Cato’s Richard Rahn, WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan, and our daughter Becky Smith, president of Young Research & Publishing.

In this incoherent feature in the WSJ, it’s not hard to come away with a fuzzy view of Senator Paul’s foreign policy position.

This, of course, may have been the intent for a publication deeply in bed with the military/industrial complex. On the other hand, the intent simply may have been to update readers on the most current/revised foreign policy thinking of Rand Paul.

 The Cato Institute’s Chris Preble offers a template that Rand Paul and a majority of Americans may feel comfortable embracing. Mr. Preble writes in The Power Problem:

What do we truly need in terms of military capacity? I contend that we need enough to ensure our peace and national security. We must be able to deter any state foolish enough to threaten the American homeland. … As for the threat poised by terrorist groups and other non-state actors, 280 modern warships, 8,000 military aircraft, 30,000 tanks and armored personnel carriers, and more than 1.4 million men and woman at arms did not deter nineteen angry young men from flying airplanes into buildings on 9/11; twice or three times the number of ships, planes, and tanks would have been equally irrelevant. If anything, our reliance on massive military force often has the effect of increasing the terrorist threat. If U.S. counterterrorism efforts rely on conventional Army and Marine Corps units stationed abroad—especially in predominantly Muslim countries—al Qaeda and other violent groups will feed on the anger and resentment generated by this presence to grow their ranks.

The wisest choice, therefore, is to adopt policies that will allow us to extricate ourselves from regional squabbles, while maintaining the ability to prevent a genuine threat to the United States.

Mr. Preble wraps up: “Some military is necessary: too much is a problem.”

In the WSJ, Bret Stephens writes that, even at an elementary level, President Obama seems not to know what he is talking about. For example, when asked by NYT columnist Thomas Friedman about his views on the new and growing global disorder, Mr. Obama’s comments were lacking any support from a deeper foundation of knowledge. As Mr. Stephens points out, every administration tries to put a spin on things when events go awry, but what stands Mr. Obama apart from other presidencies is his “combination of Ideological rigidity and fathomless ignorance.” Read more here.

Pat Buchanan explains the obvious.

Is Burger King an Economic Patriot?
“Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.”

Jefferson’s brutal verdict comes to mind in the fierce debate over inversions, those decisions by U.S. companies to buy foreign firms to move their headquarters abroad and renounce their U.S. citizenship — to evade the U.S. corporate tax rate of 35 percent.

U.S. executives who engineer these inversions are undeniably acting in the best interests of their shareholders and companies.

But are they also lacking in economic patriotism? Are they also guilty of economic treason against the nation that nurtured them?

Are they, in the phrase tossed out by Barack Obama, “corporate deserters”? Adds our president, “I don’t care if it’s legal, it’s wrong.”

But are inversions wrong? Or are these relocations abroad neither more nor less moral than Boeing’s decision to save hundreds of millions in labor costs by shifting 1,300 engineering jobs out of Seattle and Southern California to St. Louis, Charleston and Huntsville?

Is it morally permissible to leave your home state or region for economic reasons — as the textile mills left New England for the South — but unpatriotic to leave the land of your birth?

If so, was it not unpatriotic for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Fortune 500 to lobby for NAFTA and GATT so companies could shutter their factories here, lay off their U.S. workers, and move their production to Mexico and Asia?

Was it not unpatriotic of Congress and Presidents Clinton and Bush to facilitate the departure of tens of thousands of plants and millions of manufacturing jobs?

Where were the economic patriots then?

What has concentrated the mind here is the decision by Burger King, backed by shareholder Warren Buffett, to buy Tim Hortons in Canada. Burger King will move its headquarters to Canada, declare itself a Canadian company, and begin paying the Canadian corporate tax rate of 26 percent.

Ireland, with its 12.5 percent corporate income tax has proven a particularly attractive residence for companies shopping for lower tax rates. Before this year, Apple had used Ireland as a tax haven to shelter $40 billion in revenue.

Britain, too, has proven a magnet. U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer made a $118 billion bid this year for AstraZeneca so it could move its tax domicile there, but was rebuffed by the target company.

Forty-nine U.S. companies have completed tax inversions. Twenty more are looking at them. The prospect that a lame duck Congress may take up legislation to end the practice and stanch the bleeding of tax revenue from the U.S. Treasury could cause a stampede.

Treasury is talking of a December law, made retroactive back to May, to strip the tax benefits from inversions. The prospect that the loophole may disappear could accelerate corporate flight out of the high-tax USA.

Some $2.1 trillion in corporate profits, subject to U.S. taxation, is already being held abroad, parked, and not repatriated, lest the holders get hit with the U.S. tax rate. Some U.S. companies are borrowing these funds from abroad and deducting the interest payments.

At bottom, the inversions issue is not only about corporate tax rates and competitiveness, but also about loyalties in conflict.

Actor Gerard Depardieu renounced his French citizenship rather than pay the 75 percent income tax rate imposed by the Socialist regime of Francois Hollande. Though denounced, was Depardieu being disloyal to France, or to the Hollande regime and its socialist ideology?

Can one love one’s country and hate its government?

In 1776, that was surely true of Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton and Washington. And their rebellion had something to do with taxation.

Are New York City cops and civil servants who retire and take their pensions to Florida being disloyal to the Empire State because they want to stop paying the 12 percent state-local income tax bite?

When states like Texas eliminate corporate income taxes, are they engaged in beggar-thy-neighbor politics against fellow states of the Union?

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. But is Ireland less civilized than America because her corporate tax rate is one-third of ours?

Judge Learned Hand had another take:

“There is nothing sinister in so arranging one’s affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant.”

To our transnationalists, Judge Hand got it right.

But whether one is an economic patriot or a libertarian, to keep the U.S. corporate tax rate at the highest level in a global economy of ferociously competitive nations would appear to reflect the thinking of an incorrigibly stupid and stubborn government.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Read more here.

This week President Obama addressed world leaders at the United Nations for the Climate Summit 2014. Lucky New Yorkers. As though it’s not enough that Obama and other world leaders caused gridlock in NYC, climate activists organized what they hoped was “the largest climate march in history” and left, in the height of hypocrisy, a more-than-sizable carbon footprint. According to one news report, it was shocking to see the “piles of garbage strewn across the marching route.”

But before following Mr. Obama’s siren song “to galvanize and catalyze climate action,” the Cato Institute’s Paul “Chip” Knappenberger lays out some inconvenient truths: all those computerized climate models that predicted, large, accelerating warming were wrong. That’s right, wrong.

For environmentalists scaremongers, global warming is not going as planned. The hockey stick is not real. Mr. Knappenberger points out, “The climate appears less sensitive to our emissions of greenhouse gases than expected. The urgency to grant the government the authority to limit energy choice is not justified.”

Furthermore, Mr. Obama often brags of his progress in restricting greenhouse gas emissions. As Mr. Knappenberger argues, “The president’s touted ‘successes’ in restricting greenhouse gas emissions have come through Environmental Protection Agency regulations and executive orders, actions that have bypassed our representatives in Congress. This shows he is largely acting on his desires, rather than those of Americans at large.”

Read from Chip Knappenberger why climate models are unreliable and why Mr. Obama’s foundation for climate alarm (and a carbon tax) is unfounded.

Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, has led seminars on Islam for the FBI, the United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, the Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the U.S. Intelligence community.

Now in Arab Winter Comes to America, Mr. Spencer tells readers that America must end Muslim immigration into the United States as a simple matter of national security. Spencer writes that his proposal “will be condemned as ‘racist,’ but the harsh reality is that Muslims who are peaceful cannot be readily distinguished from Islamist jihadists. Can America really afford the national security risk of importing whole Muslim communities from Iraq and Somalia, as is happening now, without trying to screen out potential jihadists?”

I have written about Securing the City, Inside America’s Best Counterinsurgency Force—The NYPD. In it, author Christopher Dickey writes, “In the six years since 9/11, the threat to the West that had taken shape was not from abroad but from within, and most of the plotters were what the report called ‘unremarkable’ people with unremarkable jobs and educations.”

Robert Spencer believes that America now has a new terror war at home. A good reading of Mr. Dickey’s Securing the City will convince readers that if anything Mr. Spencer is underplaying the risk to America. And as Debbie and I have found out to our great chagrin, the risk is amplified in Europe, especially in the Scandinavian countries, England and France.

Spencer explains: (1) The Obama administration scrubbed vital, accurate information about Islamic Jihad from its counterterrorism training materials to appease Muslim pressure groups. (2) A secret document seized from the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States—a group the Obama administration has zealously befriended—reveals the organization’s radical Islamic goals (including the imposition of sharia law in America).

America’s borders must be sealed, as Pat Buchanan clarifies. It’s a strategy that must be #1 on the list for politicians running for the House and Senate this fall. It is up to the voters to make every candidate take a pledge against the clear reality that our open borders policy presents to all Americans.

AP flashes a clear warming to the West:

AP highlights that the U.N. Security Council does not address what to do about radicals who stay at home but espouse the Islamic State group’s goals. Securing the City by Christopher Dickey lays out for Americans exactly what should be done. Every politician should be demanding that we close our borders to Muslim immigration, especially from the Middle East and North Africa, as well as immediately begin to cancel visas for students from the radical Muslim world.  As Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch writes Arab Winter Comes to America . What are our elites in Washington doing to safeguard America?

Nations are honing mechanisms to monitor Westerners who head to Syria and Iraq to fight in the jihad, the better to catch them when they return home with deadly skills. But how do you track someone who reads the Islamic State group’s call in a newspaper or on a mainstream website, and then carries out a spontaneous attack?

Experts in terrorism agreed that the options to counter-act the call on all Muslims to kill are virtually nil, beyond bolstering security forces’ visibility — thus allowing them to act quickly if need be.

“We are not waging a war between east and west, or Christianity and Islam,” French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Tuesday. The French government says what it calls the “butchers” of the Islamic State group don’t represent Islam.

But Valls acknowledged that France is facing an unprecedented challenge from “the enemy within.”

Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA bin Laden unit, spent his career developing strategies to keep America safe. Dr. Scheuer outlines the deepening hole Barack Obama is digging for Americans both at home and abroad.

The recklessly lawless Barack Obama has again violated the Constitution by attacking Syria without congressional approval. He also has created a coalition of Arab tyrannies that will appear to Sunni Muslims as a clear U.S. effort to insure the stability of the Sunni tyrants who oppress them, as well as to protect the hated Shia and Alawite dictators who rule Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

The Islamist enemy’s threat at the moment stems largely from the refusal of America’s bipartisan elite to control the nations borders and its willingness to tolerate the entry of enormous numbers of illegal aliens about whose location and intentions we are ignorant.

Scheuer wraps up: “NB: If another major attack occurs in the United States, it should provoke not only the eradication of the enemy and its supporters, but also something akin to drumhead courts-martial for politicians who have served in the national government since 9/11 and opposed border control.”