What has made our nation unique is dying with those children starving in Gaza
Our leaders have not only failed at safeguarding the innocents who are starving, but also failed to uphold our values regarding how the conflict in Gaza has been conducted, writes Joe Sestak.
It’s a rare day when I regret no longer being in politics, but today is one of them.
I mostly don’t miss being in Congress, because I’d only entered the political arena to pay back my country for the good military healthcare plan that had enabled a neurosurgeon to remove the brain tumor threatening to end our 4-year-old daughter’s life.
“I’m a retired Navy admiral running on national security — that begins at home, in health security,” I said when I ran for office. I embarked on my “payback tour” so that everyone could have health insurance coverage, as my family had. When my committee completed amending the Affordable Care Act, each member expressed a few words; mine were: “I can now retire; the mission I entered Congress to do is done.”
But today, I read about America allowing children on the doorstep of civilization to starve. Starve, as ample food trucks sat outside the wire surrounding Gaza, and while our political leaders allowed 500 tons of emergency food aid to be burned in July rather than be distributed to children in crisis.
Today, as I saw images of starving children, I wished I were again in some political position to call out our failed American leadership that has allowed this to happen.
Today, I also saw that what has made our nation unique is dying with those children in Gaza.
America once led an allegiance of nations that shared universal human values. We cared about the collective duty of the world because it was in our own interest to care, but also because we valued individual and universal human rights.
Before serving in the U.S. Congress, I had a unique passport to the world as I traveled on the high seas to over 100 lands as part of the U.S. Navy. On leave, I backpacked through all of communist Eastern Europe; then from Beijing to Hong Kong inside China, the first year it opened up to Americans, and I traveled to the U.S.S.R.
In these travels, I witnessed again and again a yearning for what America stands for. In the young Egyptian officer who, as he was departing our ship after a shared exercise, told me: “Captain, you treat your enlisted as though they are equal to you.” Or the gentleman in communist Czechoslovakia, who pointed to the West when speaking with me and said, “There is freedom.” And the young Chinese woman, who told me, “I want to live in America” — instead of her own country, which was soon herding its own Uyghur Muslim citizens into reeducation camps on its way to becoming a global power.
Times have assuredly changed since then, but I didn’t believe that the yearning for what America stands for had changed… until Gaza’s Trail of Tears — similar in some ways to the one the U.S. forced the members of the Cherokee Nation to undertake in the 1830s — was allowed to happen while American leadership stood by.
No longer can today’s American world leaders condemn what happens in China — or elsewhere — without it ringing hollow, because our most precious international coinage has been lost: Trust that we have the will to act to uphold our values.
Our leaders have not only failed at safeguarding the innocents who are starving, but also failed to uphold our values regarding how the conflict in Gaza has been conducted, which has led to this man-made famine. This failure on our part has serious national security implications for our future.
President Joe Biden said Israel’s response in Gaza “has been over the top” in February 2024, but since then, America has done nothing. Global leaders now witness a failed U.S. world leadership that was once based on universal human values.
Our American leaders are responsible for the pictures of the children we look away from in sorrow.
Today, as we watch those children on the threshold of death, I know that if I were still in politics, I would do anything for Israel — but I absolutely could not allow this to stand on my watch.
Joe Sestak is a former Naval vice admiral, U.S. representative (PA-07) on the House Armed Services Committee, and director for Defense Policy, National Security Council Staff.