In his latest book, “The Last Best Hope,” political risk analyst John Hulsman offers a succinct, understandable guide to uniting the disparate wings of conservatism behind a realist foreign policy. While pitched at the interested layman rather than foreign policy nerds, Hulsman’s vignettes might even teach the most savvy readers a new thing or two. Such as, “After the Jay Treaty vote (1794), Washington never spoke to Jefferson or Madison again.” A healthy reminder, lest we think our own times and leaders are the most polarized in American history.

Before I describe the book further, a disclosure: John is one of my oldest friends, as well as a former fellow at The Heritage Foundation, where I work.

Conservatives are unable to unite in the relentless way that the Left doesthese days in Congress, but parsing them into specific tribes is a pointless exercise. Hulsman simplifies this by dividing them into Jeffersonians and Jacksonians. Roughly speaking, the former are the more traditional, corporate, intellectual types, and the latter are lower information, populist, gut-instinct conservatives. As he pithily puts it, “Jeffersonians like Johnny Cash; Jacksonians are Johnny Cash.” What should unite them is patriotism, suspicion of globalism, and, in foreign policy—realism.

From Hulsman’s first book in 2006, “Ethical Realism,” to his biography of Lawrence of Arabia to his amusing short book “The Godfather Doctrine,” realism and “prudence as a policy-making virtue above all others” is a thread running through his work. The nine “precepts of American realism” Hulsman cites in “The Last Best Hope” are each provided with a parable and a great American who embodied it.

For his first precept, that “alliances should be entered into when they advance specific and primary American interests,” Hulsman starts with our first president, George Washington. So popular that he could have been the first king of the United States, Washington left office deliberately after two terms, setting an example that endured until Franklin Roosevelt in 1940.

Washington used his unique national eminence and enormous personal capital to convince Congress—barely—to pass the wildly unpopular Jay Treaty with the British. The treaty certainly favored Britain in the short term, but it also created the scope for the westward expansion of the United States and allowed our commerce to prosper under the British naval umbrella.

Washington saw that the fledgling U.S. must stay out of encumbering foreign alliances and “remain neutral in the face of Europe’s great revolutionary wars” rather than siding with France as Thomas Jefferson and others advocated. Washington’s farewell address warned, in Hulsman’s words, that “America’s national identity must come to supplant sectional attachments, law and order must be strictly maintained, and something must be done about the evils of political parties.” Seeing the state of our union today, this seems very prescient.

To illustrate the maxim “no more stupid wars,”........

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