RUTHFULLY YOURS

It would be peculiar if, as he now claims, James Clapper did not know about the Obama administration’s monitoring of Paul Manafort. At the time, which appears to have been the autumn of 2016, Clapper was Obama’s national intelligence director. The (dubious) raison d’être of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) — a post-9/11 layering of yet more bureaucracy atop bureaucratic sprawl — was to ensure efficient information flow through the “community” of U.S. intelligence agencies.

That said, it is a gross exaggeration to contend, as some are doing, that new revelations about the surveillance of Manafort, the former chairman of the Trump campaign, show that Clapper lied in a March 2017 interview by NBC’s Chuck Todd. Instead, what we now know proves what I warned at the time of the interview: It was a mistake to construe Clapper’s answers to Todd as a blanket denial of Obama spying on the Trump campaign.

Carefully parsed, Clapper’s comments left open the possibility — which some of us regarded as a high probability — that Manafort and other Trump associates had been under Obama-administration surveillance.

Much is being made of Clapper’s assertion that “there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president, the president-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign.” But what commentators are omitting is a critical qualification that I highlighted right after the interview (as did our Jim Geraghty and NBC News itself). Clapper made clear that he could only speak, as NBC put it, “for the part of the national security apparatus that he oversaw.”

Why was that significant? As I elaborated:

The director of national intelligence does not “oversee” the entirety of the government’s national-security apparatus. By statute, for example, the attorney general (who of course runs the Justice Department) oversees the process of requesting and executing electronic surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] (see Title 50 U.S. Code, Sec. 1801 et seq.).

The surveillance of Manafort was conducted under FISA. It would have been known to the Justice Department, which presents warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and to the FBI, which conducts the investigations. But the surveillance operation would be known to the national intelligence director only if the Justice Department, the FBI, and whoever else was in the loop chose to share it with him. Apparently, they did not — confirmation that the ODNI is the excrescence many of us predicted it would be.

At the time of Clapper’s interview, the front-burner topic was whether Trump himself had been monitored. The president had just alleged, in a series of tweets, that his phone lines had been tapped at Trump Tower. I assumed (as I’m sure Clapper did) that Clapper would have been informed if Trump had been targeted for FISA surveillance when he was a candidate or president-elect. But even if that is a safe assumption, it does not mean that Clapper would have been alerted to every surveillance of a Trump subordinate or associate.

What about Clapper’s denials of wiretapping against Trump’s campaign, and at Trump Tower?

To listen to the commentary, Donald Trump used an inappropriate term at the U.N. — not just “Rocket Man,” but “sovereignty.”

It wasn’t surprising that liberal analysts freaked out over his nickname for Kim Jong Un and his warning that we’d “totally destroy” Kim’s country should it become necessary. These lines were calculated to get a reaction, and they did. More interesting was the allergy to Trump’s defense of sovereign nations.

Brian Williams of MSNBC wondered whether the repeated use of the word “sovereignty” was a “dog whistle.” CNN’s Jim Sciutto called it “a loaded term” and “a favorite expression of authoritarian leaders.”

It was a widely repeated trope that Trump’s speech was “a giant gift,” in the words of BuzzFeed, to China and Russia.

In an otherwise illuminating piece in The Atlantic, Peter Beinart concluded that Trump’s address amounted to “imperialism.” If so, couched in the rhetoric of the mutual respect of nations, it’s the best-disguised imperialist manifesto in history.

Trump’s critics misrepresent the speech and misunderstand the nationalist vision that Trump was setting out.

He didn’t defend a valueless international relativism. Trump warned that “authoritarian powers seek to collapse the values, the systems, and alliances that prevented conflict and tilted the world toward freedom since World War II.”

He praised the U.S. Constitution as “the foundation of peace, prosperity, and freedom for the Americans and for countless millions around the globe.”

“The Marshall Plan,” he said, “was built on the noble idea that the whole world is safer when nations are strong, independent, and free.”

Just window dressing? Trump returned to similar language in his denunciation of the world’s rogue states.

When critics don’t ignore these passages, they say that they contradict Trump’s emphasis on the sovereignty of all nations. There’s no doubt that there’s a tension in Trump’s emerging marriage between traditional Republican thinking and his instinctive nationalism. Yet he outlined a few key expectations.

He said, repeatedly, that we want nations committed to promoting “security, prosperity, and peace.” And we look for them “to respect the interests of their own people and the rights of every other sovereign nation.”

Every country that Trump criticized by name fails one or both of these tests. So, by the way, do Russia and China. Hence Trump’s oblique criticism of their aggression in Ukraine and the South China Sea.

Trump’s standards aren’t drawn out of thin air. A consistent nationalist believes in the right of every nation to govern itself. Moreover, modern nationalism developed alongside the idea of popular sovereignty — i.e., the people have the right to rule, and the state is their agent, not the other way around.

Trump’s core claim that “the nation-state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition” is indubitably correct; it is what makes self-government possible. If the alternative is being governed by an imperial center or transnational authorities, the people of almost every nation will want — and fight, if necessary — to govern themselves. (See the American Revolution.)

The U.N. is hardly an inappropriate forum for advancing these ideas. “The Organization,” the U.N. charter itself says, “is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.” To the extent that the U.N. is now a gathering place for people hoping the nation-state will be eclipsed, it’s useful to remind them that it’s not going away.

All that said, there were indeed weaknesses in the speech. First, as usual, Trump’s bellicose lines stepped on the finer points of his message. Second, even if sovereignty is important, it can’t alone bear the weight of being the organizing principle of American foreign policy. Finally, Trump’s foreign-policy vision is clearly a work in progress, as he accommodates himself to the American international role he so long considered a rip-off and waste of time.

Trump is adjusting to being the head of a sovereign nation — that happens to be the leader of the world.

The Jewish community was shocked when it learned that David N. Myers, a militant anti-Israel activist, had been quietly put into place as the head of the Center for Jewish History.

There was even more shock at the unquestioning support that Myers received from establishment figures at the Center and its constituent organizations like the American Jewish Historical Society.

There is a very good reason for that.

David N. Myers did not end up in his position by accident. The defenses of his anti-Israel activism contend that we should ignore his political views because they have nothing to do with his position. But it’s because of these views that he got the job and because of them that he will keep the job.

Myers’ appointment was not the beginning of a problem at the Center for Jewish History. It’s just the most obvious symptom of a serious ongoing anti-Jewish crisis in Jewish Studies.

Let’s start with an organization misleadingly named Scholars for Israel and Palestine which came up during the Myers debate because some of its members had called for sanctions against Israeli government officials.

Scholars for Israel and Palestine’s founding members included veteran anti-Israel activists such as Peter Beinart, Eric Alterman and David Myers. But its list of members also includes many key figures at the Center for Jewish History and the American Jewish Historical Society.

The Myers appointment was an inside job.

The Center posted a statement of support for Myers from members of the academic councils of the Center for Jewish History and the American Jewish Historical Society.

The most notorious figure on the list is Hasia Diner. Unlike some opponents of Israel who fashionably claim to be liberal Zionists, Diner co-wrote an editorial viciously denouncing Zionism and Israel.

In a hatefilled rant, Hasia Diner wrote that she abhorred visiting Israel, that the Law of Return was racist and that though she abhorred “bombings and stabbings”, the murder of Jews is what “oppressed individuals resort to out of anger and frustration”.

“I feel a sense of repulsion when I enter a synagogue in front of which the congregation has planted a sign reading, ‘We Stand With Israel’”, Hasia Diner concluded her ugly rant.

Hasia Diner had also complained that “it is impossible to have a conversation about Israel or BDS because one is accused of being anti-Semitic.” She suggested that anti-Semitism is “profoundly overused” and is “an easy, convenient label used to end a conversation or analysis instead of exploring what is really going on.”

Hasia Diner is a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History. And is a founding member of SIP.

Beth Wenger is the Chair of the Academic Advisory Council of CJH. Wenger signed a petition in defense of BDS anti-Israel activists and has accused Israel of mistreating “Palestinians.”

Wenger is also another founding member of SIP.

Marion Kaplan, the third Jewish CJH Academic Advisory Council member to sign the pro-Myers letter, had also signed a letter calling on Obama to end aid to Israel over its campaign against Hamas.

The letter demanded a permanent end to the blockade on Hamas and the withdrawal of Israeli soldiers.

In general, lawful Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood work to insert themselves into Western society, exploiting liberal, democratic bodies to promote their own illiberal and anti-democratic ideology.

Whether co-opting Western democracies to silence its critics, or funding American Islamist organizations with long histories of extremism and ties to terror, the Turkish regime is now a crucial component of the global Islamist threat.

For the past few years, the international Muslim Brotherhood has found a welcoming home in Ankara in the face of opposition from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Consequently, U.S. Islamist organizations have also turned to the Turkish regime for collaboration and support.

On September 18th, a Washington, D.C.- based organization, the Turkish American National Steering Committee (TASC), hosted an event in New York City with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “US-based Muslim Brotherhood supporters have a busy week coming up,” the Middle East analyst Eric Trager noted. “They’re hanging with Erdogan on Monday, protesting Sisi on Wednesday.”

Organizers of the TASC event included Ahmed Shehata, a lobbyist for the Muslim Brotherhood who has also worked for Islamic Relief and the Muslim American Society — two prominent Islamist groups designated as terrorist organizations by the United Arab Emirates in 2014.

Last year, following Turkish claims of an attempted coup against the regime, a TASC rally in support of Erdogan outside the White House included Shehata and a number of prominent American Islamist leaders, such as Nihad Awad, the Executive Director of the terror-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). As the Investigative Project on Terrorism notes, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party subsequently sent a delegation to the United States to hold meetings with senior CAIR officials. Since then, Awad has continued to meet with representatives of the Turkish regime.

Such partnerships are not new. Since a coalition of U.S. Islamist organizations travelled to Turkey in 2014, prominent American Islamic groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood have become some of Erdogan’s staunchest advocates in America.

A week ago, I suggested that, sixteen years into “the war on terror”, we were making the same mistake as the British at Singapore and pointing our guns in the wrong direction. The only difference is that we’ve been doing it for a decade and a half and don’t seem to notice that, while we’ve been firing straight ahead, our buttocks have been entirely blown off. So we continue to run around the Hindu Kush in order that, in the President’s words, terrorists will “never again have a safe haven” in Kandahar or Jalalabad, while simultaneously allowing them ever safer havens in Manchester and Brussels and Paris and Stockholm, Ottawa, Orlando, Sydney…

I’ve tried to ease up on the “As I wrote some years ago…” shtick, not only because it irritates some readers but because it sows the fatal seed in my own self-doubting breast that I’ve said it all before and it made no difference. But there is a section in America Alone about the need for countries at war to use all elements of national power. And my concluding chapter begins by saying:

This book isn’t an argument for more war, more bombing, or more killing, but for more will.

Or for more “cultural confidence”, as I call it in the ensuing paragraphs. That was eleven years ago. But the void on the culture front was obvious even earlier. My 2002 book The Face of the Tiger (yes, yes: “as I wrote even more years ago”) includes the following:

President Bush has won the first battle (Afghanistan) but he’s in danger of losing the war.

Well, we are losing. I think that’s undeniable. But why is that? Well, we have the best trained and most technologically advanced military – and nothing else:

Against that are all the people who shape our culture, who teach our children, who run our colleges and churches, who make the TV shows we watch — and they haven’t got a clue. Bruce Springsteen’s inert, equivalist wallow of a 9/11 album, The Rising, is a classic example of how even a supposed ‘bluecollar’ icon can’t bring himself to want America to win. Oprah’s post-9/11 message is that it’s all about who you love and how you love’. On my car radio, John McCain pops up on behalf of the Office of Civil Rights every ten minutes sternly reminding me not to beat up Muslims…

The Islamists are militarily weak but culturally secure. A year on, the West is just the opposite. There’s more than one way to lose a war.

I wrote that in August 2002. Obviously, the idea of a “war” subcontracted to an elite professional soldiery while consciously forswearing all other levers of national power (including immigration policy) would have struck any strategist from 50, 100, 200, 400 years ago as entirely absurd. Yet it has persisted for a decade and a half, to the point where the remnants of the hot war – the behind-the-scenes special-forces action in the Islamic State; the periodic shootouts between Nato forces and our Afghan “allies” – actively obstruct clearheaded thinking on the far more vital cold war.

William Kilpatrick expands that point in a sharp essay on the big picture. He begins with a blunt statement of where we’re headed:

Europe is currently in the process of submitting to Islam, and America also seems destined to eventually submit. If you have young children or grandchildren, it’s likely that they will have to adapt at some point to living in a Muslim-dominated society. It won’t necessarily be a Muslim-majority society because, as history testifies, Muslims don’t need a majority in order to successfully take control of non-Muslim societies.

If and when Islam persuades America to submit, it most probably won’t be through force of arms. The civilizational struggle in which we are now engaged is primarily a culture war. America used to be good at cultural warfare because America once had cultural confidence. The Cold War was in large part a cultural war, and America won it because it didn’t have qualms about demonstrating the superiority of the American way to the Soviet way.

But times change. These days, may Americans would rather shred their culture than spread it. Cultural shame rather than cultural pride rules the day. And, not surprisingly, people who are ashamed of their culture can’t be counted on to defend it.

That’s true. The Dallas School Board has smoothly progressed from chiseling the names of Confederate generals off its schools to “studying” whether also to remove the names of Jefferson, Madison and Franklin. Without whom there would be no such thing as America. Indeed, without whom there would, in a certain sense, be no you. The erasure of your total civilizational inheritance turns everyone into “Dreamers” – blank slates who find themselves in America through mere quirk of fate, and for whom the great Republic is no more than a geographical location. Or if you prefer, Un-Anchored Babies: You can be born here, but, if the entirety of your culture has been wiped clean, what’s the diff? Once Jefferson and Madison and all the rest are gone, a kid whose great-great-great-whatever got off the Mayflower is no different from the child of Mexican drug smugglers: we are all children of Year Zero.

This psychosis isn’t confined to America: In London Lord Nelson is feeling the heat, and in Canada Sir John A Macdonald. The Guardian wants to topple a statue of H G Wells. Wells’ political views are not mine – but, in the fullness of his life, he got some things wrong and some things spectacularly right. That’s not good enough for the thought police: 19th century men, and 18th century men, and 16th and 13th and back through the millennia, have to get everything right by 2017 standards – or their statues must be guillotined:

Robert E Lee must be toppled because he was racist. Thomas Jefferson must come down because he owned slaves. Christopher Columbus has to go because he had no transgender-bathroom policy on the Niña, Pinta and Santa María. The mobs in the street have no idea who these guys are – except that they are not like them, and so cannot be permitted to stand.

It really is a high honor for me to address this august audience. My wife and I have been huge fans of Hillsdale for many, many years, and it’s always a race when Imprimus hits the door mat; who’s going to read it first. But I have a caveat to begin with. For the next 30 minutes, please don’t expect a discourse on de Tocqueville and Epistemology of the New Age. My first degree was philosophy and theology many moons ago, but I cannot match the erudition of the panels that we heard this morning. I’m going to bring it all down to earth and share with you my experiences inside the belly of the beast as a deputy assistant and strategist to the president, how we should move forward, and what we can expect in the years to come.

But first things first, I must make a plea to all those people who came up to me last night, and have done so since I left three weeks ago. Relax. Take a deep breath and count to 10. The fat lady isn’t singing, OK? I know that’s not politically correct, but who cares? We are in this for the long game. I’m going to be using Washington jargon, but this is about the long game. It’s not about the first eight months. It’s about eight years, and then another eight years, under President Pence. That’s the plan.

Lots of people got suicidal when my boss, Steve Bannon resigned. And then they really got suicidal when I left the building. But it’s OK. Bringing us back to the principles of the founding is not a function of where Steve sits, or whether I have a window in my office in the Eisenhower building. It’s a function of the ideas that brought a man (as we were reminded last night) brought a man who has never held public office before, or been a general flag officer, into the position of being the most powerful man in the world. There’s a reason for that, and it is much bigger than the few people who work in that wonderful peoples’ house just across the city. So, hold the line.

Common Sense, Truth, Sovereignty
The only philosophical things I’ll say is, words matter. Words matter. And the words for my address today are simple ones. The first one is a phrase. “Common sense.” The second one, which is allied to common sense, is the word “truth.” And the last one, which is the most important philosophical undergirding of everything that brought Donald Trump into the White House, and it formed his politics, is the word “sovereignty.” This is missed by the people inside the beltway. These aren’t random speeches. The war, defeating ISIS, pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, these are informed by the same philosophical idea: the importance of sovereignty and the nation-state. So that’s all the philosophizing I will do.

So, let me talk to you about my experience for the last few months inside the White House. I’ll talk about three things: Who is the president? I’ll talk about what happened inside the building, and I’ll address this question that has become so popular today, of the ‘deep state’ and how it affects foreign policy going forward.

Who is the president? The president, behind closed doors, is exactly the same as he is in public. He’s not your average politician; when he sees a camera, flicks a little switch in the back of his head, and then switches on that “Washington grimace.” He is who he is. When I first met him in the summer 2015, I was asked to come brief him in New York on matters to do with national security. The man, in private, was exactly the man I’d come to know on the television screens. And that is, in itself, refreshing. There is no Janus-faced, bi-polarity with this individual.

Secondly, he is a preternatural, instinctual actor. It is not an exaggeration. Monica Crowley described him most accurately. The weekend of the election, we were with David Horowitz and his colleagues at his Restoration Weekend (which was either going to be a wake or a celebration.) But, the right candidate won. And two days after the election, Monica stated, “The people who misunderstand Donald J. Trump look at him through an ideological lens. And that is completely the wrong way to look at him. Because, Donald J. Trump wasn’t an ideological candidate; he was an attitudinal candidate.” And that is very, very much so. You cannot slap easy, lazy labels onto this man. Yes, the chattering classes would have you do so. The mainstream media would have you do so. But remember, this is a Republican candidate who strode along the campaign platform waving a “gay pride” flag. That’s not exactly a classic Republican candidate. He breaks the conventional taxonomy, and that’s important to remember.

What he is, is a man who cares about making this nation great again. That slogan is not pablum; it’s not empty rhetoric. He truly wishes to translate what he has done in the private sector, in terms of making a great brand, and translating that back to America’s position in the world and its founding principles.

A Hostile Takeover
What happened in the last seven months, until I left the White House? Well, what happened on January the 20th needs to be understood. Who likes the movie “Red Dawn,” the original one? Great movie, OK? Those of you who have not seen it, watch it. Not the remake; the original.

Senate Republicans must be making progress on their latest attempt to reform health care, because the opposition is again reaching jet-aircraft decibel levels of outrage. The debate could use a few facts—not least on the claims that the GOP is engaging in an unfair process.

Republicans are scrambling to pass Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy’s health-care bill before Sept. 30, when the clock expires on the budget procedure that allows the Senate to pass legislation with 51 votes. The bill would devolve ObamaCare funding to the states, which could seek waivers from the feds to experiment within certain regulatory boundaries, and it also repeals the individual and employer mandates and medical-device tax.

The left spent weeks declaring this dead on arrival, but now that Republicans appear close to a majority here come the tweets. The Graham-Cassidy proposal “eliminates protections for people who are or ever have been sick. GONE. Insurers back to denying coverage for the sick,” Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy claimed this week.

In fact, a state that receives a waiver from ObamaCare’s regulations must show plans that retain access to “adequate and affordable” coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. ObamaCare’s rules are not the only way to do this, despite the claims of Jimmy Kimmel. The Affordable Care Act’s price restrictions have in practice degraded the quality of care for the ill and sent insurers shopping for healthy patients who are more profitable. (See “Pre-Existing Confusion,” May 2)

States could set up high-risk pools, for example. These pools subsidize care for those who need costly treatment without concealing the expense across healthy patients, who may drop coverage if they can’t afford it. This can lower premiums for everyone.

Another complaint is that Republicans may vote without a score from the Congressional Budget Office, which has said it will release a preliminary estimate but won’t rule on premiums or coverage effects for several weeks.

CBO forecasts are often wrong, but in this case they’d also be meaningless. The point of Graham-Cassidy is to allow states to experiment and tailor approaches to local populations. Some might try to expand Medicaid’s reach or even go single-payer. Others might tinker with reinsurance. The budget office can’t possibly know what 50 states would do or how that would affect coverage.

The irony is that even as critics say little is known about the bill, progressive groups are pumping out black box estimates of what would happen. A report flying around the internet from the consulting firm Avalere says that states will lose $4 trillion in funding over 20 years.

That sounds bad. Except the study assumes no state block grants past 2026—because Congress would have to reauthorize funding. That’s right: The report equates renewing an appropriation with zeroing out an account, as if Congress doesn’t periodically approve funding for everything from children’s health care to highway spending.

If I had to pick a title, I might call President Trump’s 2017 UN address, “Something for Everyone.”

For example, Trump supporters heard the words “America first” and “sovereignty” and glowed. Trump haters heard the word “sovereignty” and “American interests above all else” and ignited. So consumed were many by their own respective basking and bonfires, they failed to realize that no matter how many times Trump dropped the word “sovereignty,” it was sometimes in sentences like this: “We must reject threats to sovereignty, from the Ukraine to the South China Sea.” In other words, we must reject threats to the new world order and back again.

I’n guessing that’s why neocons were carving the speech up into way many too portions of red meat (carpaccio?) for comfort. Loving it were Elliott Abrams at National Review, Sohrab Ahmari (“Trump’s Turtle Bay Triumph”), and that third amigo, Lindsay Graham, the kind of people once pertrified by The Great Candidate Trump America First Foreign Policy Speech of 2016. With all of that, there was plenty of smoke coming out of many ears — the New York Times, Stalin supporter Max Boot, to name a couple — which was also entertaining.

Then there were the big lines — including the big and also red line about “obliterating” the regime of North Korea if “Rocket Man” doesn’t stop launching missiles at us or our allies. Such talk thrills the Deplorables at home, but it troubles me because it tells me the generals are telling Trump what a quickee little war it will be against “Rocket Man” — just forget all about China, Russia, whether this might be a trap door into a larger regional war, and all that other strategy stuff. Here, they seem to be displaying their customary lack of forsight, and also negligence, when it comes to a fair appraisal of what US capabilities are like after 16 years of taxing stress on our military resources, which, by the way, they never seem to want to stop.

For some out of the box thinking on the subject — and just the pleasure of seeing a real strategic mind at work — read Admiral James A Lyons’ thoughts on using food as a point of pressure against the regime, food that is currently being provided by the UN to North Korea, where the regime exploits it.

Admiral Lyons writes: “Using `food’ as a weapon to force regime change is not what civilized nations normally do, but North Korea is not a normal nation. It is rogue nation that not only subjects its people to unimaginable humanitarian crises, but is also is ruled by a destabilizing regime that has threatened to cause the deaths of millions of Americans. Therefore, extreme measures are required prior to taking military actions” (emphasis added).

Back to Trump at the UN. My own eyes certainly lit up when the president explained the problem with Venezuela was not that it had implemented socialism poorly, but that Venezuela had implemented socialism faithfully. A marvelous line. More enjoyable still were the gasps, hiccupped laughs and guffaws the line elicited from all of the assembled socialists. In those moments of global upset I realized I could not think of a single UN “member-state” that was not in some large and fundamental ways itself socialist, and that, tragically, includes the USA.

And here we get to the defective foundation of not only the President’s disappointing appeal to “reform” this insidious World Body, but also of the widest possible academic and political consensus on past events, which, naturally, informs current events. That defective foundation is over three-quarters of a century at least of “court history,” not facts, not conclusions, about the subversion of the nations of the world by agents and supporters of world communism, for most of a century directed and supported by Moscow using extensive domestic networks in many countries. The United Nations is and always has been a massive New York outpost of this same global movement, at its core in direct conflict with our democratic republic and constitutional form of government.

The (unasked) question is, how could the UN possibly be anything else? It was created under the aegis of Soviet agent Alger Hiss, whose cover as a senior State Department official was first revealed publicly by Whittaker Chambers in 1948.

When Donald Trump ran for president, he criticized the interventionist policies of his Republican and Democratic predecessors, sparking fears that he would usher in a new era of American isolationism. But at the U.N. this week, Trump laid out a clear conservative vision for vigorous American global leadership based on the principle of state sovereignty.

Judging from their hysterical reaction, critics on the left now seem to fear he’s the second coming of George W. Bush. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) called his address “bombastic.” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said it represented an “abdication of values.” And Hillary Clinton said it was “very dark” and “dangerous.” This is all the standard liberal critique of conservative internationalism. The left said much the same about President Ronald Reagan.

In New York, Trump called on responsible nation-states to join the United States in taking on what he called the “scourge” of “a small group of rogue regimes that . . . respect neither their own citizens nor the sovereign rights of their countries.” This mission can be accomplished, Trump said, only if we recognize that “the nation-state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition.”

He is right. Communism and fascism were not defeated by the United Nations, and global institutions did not fuel the dramatic expansion of human freedom and prosperity in the past quarter-century since the collapse of the Soviet Union. What has inspired and enabled the spread of peace, democracy and individual liberty was the principled projection of power by the world’s democratic countries, led by the United States.

This is what is needed today — and what Trump promised in his address. He recast his “America First” foreign policy as a call not for isolationism but for global leadership by responsible nation-states. He embraced the Marshall Plan — the massive U.S. effort to support Europe’s postwar recovery. And he declared that “if the righteous many do not confront the wicked few, then evil will triumph” because “when decent people and nations become bystanders to history, the forces of destruction only gather power and strength.”

Trump then used this theme of sovereignty to challenge the United States’ two greatest geopolitical adversaries, China and Russia, insisting that “we must reject threats to sovereignty from the Ukraine to the South China Sea.”

The president also had a blunt message for North Korea. He dismissed its leader, Kim Jong Un, as “Rocket Man” and said Kim “is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.” He made clear that “the United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.” This message rattled some, and that was its intent. During the Cold War, Soviet leaders truly believed that Reagan was preparing for war and might actually launch a first strike. This belief is one of the reasons that a cataclysmic war never took place.

If we hope to avoid war with North Korea today, the regime in Pyongyang must be made to believe and understand that Trump is in fact, as he said at the U.N., “ready, willing and able” to take military action. His tough rhetoric was aimed not just at Pyongyang but also at China and other states whose cooperation in squeezing the regime is necessary for a peaceful solution. Those words must be followed by concrete steps short of total destruction to make clear that he is indeed serious and that North Korea will not be permitted to threaten American cites with nuclear annihilation.

I’ve suggested that Hillary Clinton’s new book, What Happened, would be more accurately titled Why I Should Have Won. But if you wanted to position it as a sequel to her earlier memoir, Living History, you could title it Rewriting History, because What Happened is a recycling bin full of evasions, misleading statements, and flat-out whoppers.

The biggest lie is the one she has told many times before, on her notorious private email server: “As the FBI had confirmed, none of the emails I sent or received was marked as classified.” She has said this many times before and been called on it many times before. The verdict? “That’s not true,” said then–FBI director James Comey. “False,” said PolitiFact. The Washington Post’s strange fact-checking system initially gave her two Pinocchios, then decided to give her the full four.

On top of the lie, Clinton is being misleading in a familiar Clintonian way, because the law doesn’t distinguish between information that is classified by its nature, despite not being marked as such, and information that is marked classified. “Even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an email, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it,” Comey said at his July 5, 2016, press conference. This means that Hillary caused classified information to be removed from secure channels more than 100 times. That’s supposed to be a felony if gross negligence is involved, and it certainly appeared to be in her case.

Moreover, Clinton says again that setting up the private email server was a matter of “convenience.” This isn’t exactly a lie; having her emails subjected to Freedom of Information Act scrutiny in the thick of a presidential campaign could indeed have been inconvenient to Clinton’s aspirations. She suggests, without quite saying so (the obvious evasion will fool no one acquainted with the Clintons’ methods), that setting up the private email server enabled her to carry only one device. That’s nonsense. Clinton isn’t a harried soccer mom who has room for only one phone in her jacket pocket. Secretaries of state have staffers to schlep their stuff around for them, and anyway, “she used many devices,” Comey said.

The “convenience” claim, which she has been making for two and a half years, earned a “three Pinocchios” rating from the Washington Post’s fact-check column last year. We all know the real reason Clinton set up the server: She wanted her emails shielded from potential disclosure. She wanted the authority to decide which ones were private, and she wanted the ability to destroy them. This cost her dearly.

Like her husband, Clinton lies about the big things, and she lies about the small things. It’s absolutely shameless for her to claim, after mentioning that Bill Clinton was despondent when he lost the 1980 Arkansas governor’s race and “practically couldn’t get off the floor,” that her own reaction was: “That’s not me. I keep going.” The world knows that when she lost last November, she hid in her hotel all night instead of giving a concession speech to her crying supporters gathered across town at New York City’s Javits Center.

Clinton even dismisses a report by “a newspaper” that she “was having séances in the White House to commune directly with Eleanor [Roosevelt]’s spirit.” She states flatly, “I wasn’t.” But pretty much every newspaper reported this, and the reason they all did so was because it came from the single most revered political reporter alive — Bob Woodward, in his book The Choice. And who did Woodward get it from? The New Age psychologist who conducted the sessions with Hillary. The only way the “séance” story is false is if you insist on a semantic distinction between “having conversations with dead people” and “séances,” or maybe a distinction between “having” séances and simply “participating” in them. It’s not an important matter, but it’s a well-known one, for anyone who remembers the 1990s anyway. Lying is an involuntary reflex for the Clintons, like sneezing.