My new book is out; see the links at the right to get it in Kindle format from amazon.com.  The book also is available here.

A Conservative’s View of American National Policy is the companion piece to A Conservative’s View of American Domestic Policy. Whereas Domestic Policy discussed internal affairs, National Policy is about our actions on the global stage.

My exposition centers on two things, the first of which is this: foreign and defense policy are more than closely related. They are not even mirror-images of each other; rather, they aren’t even tightly intertwined; they’re the same thing viewed from different perspectives. There are few, if any, aspects of foreign policy that do not inform defense policy, and there are even fewer aspects of defense policy that don’t affect foreign policy. We discuss these general policies and we have separate departmental heads representing them in the Executive Branch Cabinet only to facilitate our general understanding and the Cabinet Secretaries’ more efficient execution.

Accordingly, we need to understand the unity of foreign and defense policy as a single concept, not two related ones, then develop a unitary national policy that recognizes that necessary unity and that coordinates and maximizes the strengths of each, using each to compensate for the weaknesses of the other.

The other thing is this: after having made my case regarding the essential unity of foreign and defense policy, the rest of this effort will be concerned with what we should do with that unity, how we can put a national policy to use in a practical manner for our own betterment as a nation in a globally entangled world.

I propose an active policy of political engagement and military power projection. When and where we must act overtly militarily (rather than merely project our power to act), our objective must be victory. We should never engage in a fight with the purpose of a draw, as we did, for example, in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Political engagement (and economic engagement as a tool of national policy) must be based on active policies designed to expand the geographic and popular reach of liberal democracy and individual freedom and contract the sphere of tyranny and oppression. In a world of global competition for hearts and minds, the contest between free men and subjects is most definitely a zero-sum game. We win and they lose, else it’ll be the other way around.