Editor's Notes: Getting a Grip on Geopolitics

A consistent emphasis here at Liberal Currents is that being serious about taking and exercising political power means developing a foreign and military policy just as well thought out as your domestic policy. Indeed, in The Reconstruction Papers, Secretary of Defense Rock argues that we err in pretending a hard line exists between domestic and foreign policy. FDR very much did not think in those terms, seeing the whole project of the New Deal as one of building capacity, with no real division between domestic industrial capacity and the military industrial base. In order to become "the arsenal of democracy," America had to simply be good at manufacturing, per se.

I got into a bit of trouble when I waded into these waters myself this year.

So I'd like to revisit the topic now, a bit more carefully than I perhaps did in that essay on China, in more of the spirit of my response to critics in the video above.