Brilliant Common Sense

To Make and Keep Peace by Claremont Institute fellow and professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University, Angelo M. Codevilla is just the foreign policy book that would have been eagerly endorsed by Founders Washington, Jefferson, Madison and John Quincy Adams. Professor Codevilla’s book, as author Ralph Peters writes, “has invented a new category of policy analysis: brilliant common sense.”

This is a book, along with The Power Problem and Marching Toward Hell, that Rand Paul and Justin Amash will find a compelling foreign policy foundation. I cannot conceive of a setting in which the War Dogs (John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Bill Kristol, etc.) could debate successfully with Sen. Paul and Rep. Amash if they were rigorously prepped with this foreign policy trilogy.

In the forward to Mr. Codevilla’s To Make and Keep Peace, Hoover Institution fellow Victor Davis Hanson writes:

At home, fears over homeland security have created a government octopus. It too often sucks up vast resources, while curbing civil rights, and empowering government bureaucracies, largely because of a therapeutic reluctance to identify our Islamist enemies and take the focused and often narrow measures needed to protect society from them.

Despite unprecedented military power, America is fighting more wars abroad and winning almost none of them, much less improving American stature in the world or its ability to help our friends and punish our enemies. Such confusion is largely the result of the flawed ideas of the “ruling class.”

Codevilla concludes by lamenting two contemporary trends that sum up America’s deviation from the Founders’ nation[sic] of limited government and their warnings about intervening abroad either indecisively or for interests not directly our own.

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