[This is an edited version of a talk I delivered in July of 2025, shortly after the U.S. launched massive attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites.]
The big news in foreign policy is that President Trump ordered the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities. No doubt, some of you are wondering how to evaluate that decision. Does it represent a dramatic change in our policy? Does it reflect a new, more assertive foreign policy, one that is no longer reluctant to use massive force to defend American interests?
To answer that, we have to start with the fundamentals of this subject. And requires an understanding of the fact that both domestic policy and foreign policy are implementations of exactly the same principle.
At first thought you might assume that the two are very different. After all, a proper domestic policy calls for laissez-faire—which means a government that stays out of people’s lives. A proper foreign policy, on the other hand, calls for a government that acts forcefully to protect us. So the first seems to constrain the power of government, while the second unleashes it.
But no—the two are the same.
The principle of individual rights sets the guideline for both. And that principle imposes two imperatives on government: refrain from initiating force, and embrace the use of retaliatory force. These are the two, equally vital elements of a political system designed to protect individual rights.
Domestically, these imperatives mean: leave innocent people alone—and use the police and the courts to act in retaliation against those who violate rights. Internationally, they mean: refrain from interfering with other nations—and use the military to exercise retaliatory force if and when they threaten us.
The concept of individual rights is a selfish one. It declares that everyone has a right to his life, his liberty and the pursuit of his happiness. And just as the principle of self-interest guides one’s personal life, so too one’s political life. The government’s job is to enable individuals to pursue their self-interest—to allow them to act on their own judgment—by protecting them against initiated force.
When it comes to foreign policy, the government’s function is to selfishly defend the nation’s interests. And this is where people flounder in formulating a proper policy. They are unable to define the nation’s interests. For example, here is our State Department’s official description of its basic mission: “To protect and promote U.S. security, prosperity, and democratic values and shape an international environment in which all Americans can thrive.”Can that vague statement of floating abstractions provide any actual guidance to the architects of our foreign policy? All it does is endorse an unprincipled, seat-of-the-pants approach to every concrete situation that arises.
What, then, constitutes America’s self-interest? A nation’s interests consist of the interests of its individual inhabitants. And in the political realm, there is one fundamental interest we all have: freedom.
An individual pursues his self-interest by judging what actions are necessary to advance his own life. But to do so, he must be free to follow his judgment. A slave is not living his life, but the life demanded by his master. The moral value of freedom is simultaneously the practical value of freedom—the value that, politically, defines the self-interest of each individual, and thus of the nation.
While the government defends our freedom at home mainly by protecting us against criminals, it does the same internationally by protecting us against criminal-states. Its job is to keep us safe from any threats of force coming from abroad. (Obviously, this does not mean we have to wait for enemy missiles actually to be launched onto U.S. soil. Any more than the police, when confronting a man aiming his gun at a victim, need to wait until the weapon is fired. If there is objective evidence of a foreign threat against us, our government must act to negate that threat.)
This fundamental interest subsumes the many narrower interests a foreign policy may pursue—from establishing a strong military to forging international alliances. Every aspect of our foreign policy must be a form of safeguarding the rights of Americans.
A proper criminal code protects people not only by directing the police in making arrests, by guiding the courts in conducting trials, etc., but also by deterring crime. If a society demonstrates that it regards criminal activity with the utmost gravity and is prepared to employ the full power of its criminal justice system, without hesitation and without mercy, malefactors will think twice before breaking the law.
In the field of foreign affairs, deterring the initiation of force against us is obviously even more important. A rational foreign policy minimizes the possibility of war—not as its primary goal, but as a consequence of its vigorous defense of liberty. It prevents war by conveying to America’s antagonists the credible warning that any aggression on their part will be met with overwhelming force. It informs our enemies of our certainty in the rightness of our political values—and our rejection of any doctrine invoked by criminal-states to justify their coercive behavior against us. It informs our enemies that America’s commitment to upholding its interests is unyielding.
When freedom is the fundamental interest that nations are pursuing, there are no conflicts of interest. A free country’s self-interest is not attained at the expense of other nations. Just as, in a free market, an individual’s wealth is not gained by the impoverishment of his neighbor, so too the freedom of one nation is not gained by the enslavement of another.
It is not an act of altruism for America to recognize the rights of the citizens of other nations and to refrain from attacking them. Rather, the recognition of rights is precisely the principle upon which our own self-interest rests. A free country’s interests lie in not being subject to initiated force—and, for the same reason, it lies in not subjecting others to such force. A free country has no need, and no desire, for conquest. It grows prosperous by production and trade, not by coercion and oppression. A free country’s pursuit of its self-interest entails no sacrifice—neither of itself to others, nor of others to itself.
But just establishing that the fundamental interest government ought to defend is its citizens’ freedom, is not enough. The planners of our foreign policy need more specific guidelines in order to identify the means by which this purpose is to be achieved. What they need are instructions on how to practice the virtue that underlies all aspects of a proper foreign policy: justice.
JUSTICE IN FOREIGN POLICY
Nations, like individuals, must be objectively evaluated before they can be dealt with. This is the process of justice, which is the basic means by which our foreign policy protects the value of freedom. We must recognize other nations for what they actually are in order to know how to act toward them. We must know whether they are essentially allies or enemies of America—i.e., allies or enemies of liberty.
The opposite of justice is diplomacy—or, rather, diplomacy as it is practiced in modern times, when U.S. officials simply refuse to identify a dictatorship as a dictatorship, and instead label it a “strategic competitor” with which we must maintain cordial relations. But justice does not permit such egalitarianism. Justice demands that a cordial relationship be maintained only with a nation that deserves it. This implies certain requirements on the part of our policymakers. Among them are the following:
(1) Pronounce moral judgment. Our State Department should scrupulously judge the world’s governments by the standard of a commitment to individual rights—and should make its conclusions public. A harmonious relationship with all nations is not a goal of foreign policy. To the contrary, it is incompatiblewith America’s fundamental goal. We only undermine our freedom when we welcome, or are neutral toward, its destroyers. We should praise those who share our values and condemn those who do not—and act accordingly. We should make public a list of countries we regard as supportive of freedom and those we regard as hostile to freedom. This achieves the very practical purpose of telling the world that we take our ideals seriously enough to regard our enemies as . . . enemies. (And “enemies” refers to those who would use physical force against us, not those who compete with us economically.)
It is when our antagonists are led to think that their crimes will be tolerated by us—when they see that we operate on the expedient premise that our interests are divorced from our moral values—when they see that our standard response to any foreign entity that presents a physical danger to us is conciliation and compromise—when they see how reluctant we are to judge our enemies and to take the actions required by that judgment–it is then that our enemies grow militarily stronger and psychologically bolder.
It is by being willing to openly judge other countries that we express our loyalty to the value of liberty.
(2) Do not compromise principles. Any compromise between the defenders of freedom and those who actively seek to extinguish it only strengthens the latter at the expense of the former. To compromise one’s principles is to surrender the end in a deluded pursuit of the means. There are no beneficial “deals” to be made with those who are dedicated to our obliteration. Any alleged values to be gained through amicable relations with them—peace, trade, etc.—are as meaningless as the “peace” or “trade” that exists in a concentration camp.
There is no “happy medium” between a foreign policy of self-interest and one of self-sacrifice. The basic alternative in foreign policy is either self-protection or self-endangerment. Any attempt to combine the two opposites serves only to dilute the poison one is ingesting, with the result being simply a protracted, rather than an immediate, demise.
(3) Renounce appeasement. Appeasement is a particularly self-destructive form of compromise. It is the pretense that there are no enemies out there, only potential allies willing to be bought off, and ready to announce that their interests suddenly coincide with those of their bribers. So Hitler is bought off with Czechoslovakia, on the premise that somehow it will no longer be in his “interests” to enslave Poland or the rest of Europe. Just as it is assumed that the “interests” of the Hamas and Hezbollah jihadists, once they are given autocratic reign over some territory, will somehow no longer include the butchering of Israeli babies and the cleansing of all Jewish blood from “Greater Palestine.”
The truth, though, is that there is no possibility of an equal exchange with those who can offer nothing but a promise—a meaningless promise—to refrain from aggression.
Appeasement is a pathetic strategy when used by a schoolboy to deal with the class bully; it is an absurd act of . . . self-emasculation when practiced by the world’s superpower. The choice to be a criminal, or a dictator, is a choice about moralvalues—and being showered with money will not persuade the recipient that his choice is wrong. It will not keep him from both taking your payment and engaging in his brutality, to the extent he feels he can get away with it. The only reliable allies are those that do not need to be bought—i.e., those that share our moral and political principles. The appeaser declares that a killer pointing a gun at you actually agrees with your basic ends; he differs only in his choice of the means by which to earn a living. So—the appeaser says—there must be a mutually beneficial deal, some inducement you can offer him, that will make him choose a peaceful life and keep him from killing you.
The only way to protect oneself from such physical threats, is by responding with overwhelming retaliatory force. Protection cannot be achieved by speaking softly and carrying a big carrot.
(4) Do not sanction our destroyers. The sustaining of any widespread tyranny—from communism to Islamic terrorism—is not possible without the moral sanction of its victims. It was because so many in the West viewed communism as a “noble theory” that the Soviet Union was not boycotted economically and shunned politically. Because the Soviet Union was treated as a civilized country, rather than as a brutal slaughterhouse, it was able to obtain from the West the means of fending off starvation and of procuring a military arsenal that endangered the world for so long.
Similar moral concessions on the part of the victims have led to the growing threat of Islamic terrorism. We are often urged to avoid judging the guilty parties, especially the governments that support them, strictly by Western standards. We are told to empathize with those who are struggling for “self-determination,” or with those who need to demonstrate solidarity with their Muslim brothers in their fight against so-called Western imperialism.
But if we hold freedom as an objective political value, we cannot tolerate those who are acting to eradicate it. We dare not say, “Well, their standards may be different from ours, but we must accept a diversity of viewpoints.” We must treat them as an unqualified evil. Yet every time such destroyers are politely invited to a State Department cocktail party—or are permitted by us to preside over the Human Rights Commission at the United Nations—America is granting them the imprimatur of a moral sanction.
TODAY’S POLITICS
The threats against America have been growing only because we have abandoned the principles that undergird a free, and secure, society. It’s time to try adopting them.
Let’s see how they apply to current politics.
We have today Donald Trump proclaiming—as part of his promise to “Make America Great Again”—a policy of “America First.” Many believe that this is a policy of firmly defending America’s interests. But is it?
The essential characteristic of America—the characteristic that truly makes, or made, America great, is its embrace of individual freedom. That is the moral principle on which the country was founded and is what constitutes America’s basic interest. That interest cannot be safeguarded by leaders who see no moral distinction between free countries and dictatorships—it cannot be safeguarded by leaders who are openly envious of the political power wielded by foreign autocrats.
Nor can it be safeguarded through a foreign policy that interprets “America first” as requiring further government restrictions over voluntary dealings between people.
When people deal with one another, their self-interest—authentic, rational self-interest—requires that they trade. Each offers value for value. On this basis, there is no duplicity and no victimization; there is only honest, mutually beneficial exchange. Trade rests on, and reinforces, the idea that people’s trueinterests are not in conflict.
A foreign policy based on self-interest, therefore, embraces free trade. It allows everyone to seek out the best products at the lowest prices, wherever the source. Whether you choose to buy from someone across the street or from across the ocean, both parties gain. That’s what voluntary trade means.
This is categorically different from Trump’s outlook.
Trump cannot conceive of trade as being mutually beneficial. Instead, he believes that one party’s gain comes only through another’s loss. His ideal is the conniving wheeler-dealer, master of the “art of the deal,” who manages to put one over on his partner. His view of human interaction is that one must be either victimizer or victim, predator or prey. He thinks, for example, that Americans who trade with foreigners are being taken advantage of. Sohe calls on the government to curtail such voluntary transactions by imposing tariffs and other restrictions.
Trump views America from the perspective of a crude tribalist. He believes that to defend America is not to defend an idea or a principle; rather, it is to protect the tribe of the native-born against foreign interaction. His interpretation of “America first” is shaped by the notion of economic nationalism. Do you want to buy goods from sellers abroad? Are you a foreign-born person who wants to lead a self-supporting life in America? Are you a businessman who wants to produce better and cheaper products by outsourcing work to India or building a factory in Mexico? Trump declares that you will be stopped in order to shield America from “outsiders.” America’s greatness, he holds, is the product of native-born, white Christians, who must be insulated from foreigners and from goods made by foreigners. These native-born people become a privileged group for whose sake individual rights are to be sacrificed. America’s self-interest is thus defined not by the preservation of individualism but by the entrenchment of collectivism—i.e., by enshrining the tribe, a tribe defined by the accidental fact of one’s geographic birthplace.
Let me briefly clear up a confusion some people have about nationalism and patriotism. The two are very different. Nationalism is a collectivist idea, which regards the nation as the primary political unit of life and which holds that the citizen is obligated to devote his energies to the glorification of whatever state happens to declare him its subject. The nationalist demands, not loyalty, but unconditional loyalty—mindless loyalty—to the state. He is a collectivist, who believes in sacrificing the individual for the sake of the “nation as a whole.” The American patriot, however, supports his country because of an ideal it represents—the ideal of individualism, under which the primary unit of political life is the individual. The patriot understands that genuine self‑interest requires limitingthe state’s power for the purpose of upholding individual rights—in contrast to the nationalist, who calls for suppressing individual rights for the purpose of expandingthe state’s powers. The patriot readily criticizes his country when it becomes a threat to his rights. What he supports is not “America first” but America’s freedom first.
Now let’s continue to examine how the principles of a correct foreign policy should be implemented. If government must protect us against foreign threats to our freedom, what are those actual threats currently?
At the very top of the list is Islamic totalitarianism. The jihadists who launch terrorist attacks against us—from the airplane hijackers of 9/11, to the Houthis in Yemen today—are not simply a hodgepodge of fanatics who happen to have grudges against the United States. Rather, they are motivated by an ideology—an ideology calling for the imposition, by force, of the tenets of Islam. It’s an ideology that calls for the extermination of all “infidels,” starting with Americans.
And the pre-eminent source of that ideology is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran is the wellspring of modern Islamic totalitarianism. It is a nation that was founded, in 1979, by a religious revolution against a secular, Western-style state. (The fact that it was ruled by a despot was not what motivated the Islamists, who installed a far more tyrannical government; it was the Western orientation that they found objectionable.)
Iran is a nation governed by its clerics. It is a nation whose constitution calls for ”the perpetuation of the revolution inside and outside of Iran, in particular [by] developing ties with other Islamic and popular movements to pave the path for the unified world Muslim nationhood.” Iran is a nation that shelters leaders of al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks against us. It is a nation whose notorious fatwah against Salman Rushdie and his publishers—including America publishers—with a multi-million-dollar bounty on their lives, remains in force. It is a nation that sponsors the terrorist assaults against us by such groups as Hezbollah and Hamas, including the killing of dozens of Americans, in Israel, during the unspeakable attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
The terrorist acts against us committed in the name Islam, at home and abroad, are inspired, encouraged and even financed by Iran. Iran is a nation that has understood from the very start—from the time in 1979 that it invaded our embassy in Tehran and held its occupants hostage for over a year—that America, the “Great Satan,” is its arch-enemy. Iran has long been at war with America—but America fails to realize it.
To remove the threat of Islamic totalitarianism, it is the government of Iran that needs to be removed. We need to overthrow it by subduing the country militarily. What motivates the perpetrators of terrorism is the belief that the forces of Islam are all-powerful and will ultimately prevail over an impotent West. We therefore need to demoralize the entire jihadist movement. And the way to do that is to eradicate its moral and financial patron: Iran. Once the jihadists see that their champion has been reduced to rubble, their commitment to their cause will dissipate.
In WWII, after the decisive defeat of our enemies, their premise of an unconquerable German Nazism and Japanese imperialism vanished. The people who had so fervently killed and died for those causes became spiritually disarmed.Once our enemies no longer had an ideology to cling to—once its impotence was made clear—its followers were demoralized and were no longer a threat to the free world.
The same will happen with Islamic totalitarianism, once we destroy its source.
Imagine that we had not crushed the enemy in WWII. Imagine instead that Hitler remained alive and was allowed to stay in power. And that after destroying Germany’s largest munitions plants, we simply called for a cease-fire. Would the world have been safe then? Would the zealots of Nazism have abandoned their deadly ideology?
What was needed then—and what America categorically demanded then—was an unconditional surrender by the enemy, and then the ousting of its government. That is what removed the danger to us.
For the same reason, we now need to forcibly depose Iran’s Islamist government, and tell its people to choose a replacement. There already exists a sizeable number of Iranian opponents of the theocracy. If necessary, we can provide them with arms. We don’t need to occupy Iran; once the current theocracy is ousted, we need only to issue an ultimatum: the Iranians can decide on their own government, but if it ever presents a jihadist threat to us, we will destroy the country. That should be sufficient to protect us.
Instead, we did a half-job–just as we’ve done regularly in the past. We destroyed much of Iran’s nuclear capacity but we have allowed its government to remain in power. We not only refrained from eradicating our enemy, but we even prevented a very willing Israel from doing so for us.
Thus, the Iranians are now loudly proclaiming that they have achieved victory—that they have confronted the Great Satan and emerged intact. And its government is renewing its efforts to round up and silence the dissidents within the country—dissidents who were expecting America’s promised support in overthrowing their oppressors, but who must now apparently abandon such hope.
As a consequence, far from being demoralized, the Iranian regime feels empowered to continue its global jihadist campaign. Yes, Americans, and the world, are better off with a non-nuclear Iran—however long that might last; but an Islamist Iran remains a danger—a danger that is not removed simply by the (temporary) elimination of its nukes.
THE NEED FOR A GUIDING PRINCIPLE
Iran is a clear-cut case of America’s need to use force to defend its interests. And so is the case of Israel fighting the Gaza war. Israel shares our basic values and its enemy in that war is simply a proxy for our enemy. So while a full-fledged deployment of U.S. troops is not warranted, we ought to supply Israel with the provisions it needs to annihilate Hamas and Hezbollah. And certainly, we should stop restraining Israel from using force against its foes.
Without a guiding principle, however, we have no way of knowing how to act in any situation. Should we bomb Iran or rely on diplomacy? If we take military action, is that just selfish aggression on our part? Are we entitled to be concerned solely with America’s interests and not Iran’s? Do we have a right to make such decisions unilaterally or should we wait for directives from the United Nations? And if we fail to take action, will that be seen by our enemies as weakness on our part? Under a seat-of-the-pants approach, every such situation that arises becomes an insoluble dilemma.
Certainly, if we were guided by a proper principle, different circumstances would give rise to different responses on our part. They can range from engaging in all-out war, to supplying an ally with weaponry, to imposing economic sanctions, to perhaps no action at all. Even in a particular situation, there can be valid—i.e., self-interested– reasons to choose any of those options. But the underlying principle remains unchanged: our government must not hesitate to use whatever force is necessary to stop a physical threat against us.
For example, if such a policy were in place and Russia invaded Ukraine, we could decide that the threat to us is too remote to warrant action on our part. And we could be confident that this would not be taken by Russia as license to, say, try to invade Western Europe—which would be a clearer threat to our interests.
On the other hand, we could decide that since Russia is hostile to us—since it has weapons targeted at us–since it is a dictatorship with imperialistic goals and capabilities—since Ukraine’s desire to ally with America and the civilized West is what prompted Russia’s attack—we could decide that it is in our self-interest to help Ukraine defend itself. We could decide, say, to provide the Ukrainians with arms—though not for the purpose of facilitating some compromise between the two countries, but for the purpose of completely repelling the Russian invasion. Whatever we chose to do, though, it would be plain that we were committed to a forceful defense of a clearly-defined national self-interest.
(More importantly, whether we decided to arm Ukraine or not, our government would decare our moral appraisal of that conflict, and of all similar ones. We would make known to the world which side we regard as the evil aggressor and which the innocent victim. A decision to take an uambiguous moral stand on behalf of the victim will, in the long run, be more effective than a decision about whether or not to provide material aid.)
However, for the world to be convinced that we are committed to a principled foreign policy, we need political leaders capable of articulating and justifying it in theory. And we need at least one unmistakable demonstration of it in practice. Our willingness to use force to protect our interests would then not be questioned, even if, in some optional situation, we chose to take no action.
Sadly, we lack such a policy. Today, we have no firm guidelines, no clear idea of what our interests consist of and how to protect them. The history of our foreign policy for the past eighty years has been one of self-constraining, apologeticineptness. With no standard to guide us, we have engaged in battles which were largely self-sacrificial (such as in Vietnam), and in battles where our self-interest was clearly at stake (such as in Afghanistan in response to 9/11). Invariably, though, we took only self-doubting half-measures, resulting in America’s defeat by militarily inferior forces. The message conveyed by such events is that America is unwilling to wield the level of force necessary to achieve victory. What can the world conclude except that America cannot win a war, because it will always be outlasted by an enemy that, unlike America, is firmly committed to its cause?
Today, almost anything we do reflects weakness. And weakness invites aggression. Consider again Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There, as usual, we chose an ineffectual, middle-of-the road approach. We decided to help arm the Ukrainians—but in a typically non-committal manner. We gave them weapons, but delayed delivery; we gave them weapons, but not the ones most needed to repel the invasion; we gave them weapons—and reprimanded Ukraine’s president for continuing to fight; we gave them weapons that are not enough for victory, but are rather intended to create a stalemate that will result in diplomatic negotiations. Trump’s view of a successful resolution to the conflict is the making of mutual concessions: the Ukrainians agree that parts of their country will now be under Russian rule; in return, the Russians agree that they will not take over all of Ukraine. That is the “art of the deal.”
To our enemies, this is just one more instance of American irresolution and impotence. And that emboldens them. This is why the Iranians believed they could seize our embassy in 1979 without repercussions; it’s why North Korea believed it could continue to develop its nuclear capacity with impunity; it’s why the Taliban government in Afghanistan, following its support of al Qaeda in its 9/11 attacks, believed—correctly—that it could outlast us militarily.
So the fundamental question to ask now is not how will we respond to, say, an attempt by China to take over Taiwan, or by North Korea to take over South Korea. Rather, what we should first be asking is: What do we have to do to prevent such aggression by our enemies? And that demands a consistently non-appeasing, non-conciliatory foreign policy.
I said that the adoption of a new foreign policy, in order to be convincing, requires at least one demonstration of our willingness to use whatever force was needed to eliminate a threat. Now, the question is whether Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities accomplishes that. Does it repudiate the failed foreign policy of past years, and inaugurate a new, self-assertive, self-confident one? Does this represent a fresh commitment to using extensive force to ensure America’s safety?
I wish it did. But it doesn’t. It is true that to whatever extent, and for however long, Iran’s nuclear capabilities have been degraded, we, and the world, are safer. But will this make true safety, which requires the removal of the Islamist government of Iran more easily achievable—or less?
This irresolute response by the U.S. establishes, in effect, a ceiling on what is acceptable. It implies that the ultimate goal of regime change in Iran is no longer an option. It makes only more difficult a decision by some future American president to take the necessary next step.
Trump refrained from military action for months, as he urged the Iranians to undertake negotiations with us. But they snubbed him. Now he is willing to offer them financial inducements to sit down and make a deal with him—inducements that amount to paying them protection money if they promise to stop threatening us. He is still insisting that Israel refrain from wiping out Hamas and Hezbollah, and that it agree to a negotiated ceasefire.Doesn’t this approach declare, in effect, that the ongoing war being waged against us by Iran can be resolved, not by Iran’s defeat and unconditional surrender, but by the method cherished by our pragmatic diplomats: the method of conciliation, of compromise, of horse-trading between the U.S. and its enemies?
What we need is a president who can self confidently proclaim a policy based on the moral principle of American self-interest. We don’t have such a president. We don’t even have a president who grasps the meaning of a moral principle.
A proper foreign policy requires a commitment to that principle, not ad hoc expediency and genteel diplomacy. The absence of such a commitment is why we remain vulnerable. We may have the strongest, best-equipped armed forces in the world, but that is not enough to protect us. In other words, America’s safety depends fundamentally, not on its military weaponry, but on its intellectual ammunition. It’s our job to help provide that.
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