Today is John Wayne’s 98th birthday. He was born on May 26, 1907 in Winterset, Iowa, weighing 13 pounds. His birthplace is a museum, and a few years ago I took my son Brandon to visit it. There was a guest book, opened to a page with the entry, in the entrant’s handwriting, Name: Ronald Reagan. Address: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington DC.

To celebrate the birthday of a truly great American, let me tell you how John Wayne saved the Marine Corps from being disbanded after World War II.

It was in 1983 in Paris that I met my first Russian dissidents. They were rabidly Anti-Communist and passionately argued for freedom and democracy for Russia. Impressed, I nonetheless put them to the test. “What about the other internal colonies of the Soviet Union?” I asked. “I take it that you all advocate freedom and democracy for, say, Ukraine, as well, right?”

My inquiry went through them like a jolt of angry electricity. “Ukraine is a part of Russia!” they exploded. “Ukraine has been a part of Russia for centuries! Ukraine will always be a part of Russia!” I couldn’t resist smiling and informing them: “Not for long…”

I subsequently made a number of trips into Soviet Ukraine in the 1980s to meet with the leaders of Rukh, the emerging democracy-resistance movement -- Mykhailo Horyn in Lviv and Vyacheslav Chornovil in Kiev. These meetings were arranged by a dynamic young Ukrainian-American lady in the Human Rights section of the State Department named Kathy Chumachenko.

With a fledgling economy the focus of the 2012 presidential campaign, there has been one glaring omission from the debate so far: the failure of our current trade policy, particularly with China. Trade policy affects national security by putting the safety of our people and their jobs at risk.

Between 2000 and 2010, the United States ran an aggregate trade deficit in goods of $6.8 trillion. This is one measure of how much money went to support production and job creation overseas rather than here at home.

Last year, the trade deficit in goods was $635 billion. The import share of the domestic economy has grown very rapidly in textiles, machinery, computers, electrical equipment and motor vehicles. We buy a third to a half of these products from overseas, leaving American factories idle and American people jobless.

One-third of the trade deficit in goods over the past decade was with communist China. Our 2011 trade deficit with Beijing is on track to hit a record $300 billion. In their new book, "Death by China," University of California at Irvine economists Peter Navarro and Greg Autry calculate that this deficit has cost America 10 million jobs over the past decade.

The consensus of film critics is that three of the four best Western movies ever made were those starring John Wayne: Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1948), and The Searchers (1956). (The fourth is Gary Cooper’s 1952 High Noon.) Many critics consider The Searchers to be one of the greatest movies, period, and has been the subject of numerous academic seminars. It is a lesser known John Wayne Western, however, that contains an important lesson for our relations with the Moslem world.

Directed by John Ford, made in 1948, entitled She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, it stars Wayne as Capt. Nathan Brittles as a retiring Cavalry officer facing an Indian attack (The New York Times’ review at the time called Wayne’s performance “Oscar-caliber”). The memorable line is the advice he gives to a junior officer. It’s listed by Guinness as one of the top 100 film quotes of all time:

Never apologize, son. It’s a sign of weakness.