At the Republican National Convention’s third night Wednesday, themed “Make America Strong Once Again,” Medal of Honor recipient David Bellavia will explain how the US military can win back the trust of the American public and the world after the past four years’ failures.
President Donald Trump awarded Bellavia, 48, the medal in 2019 for his 2004 service in Fallujah, Iraq, where he saved members of his platoon by clearing an enemy-filled house to allow them to get to safety
But the hero says he won’t be talking much about his own service when he speaks just after 8:30 pm Eastern tonight. Instead, he’ll offer his vision of how foreign policy must change after the Biden administration’s catastrophes.
Bellavia is taken aback by the lack of trust Americans have in the services, saying he often speaks to parents who do not trust the military to take care of their sons after President Biden’s disastrous exit from Afghanistan.
“We’re caught in this 1978 post-Vietnam malaise of ‘I don’t trust you,’” Bellavia told The Post.
“I’ve never been told that in my life. When I talk to a parent, it’s, ‘I don’t trust you. I don’t believe you.’ They’re like, ‘What happened to the 13 at the gate? What happened to the civilians you left behind?’”
That refers to the 2021 suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport’s Abbey Gate as America hastily withdrew; 13 service members were killed.
Bellavia, who founded the organization Vets for Freedom, says it’s imperative the military win back that trust. “We gotta fix our whole military from top to bottom, and we’ve gotta restore trust and get parents to trust us. Again, our approval is down 20%. It’s the lowest approval rating for the military in 20 years.”
The Army vet blames the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, which handed the country to the Taliban at the cost of American lives, on the State Department’s overreach.
“I think our military leaders got saddled with decisions that were made by the State Department,” said Bellavia before praising Gens. Mark Milley, Lloyd Austin and Central Command as “warriors.”
Follow The Post’s live blog for the latest from the 2024 Republican National Convention
“That wasn’t their call. And yet they wore it. They had to walk the plank. They had to take the credit. The amount of bad will, how it made us look feckless. I think it made us look indecisive,” he said.
Bellavia will offer his vision for a new military: “It starts with a choice. It starts with a much more responsible DoD. It starts with putting money towards programs and people and not putting money into our social experiments that really don’t help us, don’t make us stronger.”
He believes the United States must stick to its word with allies such as Israel and Ukraine and present a more stable policy than the Biden administration has.
The veteran calls US policy in Ukraine “schizophrenic” and “unpredictable”: “If you wanted to reach out and touch Russia, defend Ukraine, you would’ve done that at the very beginning. You would’ve probably done that before, but you didn’t.”
The path forward, he said, is to promote “peace through strength,” a foreign policy he thinks only the Republican Party offers: “Power means that you keep people in check, and your strength is what keeps people safe. Reagan taught us that lesson.”
Under the Trump presidency, America was safer because it was more decisive, he said.
“My problem is that we do not have a response to anything. We’re reactive. Say what you want to Donald Trump, the world knew exactly what we stood for. The world didn’t test us. And when we had a shot at Soleimani, we took it,” said Bellavia.
Trump ordered the 2020 drone strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ deadly Quds Force.
Of the former prez’s foreign policy, Bellavia concludes: “I just think it’s smarter. I think it’s sounder. I think it makes America safer.”