In an op-ed on the 80th anniversary of D-Day on Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., took shots at both President Joe Biden and some of his GOP colleagues as he warned against isolationism.

McConnell wrote in an essay piece for The New York Times that generations have celebrated “the triumph of the West’s wartime bravery and ingenuity, from the assembly lines to the front lines” that led to the Axis powers being defeated in World War II. But, he added, we reflect less often on the fact that “millions of innocents died, because European powers and the United States met the rise of a militant authoritarian with appeasement or naïve neglect in the first place.”

McConnell said that “influential isolationists persuaded millions of Americans that the fate of allies and partners mattered little to our own security and prosperity.” 

“Of course, Americans heard much less from our disgraced isolationists after the attack on Pearl Harbor,” the longtime Senate Republican leader added.

McConnell wrote that the U.S. and its allies are facing similar threats to their security today. He called Russia, China, North Korea and Iran “a new axis of authoritarians.”

“And as these threats grow, some of the same forces that hampered our response in the 1930s have re-emerged,” the Kentucky Republican wrote.

He called out “vocal corners of the American right” who he said “are trying to resurrect the discredited brand of prewar isolationism and deny the basic value of the alliance system that has kept the postwar peace.”

McConnell also criticized Democrats for what he called their “longstanding allergy to military spending.”

McConnell noted that Biden opened his State of the Union speech in March by referencing President Franklin Roosevelt’s own January 1941 address to Congress in which he warned that Hitler’s war in Europe was a threat to freedom and democracy around the world.

But, McConnell argued, until Biden “is willing to meaningfully invest in America’s deterrent power, this talk carries little weight.”

McConnell wrote that he is encouraged by a plan unveiled last week by Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Service Committee, that calls for the U.S. to spend an addition $55 billion on its military in the 2025 fiscal year and increase military spending from 2.9% of projected national gross domestic product this year to 5% in the next five to seven years. 

Wicker says senior military leaders have testified that the armed forces are at risk of being underequipped and outgunned due to less manufacturing and outdated infrastructure.

Asked to comment on McConnell’s essay, the White House directed Spectrum News to Biden’s D-Day commemoration speech Thursday in Normandy, France. In it, the president agreed with McConnell about the dangers of isolationism. 

“Isolation was not the answer 80 years ago, and it’s not the answer today,” he said. “We know the dark forces that these heroes fought against 80 years ago, they never fade.”

Biden did not speak about increasing U.S. military spending but said, “America has invested in our alliances and forged new ones, not simply out of altruism, but of our own self-interest as well.”

Biden’s fiscal year 2025 budget proposal includes $300 billion to revitalize the American defense industrial base, which the White House says would benefit U.S. military readiness and help create and sustain jobs in dozens of states.