[TTP: there is, perhaps, much in this article to both like and dislike, and enough grey area to have a great conversation. Tell us what you think in the comments!]

The United States literally began with these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

(What that actually means, particularly the pursuit of Happiness part, is different for different people. At a minimum, however, we can all agree that Life means, well...life.)

The above quotation, of course, comes from the Declaration of Independence. But that document doesn’t define the structure of our government; the Constitution does.

And it’s from the Constitution that we get our federal system, under which (originally) the federal government had a few well-defined and finite powers such as defense, foreign relations, and adjudicating conflicts between the various states.

States, on the other hand, reserved all those powers not specifically prohibited to them or delegated to the federal government.

The truth is that the system worked very well for a long time. About 150 years.

But starting in the 1910s, with the passage of the 16th and 17th amendments, the line between the states and the federal government started to blur; in the 1930s, it began to fray; and by the 1990s, it was basically gone, which is the situation we find ourselves with today…

You know one place where federal control largely doesn’t extend?

The criminal justice system.

In February of 1972, President Richard Milhous Nixon accomplished what generations of diplomats, academics, and foreign policy mandarins had insisted was impossible.

The fiercely anti-communist president who had built his career exposing Soviet espionage in the United States stepped onto the soil of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and altered the trajectory of global geopolitics.

For decades prior, Communist China had existed behind an opaque ideological barricade. Since Mao Zedong’s triumph in 1949 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ruled a nation that was diplomatically isolated, economically stagnant, and politically convulsive.

Washington had no formal relations with Beijing. American diplomats spoke of China only through intermediaries. The Cold War was defined by a bipolar confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, while China simmered as a volatile and unpredictable revolutionary state.

President Nixon saw something others failed to grasp.

The communist world was not monolithic. In fact, by the late 1960s, the Sino Soviet split had grown into a deep strategic rivalry. Moscow and Beijing were not merely ideological cousins. They became competitors.

Nixon and his duplicitous National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger recognized an opportunity of historic magnitude. By normalizing relations with China, the United States could exploit divisions within the communist bloc and weaken the Soviet Union’s strategic position. It was a geopolitical triangulation of breathtaking sophistication. The gamble worked.

Nixon could not have known that thirty years later…

The political maneuver that unfolded this week in the Texas Senate runoff is best understood through a simple analogy.

Imagine a hunter placing a steel trap along a narrow path in the forest.

The trap is not hidden by complexity. It is hidden by inevitability.

The hunter knows that if the animal continues down the path it will eventually step into the mechanism. The trap works not because it deceives the animal but because the path offers no other direction.

Ken Paxton’s challenge to Senator John Cornyn and Senate Leader John Thune functions in much the same way. It is a device constructed so that every available move reveals something important about the character and competence of those who must respond to it.

In a region that has been in conflict for time immemorial, a people have carved out a home for themselves.

The Kurds are a stateless ethnic group that spans across several countries, including Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.

In Iraq specifically, not only have the Kurds managed to create an autonomous zone that they fiercely defend from all comers, but they are considering aligning with the U.S. to fight against Iran’s jihadist regime.

There is a saying amongst the Kurds: they have “no friends but the mountains.” This ethnic group has been caught in bloody conflict after bloody conflict.

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Kurds were not given any sort of sovereign territory. They were divided amongst the nations and left to preserve their way of life and culture in hostile lands. Every time they tried to declare independence, stronger powers shut them down.

The late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei even declared jihad against Kurdish insurgents demanding independence.

One thing the Kurds are good at is warfare. Their fighting force, the peshmerga, has become formidable due to its knowledge of the terrain, its bravery, and its toughness.

The Kurds have long sided with the U.S. in various conflicts.

Americans would be wise to begin paying very close attention to a small rugged island in the northern Persian Gulf that few could locate on a map only weeks ago.

That island is Kharg Island (it’s sometimes spelled Khark Island.)

It is nothing less than the main distribution center for Islamic Republic of Iran’s oil.

At a moment when the United States and its allies are confronting the Islamic Republic during the ongoing military confrontation known as Operation Epic Fury, Kharg Island stands as one of the most consequential strategic locations in the entire Middle East.

If Iran’s regime derives financial oxygen from oil exports, then Kharg Island is the lung through which that oxygen flows.

I joined the Marine Corps because Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I was young, but not confused.

A dictator had crossed a border with tanks, absorbed a weaker neighbor, and dared the world to respond.

President George H. W. Bush did respond. He assembled a coalition, liberated Kuwait, and then stopped.

At the time, I felt frustration. If Saddam was the problem, why leave him in power? Why halt the advance when the job seemed half done?

I believed, as many did, that the first Gulf War should have ended with regime change in Baghdad.

That early conviction shaped my support for later wars. When we went into Afghanistan and then Iraq, I did not recoil. I thought we were finishing unfinished business. I thought we could remove tyrants and midwife stable democracies. I thought American power, applied with moral clarity, could reshape broken regimes.

But the decades that followed chastened that confidence.

We discovered that removing a regime is easier than replacing it. We discovered that democracy building is not an export commodity. We discovered that intelligence agencies and development bureaucracies cannot engineer legitimacy from abroad.

Endless deployments and open-ended missions taught many of us a difficult lesson. The U.S. should not be in the business of remaking other nations in its own image. We are not good at it, and it does not work.

But….