At a time of war abroad and political violence at home, a new book called “Fighting Enemies Foreign and Domestic” couldn’t be more relevant.

Or could it? This slender volume just published by Encounter Books is all about the life and thought of Angelo Codevilla, a scholar of international relations who died four years ago at the age of 78.

The world has changed profoundly since 2021. Russia invaded Ukraine. Hamas perpetrated the Oct. 7 attacks against Israel. Donald Trump survived an assassin’s bullet and returned to the White House. And another assassin claimed the life of Charlie Kirk.

Can a book about a man who didn’t live to see all this be essential reading in 2025?

The answer is an emphatic “Yes” — because Angelo Codevilla was one of the finest strategic minds America has ever produced, and his lessons are more urgent than ever.

Take missile defense: Codevilla was a champion of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s, the effort to create space-based systems that could take out enemy intercontinental ballistic missiles before they could inflict a nuclear holocaust on America.

The end of the Cold War didn’t mean the end of the nuclear threat, however: far from it, with Russia and China still having thousands of warheads pointed at us, while other untrustworthy or outright hostile nations like Pakistan and North Korea joined the nuclear club, and Iran advanced toward acquiring the bomb, too.

Codevilla never stopped arguing for real missile defense and countermeasures against nuclear weapons. President Trump was listening — but the rest of Washington refused to hear the warning.

And so, writes Brian Kennedy, one of the contributors to this volume: “Despite the best efforts of Codevilla and President Reagan, the United States does not today have an effective national missile-defense system.”

What little defense we have is only intended “to stop a limited number of North Korean missiles aimed at the western United States. It cannot stop Russian or Chinese nuclear ballistic missiles. Nor can it stop a ship-launched ballistic missile from said countries or from Iran nor the myriad advanced missiles, drones, and hypersonic-reentry vehicles such countries can........

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