My friend Dean Oliver is a Canadian historian and consultant, formerly with the Canadian War Museum and the Canadian Museum of History. He posted the following on LinkedIn in response to he-who-must-not-be named calling NATO members “cowards.”

Please find below some of the "NATO cowards" referenced in public comments regarding peace and security in the Persian Gulf.

Volunteers to a person, these Canadians deployed, served, and died in a conflict overseas after NATO had invoked Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty in collective response to an armed attack on the United Statesstates.it

It is the one and only time NATO's Article V has ever been used.

Tens of thousands of Allied troops joined America's own in that war, and hundreds never returned. Brothers and sisters in arms, they are joined in life and loss with the personnel of every nation who bore arms, and they remain linked in the memories of those beloved of those who fell.

The community of grief is international.

The graves of other such 'cowardly' allies of the United States litter the hills of Korea, the beaches of Normandy, the jungles of New Guinea, Dutch polders, and Italian mountain tops. Thousands more fell from the skies over Germany, or rest in watery graves beneath the world's oceans. In NATO and NORAD, millions served together the long Cold War watch.

Members of the United States' armed forces know very well this complex, intertwined history. They honour it, always.They know which of their own leaders have demonstrated actual courage too, including past presidents, such as Washington, Grant, Kennedy, or Bush senior.

Those clinically incapable of courage - or of wisdom, empathy, tact, or reflection - are just as obvious: to warriors, to allies. To all. Courage is not defined by dim obedience, sycophancy, or selective self interest. It isn't opportunism. It isn't action in expectation of advantage or reward either. Or the cloying for recognition and faux awards. It isn't idolatry, ideology, or the performative antic of the dancing fool in the presence of his sniveling troupe.

Courage is knowing that the right thing, the moral thing, the just thing can cost everything, including one's own mortality. And then, courage means doing it anyway.

"Thank you for your attention to this matter".

(With thanks to linkedin.com/company/le… for your ongoing service to history.)