Coherency.....................................

Walter Russell Mead suggests it is time to step up our foreign policy game:

"For a full generation we have not had to think too much about whether something done or undone in foreign policy promotes or endangers our vital interests and the security and prosperity of the American people. We have gotten out of the habit of making foreign policy under the gun and as a result we are not as a people very good at understanding what matters and why."

"What is missing from the ‘peaceful withdrawal’ scenarios is an understanding that there are hostile and, from our point of view, destructive powers in the world who will actively seize on any leverage we give them and will seek to use their new power and resources to remake the world in ways we find fundamentally objectionable and unsafe."

Full worth-the-time-to-read-it essay is here.