Speaks Ink and on Amazon with a four-book series on Donald Trump called “Trump Era: The MAGA Files” and many other books and subjects C. Rich is known to cover.

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