When President Biden entered the Oval Office, he gently shifted the portraits of Presidents Washington and Lincoln to give President Franklin D. Roosevelt, social reformer and conqueror of fascism, pride of place.
Now is the moment when President Biden should reprise President Roosevelt’s famed and pathbreaking Four Freedoms speech, given as his State of the Union address on January 6, 1941 (yes, the same day), eleven months before Pearl Harbor. No public enunciation – not even Lincoln’s Gettysburg address – so powerfully set out the moral determination of the United States to combat tyranny. It told the world, and Americans, who we wanted to be and why.
Roosevelt’s words strikingly rejected the extreme isolationism and fear of foreign entanglements that had hitherto gripped a large swath of the American people. He sought to shift public opinion to favor supporting the brave defenders of freedom in Europe and Asia against the marauding Axis armies, then overrunning France and the Low Countries, threatening Britain, and heading toward Moscow. Once again, a year after Putin’s merciless invasion of Ukraine, our support for Europe and essential freedoms is again threatened by ambitious political forces from the right.
Roosevelt called for a rapid increase in the production of American arms, something that Biden should now demand in support of Ukraine. Roosevelt also asked Americans to back and welcome his Lend-Lease program that, importantly, gave free access to American arms to Britain and other allies. The Pentagon is already doing much the same, but more shifting of American war goods to Ukraine is still required to repulse Putin. Ukraine needs the promised tanks, modern aircraft, advanced artillery, and more. As Roosevelt said in 1941, “Our most useful and immediate role is to act as an arsenal for them as well as for ourselves. They do not need manpower, but they do need billions of dollars worth of the weapons of defense.”
His were critical instrumental initiatives. But at the core of Roosevelt’s stirring speech was an articulation of what the battle against Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito was all about. “Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere,” he declared. That was the basis of a new moral order for the peoples of the planet.
His vision, which Biden and the allied support of Ukraine has embraced, is of a world that embodies freedom of expression and speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Those are the essential Four Freedoms, each of which is jeopardized by the continued Russian aggression in Ukraine; by China’s abuse of Uyghurs and residents of Hong Kong; by India’s harassment of 200 million Muslims; by Pakistan’s persecution of Balochis; by Iran’s oppression of women; by the systematic eclipse of human rights by despotic rulers in Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria; by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s attack (even after three earthquakes) of Kurds and any faction opposing his re-election on May 14; of President Bashar al-Assad’s theft of relief supplies in Syria; and – hardly least – the autocratic expunging of human rights throughout sub-Saharan Africa by leaders ranging geographically from Ethiopia to Mali and Burkina Faso, and on to Cameroon, the Republic of Congo, and Equatorial Guinea. Roosevelt’s new moral order needs to project itself across much of the unfree parts of the globe.
Roosevelt’s fourth freedom, the freedom from fear, is particularly relevant today. “Freedom from fear,” he said, “means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world.”
That is why winning the war in Ukraine is so important. The existential battle there is one that reverberates throughout distant parts of the planet. When the Allies won World War II and established the United Nations, a big sigh of relief was heard across the globe. Just maybe the denizens of the world could grow and develop in their individual and often flawed ways – but in peace, in lasting freedom from fear.
Roosevelt’s call for human rights created a legacy world-wide. Those freedoms became symbols of hope during World War II, adopted by the Allies as the basic tenets needed to create a lasting peace. Following the end of the war, the Four Freedoms formed the basis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and led to the Convention Against Genocide and a new Geneva Convention.
The Cold War, and the overhang of a potential nuclear holocaust, shaded a full realization of freedom from fear and, especially in the Soviet Union, destroyed freedom of expression and speech, freedom of worship, and freedom from want. Now Putin seeks a Russian world that mimics the Soviet Union’s marginalization of the four freedoms at home and, if he should prevail in Ukraine, in eastern Europe and beyond.
Roosevelt’s speech was also about the value of democracy and the integrity of humanity. Those elements are still at risk in Ukraine as well, from Russian depredations. As Roosevelt said, “There is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are equality of opportunity for youth and for others; jobs for those who can work; security for those who need it; the ending of special privilege for the few; the preservation of civil liberties for all; the enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.”
Biden has defended such essential elements of the new moral order. But now is the time for him to re-emphasize those values, making sure that Putin and China’s Xi Jinping know that we will defend them fully, and champion them in the face of fascist attacks from without and right-wing Republican carping and implacable hostility within. Biden needs more forcefully to win a still raging battle for the hearts and minds of all of those opportunists at home and prevaricators abroad who refuse to stand for morality and freedom. As Roosevelt closed his 1941 address: “To that high concept there can be no end save victory.”
Well said, Robert