Ben Sasse is of that endangered breed: the principled and visionary Republican

 I'm gonna have to avail myself of the entirety of the Senator's Reagan Foundation speech, either in transcript or video form. The excerpts from it that I'm coming across are like drops of spring water on a parched landscape.

About the current state of both of post-America's political parties, he says this:

Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., lit into the “weirdos” that he said are tearing the United States apart, in a fiery speech at the Reagan Foundation that connected the hyperbolic political debates of the last few years with the global threats facing the nation.

The Nebraska Republican ripped into “performance artists” on the far left and far right who have dominated politics for close to a decade, saying they’re more focused on getting likes and retweets for themselves on social media than on preserving the United States’ standing as a global superpower amid new threats from adversaries like China.

“This is a government of the weirdos, by the weirdos and for the weirdos,” Sasse said Thursday night in California. “Politicians who spend their days shouting in Congress so they can spend their nights shouting on cable, are peddling crack — mostly to the already addicted, but also with glittery hopes of finding a new angry octogenarian out there.”

He says that in 2016, both parties appealed to the post-American public's inclination to find reasons to see itself as a bunch of victims:

[Sasse said] that in 2016, American voters were presented with two candidates whose "fundamental diagnosis was really the same" and that both sought to victimize voters.

"The system's rigged, you're getting screwed, you're a victim, the country's going down the tubes," Sasse said mockingly. "You're victims."

And he offered a pretty bold foreign-policy vision:

Sasse later laid out a list of specific policies to counter China, including a trillion-dollar U.S. defense budget and a “NATO for the Pacific”: 

• Let’s pass a trillion-dollar defense budget, but let’s radically cut the share that goes to legacy systems and platforms that employ an army of lobbyists. In a new era of cyber and asymmetric war, let’s make sure we’re getting maximum lethal capacity for every taxpayer dollar spent – by overhauling procurement policies that aren’t just too expensive but primarily way, way too slow.

• Let’s build a “NATO for the Pacific.” We need allies to get back on the offensive against the CCP, and those allies need US leadership. NATO in Europe has been the greatest treaty organization in history. It held the line against the Soviets, and it’s now holding the line against bloody Putin. But as Chairman Xi looks to expand his sphere of influence, we need a new military alliance centered far out into the Pacific. This is our main foreign policy work.

• Let’s streamline our intel agencies so we can win a shadow war with the Chinese Communist Party.

• Let’s arm the Taiwanese military to the teeth. Let’s amend the Taiwan Relations Act directly to make our security guarantee explicit. No more strategic ambiguity.

• Let’s pair military partnerships with economic partnerships and end the nonsense anti-trade policies of the last two administrations. Pacific NATO should be a free-trade zone, too. Trade is a win-win because when Americans compete, we win.

If the GOP has a future, it will be led by folks like this, not the current crop of sycophants, nuts and cowards steering its course.