Reclaiming Our Place in the World

This is a remarkable book that “combines history and current events, including my own experiences in the Army and the Senate,” Tom Cotton writes. “For the latter, I’ve drawn on my own recollections, research, notes, and writings for speeches, op-eds, and so forth. For recent events, I’ve also consulted news stories in traditional media sources.”

Cotton is being modest. He’s not a braggart or a make-believe expert. His reading and research have been breathtaking, as a soldier, congressman, and, since 2015, a senator and adviser to Mitch McConnell, the leader of Senate Republicans. And, by the way, Cotton is from rural Arkansas where his family clan has lived and farmed for six generations.

His academic career was impressive and unusual. He graduated from Harvard and then Harvard Law School, leading to his enlistment in the U.S. Army in 2005. His military career was brief but dazzling. He passed the Army Ranger Course and the Airborne School. Yes, he earned an Army Parachute Badge. He was discharged in 2009 after combat assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Next came national politics. He won two House terms and a Senate career in which he became a McConnell ally. His Army and legal careers paved a new way to defend America’s sovereignty and freedom. When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, he pushed for reform legislation to ease punishment of nonviolent prisoners. A tough-minded conservative, Cotton didn’t go along. He voted no.

Soon enough, Cotton embraced a new issue, captured in his groundbreaking book Only the Strong: Reversing the Left’s Plot to Sabotage Power. To aid readers, Cotton has provided a “list of the specific books, essays, articles, and other sources I consulted for each chapter.” Here’s an example: “For insights into nuclear strategy during the Kennedy and Johnson eras, I drew from Richard Pipes’s bracing 1977 essay in Commentary, ‘Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Can Fight and Win a Nuclear War.'”

Here’s another: “For the Vietnam War I consulted Mike Moyar’s Triumph Forsaken, H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty, and Michel Lind’s Vietnam, The Necessary War.” One more: “Mackubin Thomas Owens catalogued John Kerry’s disgraceful anti-war activities in National Review.” A final one: “In researching the invasion of Grenada, I relied on Ronald Reagan’s autobiography, An American Life.”

But Only the Strong is a spectacular book on its own. It covers a 100-year period during which Democrats and the political left, led initially

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