There is a broad range of possible outcomes to any situation, and each outcome has associated with it some good (benefit) and some bad (cost), optimism (seeing only the good) and pessimism (seeing only the bad) are merely the extremes on a continuous line, not either/or choices.

I’m not sure what gamblers would have thought about Valley Forge. Some might have despaired and bet against George Washington, some may have bet for him out of pure optimism. But most of the card players I know would first have considered both the odds and payoffs of both positions (fighting or not fighting), and bet accordingly. If Washington’s troops were professional gamblers, they would have fought not because they were absolutely convinced they could win, but because what they would gain from wining made up for the low odds of victory --- a “give me liberty or give me death” sort of thing.

I think Americans and their leaders have been mainly realists. Valley Forge and Midway are examples of battles fought knowingly against the odds because of the huge outsized benefits of victory over defeat. I think less glorious military endeavors in American history such as Viet Nam were lost because we entered the battle first with an overly optimistic view of what it would take to win, and second, with much more to loose than to gain. That’s a really bad foundation for a bet, and in the end we recognized its stupidity and folded our hand, just as any reasonable gambler would have done.

Sowell says “One of the many symptoms of this decay from within is that we are preoccupied with the pay of corporate executives while the leading terrorist-sponsoring nation on earth is moving steadily toward creating nuclear bombs”, but he’s way off base --- what terrorists may or may not be doing with nuclear bombs is one issue (obviously of huge importance) but that doesn’t mean corporate salaries isn’t also an issue of some importance. Most Americans are able to deal with more than one issue at the same time if they choose to do so. Overpay of corporate executives itself is a weakening force in America because it demoralizes the workers who do their best for their companies and see the executives pocket an unearned portion of the fruits of the workers’ labor, and it refocuses workers attention from doing their jobs well to seeking impossible personal financial goals no matter what the cost to their company, especially in the long term. Corporate officers lead by example, and if the example they set is “give me a bigger share of the corporate pie”, they should expect workers (and their unions) to also fight for a bigger share. Sowell says “Does anyone imagine that we will care what anyone's paycheck is when we see an American city in radioactive ruins?“ Should anyone not care what is in their paycheck when American cities are not in ruin? And if they shouldn’t care about the size of their paycheck, why are corporate executives fighting so hard for their huge compensation.

Sowell says “It took only two nuclear bombs to get Japan to surrender-- and the Japanese of that era were far tougher than most Americans today. Just one bomb-- dropped on New York, Chicago or Los Angeles-- might be enough to get us to surrender”. It took only two bombs for the Japanese to surrender because they recognized and understood that we could bomb them out of existence and they could do nothing to stop us --- the probability of their victory was zero and the cost of that continuing to fight was in effect infinite (utter destruction), while the cost of surrender was large but finite. We, on the other hand, have several actions we can take in response to nuclear attack, including nuclear retaliation. To assume that a few bombs will force us into surrender is an assumption unsupported by evidence and in direct contradiction to what America did after 911 --- counterattack.

Sowell says “The dumbing down of our education, the undermining of moral values with the fad of "non-judgmental" affectations, the denigration of our nation through poisonous propaganda from the movies to the universities. The list goes on and on”. He should add to the list the ravings of single-issue columnists oblivious to the complexity of the real world.

I think Sowell misunderstands WW-II’s war in the Pacific. Japan might have defeated our naval forces and taken Hawaii and perhaps the Aleutians but they did not have sufficient population or supply chain to occupy the continental US --- if they tried they would have met the same fate Germany met in Russia, Russia met in Afghanistan, and we met in Viet Nam. And in the long run, Japan plus the territories Japan could successfully occupy could not out produce us and would collapse under its own economic troubles, just as the Russian Communist empire fell to the US and its allies in a long term economic competition.