The trouble with Trump and national security … Trump is consistent only in his inconsistency on national security issues … There are the growing challenges abroad — the rising threat of ISIS, the resurgence of al Qaeda, the menace of Putinism and a newly aggressive China, all of which should mean the party historically most trusted on national security would make the crumbling world a special feature of its electoral appeal.  But no. Here's the trouble: Donald Trump not only knows nothing about national security, he doesn't care to know. –CNN

This is a strong and damning article by Danielle Pletka, senior vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

The Institute is known as a conservative – though "compassionate" – think tank. But from what we can tell the gulf is wide and deep between modest  libertarian entities like DB and looming "conservative" facilities like AEI.

As an anarcho-libertarian publication, DB takes the stance that government is basically the problem, not the solution.

Any time you're telling people what to do, you are essentially "fixing a price" – transferring resources from one place to another by force.

This is inevitably an economic distortion that invades and invalidates free-market operations.

When you invalidate free-markets, you reduce or eliminate competition. When that happens, economic functions are disturbed and demeaned. Worst case, you end up with places like Venezuela where inflation is now approaching 1,000 percent.

Political solutions never work as planned and marketplace environments inevitably produce better results.

Those who work in government know this, of course. That is why they are constantly trying to manufacture domestic and international tensions and worse.

It is only in times of war and impending war – or perhaps economic emergencies – that government can really be justified.

The West supposedly won two world wars against fascist opponents but now it turns out that tomorrows model of governance involves, nonetheless, a kind of global fascism (see Hillary article, this issue.)

Generally wars of self-defense may be seen as justifiable but wars of aggression are not. It gets really hard to tell, however, as governments will claim that any war is a "defensive" one.

The sociopolitical environment surrounding and nurturing warfare is similarly filled with misleading rhetoric.

This article is a good example of that.

More:

It has been said many times that the measure of a leader is not in his embrace of the specifics, but his vision for the nation's role in the world. For Republicans, that means that wonks like Richard Nixon and anti-nerds like George W. Bush have shared a sense of their country's place in history.