Iran’s geopolitical ascent is the most significant and dangerous development in the Middle East this century.

But while the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy properly identifies Iran as among the important challenges to U.S. security interests, it doesn’t offer a concrete strategy on how to counter Iran’s growing regional power.

President Trump should follow the example of President Reagan, who pursued an offensive strategy to undermine the Soviet Union that included supporting indigenous anti-communist insurgents around the globe: the Reagan Doctrine.

Today, America should support indigenous forces that oppose – and seek independence from – Iranian domination: a Trump-Reagan Doctrine.

The Democracy Dies in Darkness Café is located conveniently near the Capitol, the Hill and the FBI headquarters. It’s open all night and I stopped in for a late-night coffee with my friend, a fiction novelist who was depressed.

“I spent a year writing about a coup attempt against an outsider who by strategic brilliance defeated the handpicked candidate of a cabal of establishment powerhouses” he explained. “It involved the highest officials of the FBI and Department of Justice. They manipulated a FISA Court into letting them electronically surveil the candidate and all who worked with him, unmasked their names, leaked what they found, and they still couldn’t beat him.”

“Sounds great,” I said, so why are you depressed?”

He sighed. “Every publisher I sent it to rejected it as being too implausible to sell to readers.”

It was hard to talk much as the place was rocking. There was a private room to the side, packed with white collar criminal defense counsels drinking champagne and downing tenderloin. Every single one of them had fat retainers to defend the accused, the top brass of the FBI and former Department of Justice officials.

Presidential administrations by law must publish strategic manifestoes.

Indeed, the Goldwater–Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of October 4, 1986 required every subsequent government to issue periodic and formal national strategic strategy blueprints.

Most of these documents dating from the Reagan Administration are blah-blah boilerplate announcements of the obvious.

They offer platitudinous promises of a sober internationalist United States leading the world in promoting global institutions while using its preeminent strength to partner with allies to counter perceived rising threats, such as rogue nations or terrorism. And so on.

The Trump Administration has just released (12/18) its first National Security Strategy.  Here is the White House Summary.  Here is the Full NSS Text as a pdf download.

But to be frank, it is unlike most all prior manifestoes. The contrast with the 2015 Obama doctrine (his last, there was none in 2016) is stunning.  Let’s take a look at why it’s so stunning.

There was a lot of good news in President Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) — the document which finally told the truth about climate change: that green activists pose a bigger threat to U.S. security than anything the climate can manage.

But nothing in the NSS is likely to provoke quite so much fury among environmentalists as one of the clauses buried among another of the Trump administration’s recent reform measures: the bit in the tax-reform package which permits part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to be opened to oil exploration.

Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) has long been a Sacred Polar Bear for environmental campaigners. It’s their line in the snow: the ne plus ultra of pristine wilderness, majesty, and loveliness to be preserved at whatever cost. Democrats have been fighting to prevent it being developed for oil since the 1970s.

So Trump’s announcement that soon oil companies will be allowed to explore there is about as a big a provocation as if he’d turned up to the Sierra Club’s summer vegan barbecue, spit-roasted a baby manatee, and served it up with a snail darter reduction and spotted owl sauce.

Special Counsel Mueller was himself appointed in rather strange circumstances.

Former FBI director James Comey deliberately leaked his own confidential notes about conversations with President Trump, hoping to prompt appointment of a special investigator to investigate a president — whom he said, also under oath, that he was not investigating.

Comey’s ploy worked all too well. Department of Justice officials, now in the Trump Justice Department but who once served in Barack Obama’s administration, selected Comey’s close friend and long associate Robert Mueller as investigator.

From that germination, an innate conflict of interest was born — given that Mueller’s appointment assumed that Comey himself would not come under his own investigation, a supposition that may be increasingly untenable.

Okay — one such conflict of interest swallow does not make a discredited spring.  But then, we now have an entire flock of such swallows.  Let’s count them.

By now it should be clear to every sentient American that the Mueller "investigation" is not an investigation at all.  It is, as President Trump and others have noted, a witch hunt.

As surely as the witch trials that began in 1692 were driven by hatred and hysteria, this one, too, is driven by hatred, intolerance, and fear.

The progressive left still refuses to accept the outcome of the 2016 election and has been trying to undo it by any means necessary.  The "collusion with Russia" meme was and remains a non-starter, so now the real motive for Mueller's appointment as special counsel is evident for all to see.

It was always to find a way to remove Trump from office.  The question now is:  Why is this travesty being allowed to continue?