Fortress America

National Security Strategy: Fortress America

“The times they are a’changing…” 20th Century ideas won’t do in the 21st Century

“For this victory, we join in offering our thanks to the Providence which has guided and sustained us through the dark days of adversity. Our rejoicing is sobered and subdued by a supreme consciousness of the terrible price we have paid to rid the world of Hitler and his evil band. Let us not forget, my fellow Americans, the sorrow and the heartache which today abide in the homes of so many of our neighbors—neighbors whose most priceless possession has been rendered as a sacrifice to redeem our liberty. We can repay the debt which we owe to our God, to our dead, and to our children, only by work, by ceaseless devotion to the responsibilities which lie ahead of us. . . .”

                                                                President Harry S. Truman speaking on V-E Day, May 8, 1945

“… the next round of conflicts won’t be like your grandfather’s wars. The great conflicts of the last century were primarily industrial wars, in which the side that turned out the most weapons was likely to win. Industry still matters, but information technologies and cyber capabilities will shape the next round of conflicts…. Every facet of society, from the highest reaches of the political and military establishments to street gangs, is a battlefield… More broadly, a[ll] patriots… need to think about how their skills can help Americans wake up to the growing peril.”

                                                                Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2025

“The U.S. can rise to meet all existential challenges by devising a national strategy using nonmilitary instruments. But we should give more than a glance to the need for a dynamic, efficient and scalable U.S. industrial base. That machinery must be able to work with allies and partners to supply our needs and theirs with minimal dependence on China. Diplomacy, value promotion and economic tools like tariffs, trade agreements and export restrictions won’t matter if the West can’t manufacture its own needs.”

                                                 Mark Rosenblatt, Scarsdale, NY in The Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2025

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dedication: To The American Way of Life

The Hudson Institute’s Christopher DeMuth in an interview with Lénárd Sándor of the Institute for American Studies at Hungary’s National University of Public Service, appearing in Mandiner magazine, Oct. 7, 2021. 

“The American way of life has changed in many ways over our long history, as Americans have become more numerous, diverse, prosperous, urban, and mobile. Three characteristics that have endured from the founding are a live-and-let-live attitude, a belief in opportunity and initiative, and a strong sense of patriotism. The first two embody our ideals of liberty and equality; the third is the spirit that holds everything together.

First, most of us are attached to ways of living that are characteristic of our localities, ethnic heritages, family traditions, religions, vocations, and so on—but recognize, and appreciate, that many of our countrymen are attached to other distinctive, worthy ways and traditions. Live-and-let-live has fortified rather than divided our nation. We have been, for example, a notably religious people without tearing ourselves apart over matters of doctrine and revelation—and religious movements have made many illustrious contributions to our national development.

Second, we are united by an ethic of equal opportunity for all. This is not an abstract creed but rather a set of living practices. It depends on robust private initiative and public commitments—to the rule of law, limited government, and wide freedoms of inquiry, belief, and speech and of association and industry.

Third, our patriotism is strong because it is based on gratitude—for our stupendous natural resources and geography, for our long-lived Constitution and political system that have gotten us through many hard challenges, for the deeds of our ancestors, for the living practices of liberty and equality. This American patriotism is not aggressive and does not have a chip on its shoulder; it is attached to our national inheritance rather than to the state; it is unifying rather than dividing.

Today’s woke progressives believe that these features of the American way are lies and illusions—to be “woke” means to have woken up to the realities concealed by happy talk about liberty, equality, and opportunity. Progressives want to replace live-and-let-live with an identity politics of grievance and resentment among racial, sexual, and other groups and of envy of “the rich.” They would replace equal opportunity with preferences and penalties for officially identified groups, and individual initiative with government provision for even routine incidents of life. In the service of these goals, they would restrict each of the freedoms I have itemized. Finally, by opening our borders, and by recasting our history as a story of unmitigated evil, progressives would depose American nationhood; they favor the sovereignty of the unmoored, unconstrained self.

A great many Americans remain attached to our traditional ideals and ways of life and are aghast at the strange ideologies sweeping their institutions, from Wall Street to local schools. But progressivism has become a powerful force. It draws upon the decline of family, religion, and locality and on the tribalism of social media and the internet. It has the advantages of passionate conviction, elite validation, and bureaucratic entrenchment. Which American way will eventually prevail is an open question.”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

FROM YOUR AUTHOR

            “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

                                - William Faulkner

            “We often recollect the past with piety, even gratitude,

              for some purpose in the present.”

                                                                         - Michael Roth                                                                 

With profound apologies to Mr. Lincoln: Four score and seven years ago (1939-2026) our fathers entered a transition like no other in the previous millennium, best described as “e pluribus unum orbi”, liberally translated as “out of many, one world”, where all barriers for peoples and nations, isolated by geography, language, culture or politics, crumbled before a technological tidal wave created by the earthquake known as World War II.

Once engaged in the great conflict, all the world’s peoples and societies were buffeted first by the winds of war and then by the winds of change. This is the story of our fight for stability in our future and against the demons of our past in a long, twilight struggle and of our arrival on the precipice of the abyss – a pit filled with the worst angels of our nature.

Rather than despair, it is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – to find the road around the abyss or a bridge over it and resolve, as Lincoln reminded us – that government of the People, by the People, for the People, shall not perish from the earth.

Come aboard and join us for a voyage of rediscovery of the America we have loved and lost. Help us reestablish her as the shining city on a hill, the land of opportunity and still,  the last, best hope for mankind on this good earth.

–       JT Galt, Jr.

---------------------------------------------------------------

America’s Only Concern is To Not Be Threatened

Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world. He’s the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, and, most recently, “Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other.” He writes: “The United States has no natural ambition to be involved in other parts of the world; its only concern is to not be threatened.

Unlike empires built on steady expansion such as Rome or colonial projection such as Britain and France, the United States populated and developed the great center of North America but beyond that has never remained long in any place where its presence was not desired, as it demonstrated in Cuba and the Philippines. It has absolutely no desire to maintain a large military presence in Europe and only did so to keep potential threats far away from its own shores.

That was a strategic policy that commended itself in days when Germany was, as far as the Anglo-French democracies were concerned, an unreliable and potentially dangerous country. It was long a truism to say that Germany was too late unified, had never determined if it was an Eastern or Western-facing country, and could not assure its own security without frightening or violating its neighbors.

U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower overcame the resistance of Winston Churchill and of the French government in bringing West Germany into NATO and approving its partial rearmament in 1954–1955. U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were essential to the reunification of Germany, which Thatcher, Mitterrand, and Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev favored; only the United States had no fear of a united Germany.

Now that Germany is comfortable in the cocoon of economic and military allies and all of the states that were its mortal enemies to the West are its allies now, Western Europe has four or five times the economic strength of a Russia that contains only half the population of the old Soviet Union. And Western Europe can easily match and surpass Russia in military capacity.

The United States is now responding to the threat from China, as it did to the threat from the Soviet Union, by assembling a containment strategy. To be maximally effective, this will include Russia as well as India, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and, depending on events, Taiwan. Europe and the United States, although their relations should always be cordial, do not need each other as they did when the USSR was threatening all of them.

Europe is not a serious force in the Pacific, and its military role should now be to ensure the security of Western and Central Europe and maintain a general alliance with the advanced countries of the Commonwealth, the United States, and its Pacific allies. Ideally, NATO would be reconfigured as a worldwide defensive alliance of democratic countries.

But in the meantime, Europe is absolutely correct to assure its own defense— which it has the means and the technical ability to do—and those European countries that wish political integration should achieve it while those that wish to retain their sovereignty should do so in alliance with federal Europe and the UK, as well as Canada and the United States. Beneath all of the bluster and posturing, international relations are devolving sensibly.”

As America faces down the treacherous China-Russia-Iran-North Korea axis, we and our allies must reflect on who we really are, and who we need to be: determined to become self-sufficient and secure in food, water, electrical power, basic and strategic raw materials, advanced technologies, strategic R&D, military power, and our commercial, scientific, technological, and intellectual property. 

A "Siege Mentality" must be adopted by the American people, who must help build and maintain "Fortress America", in order to be ready to defend ourselves and our allies against the evil and insidious forces arrayed against us who are already engaged in a hybrid war with the West.

If we are not secure in who we Americans are at home, we will never be able to secure the peace that most people around the world desire.

So, let’s do  some reflection about who we are and who we want to be, because we’re not there yet. At the same time, let us look at the roadblocks we will encounter on the way.

                                                   -------------------------------------------------

What Would It Take for Us to Stop Begging for Permission?

Mollie Engelhart, a regenerative farmer and rancher, is committed to food sovereignty, soil regeneration and educating on homesteading and self-sufficiency. She is the co-owner of Sage Regenerative Kitchen & Brewery in Echo Park and Pasadena and the regenerative Sovereignty Ranch in Bandera, Texas.

She writes: “It feels like every conversation these days is about how the government should wield its ever-growing power. We should be asking a more important question: How do we reduce the power of government in our lives altogether?

As we hurtle toward a world where government intervention touches every area of our lives, millions of voices on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook scream from their party’s perspective about how the government needs to fix everything. But historically, the government doesn’t fix problems—it exploits them to take away our freedoms.

I believe that we should be fighting to shrink the government back to the size it was intended to be. Right now, it’s the largest employer in the United States. That was never the plan. It was never meant to be a bloated bureaucracy standing in the middle of every interaction between humans.

How did we go from being a people willing to go to war over a tax on tea to being citizens who allow the government to tell us:

• What we can and cannot eat

• Who we can and cannot buy food from

• Who can and cannot sell food

• That alcohol is safer than raw milk

What we need government approval for everything from housing to health care to how we raise our children We’ve lost trust in ourselves—and worse, we’ve replaced that trust with blind faith in a government that doesn’t know us, our families, or our communities.

When The Epoch Times did a special about me leaving California, I spoke openly about the unbelievable government interference I had experienced there. They measured my produce at the farmers market, then came to my land to verify that it had actually come from my property. Are those the kinds of things our tax dollars should be funding?

Do we really believe that we need the government to protect us from buying eggs from a farmer we know and trust?

So many people are screaming for socialized health care and more regulation. But let me ask you: Do you want the same people who run the Department of Motor Vehicles to run your health care?

People love to hate capitalism, but true capitalism—not crony capitalism—is the economic system that is closest to nature. If something comes into your neighborhood and people love it, they support it. It thrives. The neighborhood thrives. That’s capitalism.

But that’s not what we have now. What we have is centralization and massive corporations that are too big to fail. When you dig down, they’re all owned by the same few entities—and they’re deeply entangled with the government. That’s not the capitalism we want.

We want a system in which the consumer has power, in which small businesses can thrive, in which we vote with our dollars. But to get there, we need to stop depending on supply chains and systems that don’t support us or nourish us.

Look at Amos Miller, the Pennsylvania farmer who has been repeatedly raided and harassed. Do we think that the customers going to him are unaware that his food isn’t processed through U.S. Department of Agriculture facilities? Of course they know. They’re going because it’s not. Yet the government steps in and says it’s unsafe.

But is it really the government’s job to keep us safe? Or was it meant to protect our freedom?

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s what this country was founded on. And for me, liberty means being able to eat food from a farmer I trust—even if he chooses not to process through Department of Agriculture facilities.

Everyone should have the right to make that decision for myself and my family.

If we want small farms to thrive, more regulations aren’t the answer. Fewer are. We’re not asking for new programs or more politicians to save us. We’re asking for the freedom to be left alone—to provide nutrient-dense food to our communities without interference.

What would it take for us to stop begging for permission and just start living the lives we want to live?

--------------------------------------------------------------

The Dramatic Change in the Political Culture

Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “ Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of “ The Best of Ludwig von Mises.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. He writes:

“Recently, the MAHA Institute had an invitation-only event in Washington as their organizational launch in anticipation of a MAHA report to be issued by the Trump administration. On stage was a highly unlikely cast of characters, something with no modern precedent in American politics.

There was a member of the Teamsters Union who called for labor rights, including the right to refuse to be vaccinated. There were ranchers who were demanding the right to sell to consumers and even eschew Department of Agriculture processing plants. We heard from organic farmers who struggle to survive because of the many ways in which the regulatory framework favors industrial scaling.

There were activists against psychiatric meds. There was a diabetes doctor who learned about unorthodox healing diets from her own clientele. And there were experts on the COVID-19 crisis who called for an end to the enabling legislation to permit the unleashing of countermeasures on the general population.

There were many others, covering most aspects of domestic policy. The mix was intriguing: homeschoolers, labor unionists, medical doctors, moms with injured kids, pastors angry that their houses of worship were forcibly closed, and people concerned about growing surveillance by digital technology. These voices were joined by small businessmen deeply harmed by lockdowns.

Here we have an extremely broad and nonideological coalition of people who are united in their concern that large and government-aligned institutions are robbing people of their personal autonomy.

As I listened with both agreement and amazement, I took note of some just-outof- college interns at my table who had just come to Washington to work for a traditionally conservative think tank. That think tank had people on stage with highly unlikely allies.

I pointed out to them at some point that this version of conservatism to which they are being exposed would have been unrecognizable 10 years ago. They did not really understand what I meant. I left it at that and said no more.

I was an intern in Washington just like them decades ago. It was the waning years of the Cold War. We moved from event to event. I worked in the Senate Press Gallery. I went to all the luncheons. It was a time of tremendous binaries in public life—and one overriding one: the United States versus the Soviets. That was the one supreme reality, and everything else fit within it.

From that template, the notions of liberal and conservative were formed. Liberals were soft on the Soviets and favored arms treaties, disarmament, and peace, whereas the conservatives were tough-minded, wanted rearmament, and supported freedom fighters about whom we knew little. In domestic terms, liberals wanted more government spending and taxing, whereas the conservatives wanted less, thus allowing maximum support for enterprise of any sort, including huge industrial pharmaceuticals and agricultural interests.

That constellation of causes, however strangely inconsistent and overly simplified, lasted a very long time. This binary was born in 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower beat Robert Taft in the contest for the GOP nomination. Taft was an old- style America Firster who had no interest in the Cold War—indeed, he saw empire abroad as inconsistent with small government at home. He lost and modern American conservatism was born.

The post-Franklin Delano Roosevelt liberalism with which generations became familiar favored more caution abroad and more collectivism at home. No amount of government expansionism displeased them provided it did not concern the military.

What about the constituencies that merely wanted to be left alone to conduct their lives in peace and build prosperity for themselves without all the annoyances of these ideological binaries? They were sidelined. For how long? I did the math on this. It’s fair to bookend this binary from 1952 until 2024—fully 72 years. This is because it did not end with the Cold War: There were new struggles born that delayed the coming to terms.

What ended it? I would name the moment last fall when Robert F. Kennedy ( RFK) Jr.—the scion of an old Democratic family— gave up his independent bid for the presidency. There was simply no way he would be allowed to challenge Joseph Biden for the nomination of the Democratic Party. He made the decision, against my own advice, to go independent.

His effort was valiant but the math simply was not working out. Every thirdparty effort in a winner-take-all system runs afoul of the same problem. People under our system tend to vote against that candidate whom they fear the most, thus squeezing out the third choice even if he is the favorite. This is why we have only two parties. RFK Jr. got wise to this reality.

There was an assassination attempt on Trump. RFK Jr. called Trump. They found common ground in opposition to the ruling elites. The rest is history.

What this move did was extraordinary. It brought together people who never knew each other. They started listening to each other and learning from each other. The homeschool moms concerned about vaccine mandates realized the bigger problem was a hegemon that was also corrupting their food and medicine. The people subjected to forced shots, from all walks of life, joined with veterans tired of woke policies that were diminishing the ethos within their ranks. Religious people who had never been involved in politics realized that they had to be in order to preserve their way of life.

As I finally got on stage to speak my mind at this event, I looked at the 200 or so gathered and knew intuitively what was going on in the room. These people simply wanted their lives back with the freedom to manage them according to their own light, without the invasions of big institutions from the outside. It seems like an obvious point, but if it is so apparent, why did this insight take 72 years to coalesce into a movement?

I wanted to give the people gathered there a name, but I dared not. There is no name. We are not even entirely sure what this is. Make America Healthy Again ( MAHA) suffices for now. We might reach for the word libertarian, but the impulse in the room is not that formalized, much less rationalistic. It draws from an intuitive distrust of elites and a ferocious demand for the right to live according to the promise of the Bill of Rights and what the Declaration of Independence promises: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Sometimes it is hard to see and fully understand the culture we inhabit in our times. It just seems like the water in which we swim. But take a step back and consider the implications of the existence of this small gathering called MAHA.

Nothing like this existed or could have existed even a few years ago. A remarkable set of conditions had to present itself to make it possible.

But now that it does exist, now that the barriers of so many decades have broken down, what comes of it? Politics is only one answer, and that answer is the obvious one. Less obvious is the cultural change this represents. We have here the formation of new friendships, communities, institutions, and movements. They are robust and likely to last much longer than this political moment. They stand ready to change fundamentally to structures of the social order.

This is the bigger picture, and it is an important one, much more significant than this press conference or that budget bill or this appointment. All those news items pale in significance to the overarching reality: the end of the postwar ideological binaries and the birth of something entirely new. What are the broad outlines? There are two big teams: the establishment that wants imposition in our lives versus the people who want to take back their lives.

The MAHA movement, implausibly, happens to inhabit the Republican Party for now, but this is an accident of history that could change. This is sometimes called populism, but that word too has its limits.

For now, I prefer to see the emerging new communities remain undefined by words.

It is better just to experience it.

I did and I was thrilled beyond description. When I founded Brownstone Institute, it was with the conviction that something dramatic was changing in light of recent upheavals, and I wanted a community to come together to understand and track it. That effort now inhabits many institutions and movements.

Whatever was is no more and what comes to be on the other side still evades neat ideological categorization. Regardless, it is important and decisive in our times. It will likely play a huge role in the future in forming whatever comes next following the final collapse of the 72-year-long packaging of the familiar barriers to understanding it.

For this, we should all be deeply grateful.”

-------------------------------------------------------------

Next time: The American Foreign Policy Tradition