A Better Way to Keep Us Safe and Free

                What does it say: Protect the Homeland from internal threats, illegal immigrants, and cyber-attacks.  Take the fight to the terrorists, build a stronger military and police force.  Defend freedom around the world.

                What does it mean:  This is all pretty straight forward.  Mostly it is a return to our foreign policy under President G.W. Bush.  In this context, “Defend Freedom” means that we will use our military might to lean on other countries to benefit our economic and political interests.

                What Will and Won’t Work:  I like using a slightly more forward approach to ISIS than President Obama has been using, but it costs a lot of money to have troops deployed overseas.  Also, part of the reason we are not as involved in Syria is that it is costing the Russians a lot of resources to prop up their allies in the region; resources that could be turned toward Ukraine.  Under the Obama administration, it feels as if we have a much better relationship with our allies than we did under G.W. Bush with his pushier tactics.

                 Progressive Twist:  There are some good progressive ideas in here, especially when discussing an update of the State Department, international communications and outreach.  There are not any details of how to change it, just a critique of the current administration (Thanks Obama!).  It is hard for me to develop a better plan as I do not have a full grasp of what assets we have available, or who we are dealing with.  Sometimes you need to use a carrot, sometimes a stick, and sometimes you need to accidentally (?) drop a bomb on an embassy…or two.