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Australia\u2019s newest interlocutor for strategic policy in the White House is Michael T. Flynn, the retired US Army lieutenant general who is expected to be Donald Trump\u2019s National Security Adviser. In his 2016 book, The Field of Fight<\/em>, co-authored with Michael Ledeen, Flynn calls for a resumption of US war on the ground in the Middle East to defeat \u2018radical Islam\u2019. Would Australia join such a war?<\/p>\n The authors see renewed war as an essential move to squash the global alliance that has come together to destroy America. That alliance includes, they say on page 76, not only Hezbollah, Islamic State and al-Qaeda, but also Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua. The authors suggest that Putin\u2019s government doesn\u2019t understand that it\u2019s aiding and abetting radical Islam. They say that the incoherence of Russia\u2019s counter-terrorist strategy helps jihadis spread radical Islam throughout the country and beyond.<\/p>\n The book argues against the view that peace is the normal condition of mankind. It says that the Powell doctrine, which holds that the US should only go to war if there\u2019s a domestic consensus in favour of it, is backwards. What counts, the authors say, is what the public thinks at the end of the war.<\/p>\n Their war plan is premised on the destruction of jihadi armies and killing or capturing their leaders. The authors contend that current US policy of targeted assassination over a protracted time, supported by intermittent military interventions, isn\u2019t helping. The only possible conclusion from the Flynn and Ledeen book is that US armies should return to the Middle East.<\/p>\n Those new policies would require a change in US diplomacy. The authors say the country needs a new set of 21st century alliances which \u2018will emerge naturally from the military and political campaign\u2019 of the new war.<\/p>\n As for those governments that \u2018support our enemies\u2019, the US strategy must be \u2018weakening them at a minimum, bringing them down wherever possible\u2019. The war won\u2019t be easy or short, and the country needs to mobilise as it did in the Cold War and in the Second World war against other messianic movements.<\/p>\n Just what that set of views might mean for Australia in practice is far from clear. It\u2019s hard to imagine that Flynn will have any influence among current senior leaders in the Pentagon or in a State Department led by a more sober-minded person, such as Mitt Romney. Flynn says himself that he has been a maverick most of his life. Both Flynn and his co-author have been branded as conspiracy theorists, with Ledeen arguing previously that Western European countries were in alliance with radical Islam to bring America down. Flynn\u2019s appointment as Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency was terminated by the Obama administration after two years\u00a0in the job.<\/p>\n It would be almost impossible for the US to resume ground force operations in the Middle East to destroy all jihadi forces, spread as they are across many countries, so the more extreme parts of the Flynn vision for a new war are likely to remain his fantasy. Australia won\u2019t be asked for new ground force contributions to the Middle East on any scale under a Trump administration. But Flynn has left open the door for a new Cold War against the governments that don\u2019t crack down hard on radical Islamists.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the worrying part. How will the new US administration define the adherents of \u2018radical Islam\u2019? Flynn has specifically named Pakistan as soft on the \u2018ideology\u2019. For such countries, Flynn advocates a hard line, while saying they shouldn\u2019t be punished twice, once by the extremists and then with a follow-up from the US. The book praises Singapore for insisting on secularism, and holds banning headscarves up as a positive move.<\/p>\n