White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed on Monday that President Donald Trump coined the term “peace through strength,” though its origin in United States politics actually dates back to the 1960s.
The Trump administration has been touting the phrase following the U.S.’s strikes against Iranian nuclear sites, where “monumental” damage was carried out.
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“Nobody knows what it means to accomplish peace through strength better than President Trump. He is the one who came up with that motto and that foreign policy doctrine, and he successfully implemented it in his first term,” Leavitt said on Fox News’s Fox & Friends on Monday. “The president wants peace, sometimes you have to use strength to achieve it, and he’s not afraid to use strength.”
The term “peace through strength” was popularized by President Ronald Reagan and was widely viewed as his policy on national security. However, he did not coin the phrase, either.
Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign
Prior to Reagan’s run for the Oval Office, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), running for president as a Republican, had his campaign backed by the Republican Party’s budget of almost $5 million, almost all of which was spent on “peace through strength” television spots. The ad campaign criticized the foreign policy of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was running as a Democrat following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“Appeasement has always brought war, but real peace comes only through firmness and courage, and I want that peace,” Goldwater stated in an ad.
A week before the 1964 election, Reagan spoke on behalf of Goldwater on Oct. 27. During this speech, he explained that the term “peace through strength” means telling the United States’ “enemies” that “there is a price we will not pay.”
“There is a point beyond which they must not advance,” Reagan stated. “This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s ‘peace through strength.'”
Ronald Reagan’s presidency
Following his campaigning for Goldwater and two gubernatorial terms in California, Reagan won the 1980 presidential election, defeating incumbent President Jimmy Carter. Reagan’s campaign platform critiqued Carter’s handling of foreign affairs, asking voters at his Republican National Convention acceptance speech if they felt unease knowing that the U.S.’s allies were dealing with an “amateurish and confused Administration.”
“We are not a warlike people. Quite the opposite,” Reagan said. “We always seek to live in peace. We resort to force infrequently and with great reluctance, and only after we have determined that it is absolutely necessary. We are awed and rightly so by the forces of destruction at loose in the world in this nuclear era. But neither can we be nae or foolish.”
During Reagan’s second term in office, the president argued in 1986 that his leadership demonstrated the nation’s strength as “a sheltering arm for freedom in a dangerous world.” He added that the U.S.’s strength was the best persuasion tactic to “negotiate seriously” with other countries.
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Decades later, the iconic phrase is being pushed by the Trump administration and members of Congress, praising the president for carrying out “peace through strength” against Iran.
Following the strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites, Trump has indicated that “regime change” could be in the cards for the country. He has questioned why this change could not take place if the current Iranian Regime is “unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN.”