Now that President Obama has put boots on the ground into Syria, the question is: What’s the strategy? We know the president’s strategy on domestic policy; he wants to expand government-by-experts to the utter limit. And he wants to keep today’s hyphenated Americans by dividing them from “typical Americans” using Frankfurt School and Alinsky techniques to keep them hived off in identity silos. But what is the famed Lightworker’s strategy for the Middle East?

Even if the president did have a strategy in the Middle East he couldn’t tell us about it because his base believes in Peace and Diplomacy. He cannot turn around and tell ruling-class liberals, as Greg Jaffe at the Washington Post does, that “after vowing to end two wars, [he] may leave three behind.”

Anyway, according to Richard Fernandez, U.S. special forces have been in northern Iraq for months. So what is our national strategy?

If you think this is déjà vu all over again you are right. President Carter started out his administration sneering at our “inordinate fear of Communism.” But when the Soviets taught him a lesson in Afghanistan, he had to reverse national defense strategy. It ended up, ten years later, with President Reagan’s victory in the Cold War.

When you keep getting surprised by events, and eventually change your defense strategy in mid-administration, you are telling us that your original strategy was clueless.

That’s why I want a president with a proper strategic vision -- as opposed to a clueless lefty fantasy of Peace and Diplomacy.

What do we mean when we yearn for strategic vision in a President of the United States? I’d say we mean three things.

First, the president needs to have a workable model of the “way the world works” in his mind. The problem with our liberal friends is that they don’t. Their idea of Peace and Diplomacy in foreign policy is a fantasy; their domestic blue model of government by experts is belied by 50 year old settled science.

Second, he needs to have a certain amount of native cunning. Bill Clinton has it; Hillary doesn’t. Obama -- or his people -- seemed to have it for the community organizer stuff; but not for foreign policy. Ted Cruz seems to have it; Jeb Bush doesn’t. If you have a solid worldview and some native cunning you can “see around corners” and think a couple of moves ahead. We need that in a president.

Third, he must be a man of action. He needs to have the courage to act, to inspire others to follow him, and deal with the inevitable fact that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Needless to say he, or she, must not lose his head when the New York Times and the mainstream media are losing theirs.

That’s why we have long U.S. presidential campaigns. It is necessary to weed out the men that don’t have a strategic vision about how the world works, that can’t see around corners, and that can’t lead a shoebox. And that doesn’t have the stamina to go the distance.

Now look at the Democrats. Their worldview is a fantasy. Their idea of cunning is calling their opponents racists, sexists, and homophobes, and their idea of leadership is to betray their men on the ground in Benghazi and then lie about it.

A Republican president has to persuade. He has to start his term with a battle plan to take it to the ruling class and appeal over their heads to the typical American. He has to befuddle the opposing liberal scrum of politicians, pundits, and “activists,” and leave them wondering how he, the Great Communicator that everybody knew was an amiable dunce, was able to do it.

If today’s conservatives and Republicans are fit to be tied it may be because the Republican leaders of the last decade have not really tried to do this. They have looked at the tea leaves and decided that now is not the time for bold conservative action. They have connived and conspired to keep the movement people out of the loop. And we just aren’t going to take it any more.

So I am looking at the Republican candidates to see which of them really has a strategic vision, with the smarts and a ground game to make things happen, and then deploy their leadership skills to persuade the American people that the Democratic Party is the party of the rich, the Democratic Party is the party of the greedy bankers, the Democratic Party is the party of the special interests. It shouldn’t be that hard, because it’s true.

Really, the GOP candidates ought to be able to eat the Hillary, the MSM and their shallow ruling-class conceits for lunch. And then grill up a real strategic vision for dinner.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.