Looking at the past can help us today

The following is an excerpt from a review of "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Phil Carter at IntelDump. I think it says something about the current world and our position in it.

The Centripetal Force of Moral Leadership. Rhodes devotes a number of pages to the personal histories of the giants of science who came to the U.S. to work on the Manhattan Project. We learn about the early lives of Leo Szilard and Edward Teller in Germany, Niels Bohr in Denmark, Albert Einstein in Germany, and many others. Eventually, many of these lives came to intersect with the Third Reich of Nazi Germany. Many of these scientists decided to leave Europe for Britain or the United States. A majority of those chose to work for the U.S. government, either directly or through a research program at a major university, in support of the Manhattan Project. Why?

Many of these men had already fled Europe by the time the Manhattan Project had started. When the call went out from the White House and NRDC asking for scientific participation in the atomic endeavor, these men willingly enlisted. They left their posh homes, their comfortable university laboratories, and in some cases, their families, for the Spartan existence of the Los Alamos lab and the unrelenting management pressure of Gen. Leslie Groves. It really is quite a story. I think this owes a great deal to America's moral leadership in the world, particularly during the time when these men were alive. When these scientists looked across the oceans at Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, they saw the faces of pure evil. To a lesser extent, I think they also saw future totalitarianism in Stalin's Soviet Union. Collectively, these men decided to contribute to the fight against evil by contributing their minds to the Manhattan Project. I think that says a great deal about our country during this last great war, and its ability to rally the world's brightest citizens to its cause.

Much has been written about America's in the world, and the ways our cultural, moral and political leadership enable us to influence events around the world. This is a slightly different point. In addition to such soft power, America's moral leadership also makes us stronger when we have to take decisive military action. It exerts a kind of centripetal force which rallies friends and fair-weather friends to our cause. We should never neglect the moral dimension in choosing national policies. Our moral choices shape the battlefields upon which we fight, and frequently shape the outcomes of those fights as well.