Yesterday, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) delivered a speech at the Hertog Forum in Israel detailing the importance of a “conservative-national-realist global strategy.” Senator Cotton also affirmed America’s commitment to Israel as an important ally and defended Israel’s right to defend itself.

Full text of the speech may be found here or below.

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be among so many good friends.

I’d also like to thank my friend Roger Hertog for convening this event.

I’ve been asked to say a few words on a “conservative-national-realist global strategy.” That’s a mouthful, but it’s also something real—and urgent.

Our strategy should be “conservative” in the best tradition of statesmen like Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, and another speaker this week, Benjamin Netanyahu. It should be “nationalist” in putting first our vital national interests. And it should be “realistic” in its appraisal of the world as it is, not how we might wish it to be.

Israel is a fitting place for this conversation, because there’s perhaps no better example of a tough-minded, clear-eyed, and hard-nosed foreign policy than Israel—a small country surrounded from its founding by mortal enemies.

Israel has a strong and proud military and isn’t afraid to use it to defend national interests—alone, if necessary.

But Israelis are also a practical people who’re willing to bury old enmities to make new friends, from Jordan and Egypt and now to the Abraham Accords. They understand that a nation has no perpetual enemies, only eternal and perpetual interests, as their old friend Palmerston put it.

Israel is a sovereign nation that vigilantly protects its people—and has even built a wall to prevent illegal aliens and terrorists from breaking into the country. Israel has proven by example that walls work.

And Israel protects and respects its people. Earlier this year, a depraved terrorist killed seven people at a synagogue on the Sabbath. Israel responded by loosening gun laws.

It’s hard to imagine such a sensible response coming from Washington. Democrats would’ve demanded that we disarm law-abiding citizens. But not in Israel. This is not a nation of victims. This is a nation of warriors who forge their own destiny.

More than most, Israelis understand that only the strong can survive in a dangerous world. Only the strong can preserve their freedom. And, for that matter, only the strong can protect the weak and only the strong can afford to be merciful.

For all that, Israel is often on the receiving end of opprobrium and condemnation from globalists around the world. America gets our fair share of that as well. The reason is simple: our nations are the democracies that most actively use our militaries every day to defend our interests. And we’re therefore a living repudiation of the progressive fantasy of global government by selfless “expert” bureaucrats, lawyers, diplomats, journalists, professors, and NGOs.

But American progressives share this fantasy. It started at the beginning with Woodrow Wilson. Wilson and his heirs mistrust American power used to advance American interests. At best, they insist on channeling it through international institutions and employing it only in pursuit of airy-fairy abstractions like “the rules-based international order.”

Let me assure you no American soldier ever picked up a rifle to defend such a thing. They do it to defend America. The same is true of young Israelis—they serve to defend their nation.

If you ask Wilson and his heirs, “what’s in it for us?” they would proudly answer “Nothing!” And they think that’s a good thing.

But it gets worse with progressives, who often blame America first, to borrow from Jeane Kirkpatrick. They blame America for the world’s problems and demand that America pulls in its horns and atone for its supposed sins. Consider Barack Obama’s early apology tour.

Worse yet, consider his record, especially in this part of the world. Many conservative critics accuse him of naivete or inconstancy. I disagree. President Obama had a ruthless ideological agenda and he pursued it ruthlessly. If you were aligned with America like Egypt or Libya, you got overthrown. If you were an implacable American enemy like Iran and Syria, you got rewarded.

Things haven’t gotten better with his understudy, Joe Biden. We’ve had egregious assaults on our sovereignty, from millions of illegal aliens crossing our border to a Chinese spy balloon floating on its merry way across America. The president’s appeasement of Russia and disastrous retreat from Afghanistan tempted Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. And the president’s weakness in the face of Chinese provocations is tempting Xi Jinping to go for the jugular in Taiwan.

With so many Democrats ambivalent about American power or even America itself, it’s little wonder that some Americans have grown increasingly doubtful about our leaders and even the military itself, as they see it misused for left-wing social engineering and fanciful crusades far removed from our national interests.

We need a better strategy to reclaim the trust of our people, the respect of our allies, and the fear of our enemies.

That strategy ought to recall the wisdom of our Founders, who wrote the Constitution in part to “secure the blessings of liberty.” Those blessings, I would suggest, are safety, prosperity, and freedom. We must protect these blessings, especially from foreign domination.

But we can’t protect them by turning inward. One of my sergeants in the Army summed up America’s natural military strategy: “we don’t play home games.” Away games can be costly, in peace and war, but anyone who doubts this strategy should ask Israelis about the cost of playing only home games.

America defends forward to keep the awful destructive power of modern war far from our shores. We need beachheads and lodgments of freedom in the Old World to defend our way of life in the New World. We therefore need a dominant and focused military capable of projecting power anywhere.

And we need friends. It would be nice if all our friends shared our political and social sensibilities, as well as deep historical, cultural, and religious ties, as does Israel. But let’s not kid ourselves: the world is a dangerous place. We take our friends as we find them. Mubarak was a strong man. Qaddafi had a lot of American blood on his hands, but he had long since been scared straight. No one mistook them for the Little Sisters of the Poor. But they helped America defend our national interests. As did the Shah in Iran. And in each case, what came after them was far worse.

We should always respect the most fundamental distinction in world politics, which is the distinction between friends and enemies. A nation can do worse than heed Sulla’s timeless admonition: “no friend ever did me a favor, nor enemy an injury, that I have not repaid in full.”

We find our best friends in places like this blessed land, or Great Britain. But we also have vital friends in places like Riyadh, Amman, Abu Dhabi, and Cairo. And when we support our friends, not only do we protect our interests, but we also give them the confidence to undertake reforms, as Reagan did with the Philippines and South Korea.

Contrast our enemies: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba. These nations threaten our national interests, indeed our way of life. They’re also the world’s worst, most repressive regimes. That’s not a coincidence.

A globally dominant military, a strong network of friends, a clear-eyed view of who our enemies are and why—these things lay at the heart of our strategy. Let me close with a word about how we use them. Too often today, we hear voices posing abject appeasement or another supposed “forever war” as our only options in a crisis.

Of course, that’s a false choice. While military force should remain a last option, it must remain an option to resolve a crisis. As Reagan showed in Grenada and the Tanker Wars, the elder George Bush in Panama, and Donald Trump with Qassem Soleimani, the discriminate application of military force in the last instance doesn’t lead to “endless war”—it leads to victory and peace.

John Quincy Adams wisely said America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” He didn’t say America doesn’t destroy monsters. The world is full of monsters. We don’t need to go searching for them. But when they rear their ugly head and threaten our people and our vital national interests, we should indeed destroy them.

And if the monsters know we will destroy them if they threaten us, they’ll be more apt to stay out of our way in the first place and our nations will be safer from the beginning. And that is a clear-eyed strategy that is conservative, nationalist, and realist.

Thank you, God bless you, God bless Israel, and God bless the United States of America.