The secret of national security policy is asking and answering “why” before moving to “how.” The 600 soldiers in Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” were pointlessly slaughtered in the Crimean War by mindlessly obeying a blunder: “Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die/Into the valley of Death/Rode the six hundred.”

French General Pierre Bosquet said of the doomed charge, “It is magnificent, but it is not war, it is madness.”

H.R. McMaster served as former President Donald Trump’s national security adviser for 13 months. But he neither asked nor answered why the national security of the United States is better served by projecting military force globally at staggering expense on fool’s errands than by adherence to President George Washington’s farewell address, Secretary of State John Qunicy Adams’ warning against racing abroad in search of monsters to destroy, and reliance on invincible self-defense.

In “At War with Ourselves,” McMaster chronicles his turbulent tenure as national security adviser. The book’s narration of the major issues he addressed postulates as a self-evident truth that the United States would be ultimately attacked and its economy ravaged if we neglected preemptively to hammer China, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Iran, the Houthis, Hamas, Venezuela or other adversaries yet to be conceived.

A creature of the American Empire, McMaster instinctively inflates threats manifold to justify America’s need for global domination to thrive or survive and his own job. He is oblivious to the century in which the United States grew from a tiny acorn to a mighty oak by resisting embroilments in foreign conflicts and relying on example rather than force to influence affairs abroad. We then jettisoned our republic for an empire eager to smash hornet’s nests abroad to spur sting attacks as pretexts for war. McMaster also neglects that America’s greatest military asset is the loyalty of its people willing to risk and give that last full measure of devotion for the survival and prosperity of the country.

If all that mattered was weapons, money and manpower, Israel would have lost its 1948 war of independence and North Vietnam would have succumbed to America’s vastly superior weaponry. Between 1965 and 1975, the United States and its allies dropped 7.5 million tons of bombs in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, twice the amount dropped in Europe and Asia in World War II.

Citizen loyalty is cultivated by making liberty the North Star of the nation, the opportunity to march to your own drummer unfearful of domestic predation or foreign aggression secured by separation of powers — a structural bill of rights to arrest majoritarian tyranny. The right to be left alone is the most cherished right among civilized people.

The greatest danger to the United States today does not come from the usual suspects — China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, etc. — but from our own government. Among other things, it engages in warrantless, Orwellian surveillance of the “not-yet-guilty,” i.e., the entire population. It empowers the president to play prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner to kill any person on the planet based on secret, unsubstantiated suspicion that the corpse might have become a national security danger. It has accumulated an unsustainable national debt that has soared past $35 trillion with annual carrying costs that eclipse the Pentagon’s budget. Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen told CNN as long ago as 2010, “The most significant threat to our national security is our debt.”

The Code of Federal Regulations exceeds 200,000 pages. With so many inscrutable technical laws on the books, the government no longer discovers a crime and searches for the culprit but picks out obnoxious critics and scours the criminal code to pin offenses on them. If there are better ways of alienating a citizenry, they do not readily come to mind.

The United States is the safest nation in history. There is zero chance that we will be invaded by a foreign country. The chance of an American dying from an international terrorist attack is less than dying from a falling vending machine. Our aim for world domination is as stupid as Napoleon’s march on Moscow and portends the same disastrous ending.

What Abraham Lincoln related in 1838 is even more true today:

“By what means shall we fortify against [danger]? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years… If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

Bruce Fein (X: @brucefeinesq; www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com) was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.”