Evan Thomas’s excellent new Richard Nixon biography recounts the 1973 Yom Kippur War when Egypt and Syria launched surprise attacks on Israel during the Jewish holiday. Amid stark battlefield losses, Israel pleaded for emergency assistance. The Pentagon, fearing adverse reaction from Arabs and the Soviets, stingily planned three transport planes with arms for Israel.  Nixon accurately growled, “We’re going to get blamed just as much for three planes as 300.”  When still the Pentagon dallied, Nixon phoned the Defense Secretary:  “Do it now.” When Nixon heard there was a debate over what aircraft to send, he exclaimed: “Get everything into the air that can fly.”

The next morning, Thomas recalls, some residents of Tel Aviv stopped their cars and shouted “God bless America” as they heard the roar of American transport aircraft overhead. Premier Golda Meir wept. Thomas doesn’t detail that the emergency U.S. arms airlift to Israel had no support from European allies except Portugal. After landing in the Azores, U.S. transport planes, escorted by U.S. fighters, had to fly a thin thread over the Mediterranean, hostile Arab states to the south, and unwelcoming NATO allies to the north.

Arab oil states embargoed oil to frighten Europe anyway, proving cowardice has few rewards. Nixon knew he risked an oil boycott, which ultimately helped kill his already troubled presidency. But he would not allow Soviet proxies and arms to defeat a U.S. ally. The U.S. arms airlift of over 22,000 tons of material, compared to the Soviet airlift of 12,000-15,000 tons to Syria and Egypt, helped save Israel. It also ultimately helped remove Soviet influence in the Mideast. Experiencing the push of American arms, which stopped his advancing armies in Sinai, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat expelled Soviet advisors and realigned Egypt into a new alliance with the U.S.  Nixon visited Egypt in 1974, received by cheering, state-orchestrated crowds of hundreds of thousands, though U.S. arms had helped defeat Egypt only a year before. The new U.S.-Egypt alliance led to the U.S. mediated Israel-Egypt peace deal in 1978.

The global predominance of U.S. air power perhaps dates to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1942 State of the Union pledge, largely concocted in FDR’s imagination, to produce 60,000 aircraft that year, to be doubled in 1943. Members of his own administration were stunned, allies were skeptical, and enemies were dismissive. Hermann Goering had once scoffed that America could produce refrigerators.  But America met FDR’s aircraft quota, and America has largely ruled the global skies ever since.

For over 70 years American air power has remained indispensable for global order and the defense of the West and its allies against potential aggressors. Several years after pounding Germany into defeat, American air power rescued West Berlin from Soviet encirclement with an unprecedented nearly year-long airlift of over 2.3 million tons of food and other essentials. Crowds cheered in West Berlin then as they would 25 years later in Tel Aviv. American air power a year after the Berlin Airlift helped defend South Korea from invasion, and helped deter Red China from assaulting Taiwan.

Nixon, like LBJ, was often frustrated that American air power could not decisively win the war in Vietnam. In his book, Thomas speculates that Nixon, who witnessed the effects of American air power when visiting Berlin shortly after WWII, perhaps had too much confidence in its capacity. Early in his presidency he promised South Vietnam’s president that he would guarantee the protection of American air power through 1976. Nixon had not reckoned that Watergate would preclude his fulfilling that promise. But the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972 drove North Vietnam to a peace settlement, which absent American air power when the North broke the peace, could not survive.

France was rightly hailed for its air strikes on ISIS after the Paris terror, but French air power is a fraction of America’s, and the air attacks on ISIS are and will overwhelmingly remain American, even with Russia’s murky participation. Critics complain that even so, U.S. air strikes on ISIS seem paltry compared to the force of American air power against the Serbs during the 1990s and twice against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Defeat of ISIS likely requires an expansion of American air deployment in Syria and Iraq.

Many Americans may sometimes have an over-assurance about the capabilities of American air power, as few wars can be won by exclusive reliance on it. Other Americans, as on the Religious Left, sanctimoniously ask, in almost any global situation, whom Jesus would bomb. Jesus the earthly nomad preacher and Savior had no vocation for lethal force. But American air power since WWII has providentially curbed or deterred countless evils. And for the foreseeable future, unsurpassed American air power, will remain central to pursuit of approximate justice in the world.

In nearly any major crisis, military or humanitarian, the reality or mere prospect of American planes filling the skies is the final earthly hope, which no misplaced confidence in international good will can ever replace. May the purpose of unrivaled American air power be manifest to all who realistically seek the good in a fallen world where aggression, terror and disasters always loom.

Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and Editor of Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy.