It says a lot about former secretary of state and presumed presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton that she’s a member of the Henry Kissinger Fan Club. Progressives who despised George W. Bush might want to examine any warm, fuzzy feelings they harbor for Clinton.

She has made no effort to hide her admiration for Kissinger and his geopolitical views. Now she lays it all out clearly in a Washington Post review of his latest book, World Order.

Clinton acknowledges differences with Kissinger, but apparently these do not keep her from saying that “his analysis … largely fits with the broad strategy behind the Obama administration’s effort over the past six years to build a global architecture of security and cooperation for the 21st century.”

Beware of politicians and courtiers who issue solemn declarations about building global architectures. To them the rest of us are mere “pieces upon a chess-board.” Security and cooperation are always the announced ends, yet the ostensible beneficiaries usually come to grief. Look where such poseurs have been most active: the Middle East, North Africa, Ukraine. As they say about lawyers, if we didn’t have so-called statesmen, we wouldn’t need them.

If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect some pseudonymous writer of having fun with irony in this review. Behold:

President Obama explained the overarching challenge we faced in his Nobel lecture in December 2009. After World War II, he said, “America led the world in constructing an architecture to keep the peace.…”

Keep the peace — if you don’t count the mass atrocity that was the Vietnam War, the U.S.-sponsored Israeli oppression of Palestinians, and various massacres carried out by U.S.-backed “leaders” in such places as Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), East Timor, Chile, and elsewhere.

One Henry Kissinger had a hand in all these crimes, by the way. Strangely, Clinton doesn’t mention them. (See Christopher Hitchens’s devastating two-part indictment here and here, later turned into The Trial of Henry Kissinger.)

America, at its best, is a problem-​solving nation.

Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya are only the latest examples of problems America solved during Madam Secretary’s tenure, building on the glorious successes of George W. Bush’s team. Henry the K is no doubt flattered by the homage.

Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state. He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels.

Now things make sense. That Hillary Clinton thought Kissinger — Henry Kissinger — a worthy advisor is something we should all know as 2016 looms.

What comes through clearly in this new book is a conviction that we, and President Obama, share: a belief in the indispensability of continued American leadership in service of a just and liberal order.

There really is no viable alternative. No other nation can bring together the necessary coalitions and provide the necessary capabilities to meet today’s complex global threats. But this leadership is not a birthright; it is a responsibility that must be assumed with determination and humility by each generation.

It takes chutzpah to write humility even remotely in connection with Kissinger. And if the U.S. empire is indispensable to justice and liberalism — and where are these, exactly? — we are in trouble. The record is not encouraging. Kissingerian “realism” creates global threats.

The things that make us who we are as a nation — our diverse and open society, our devotion to human rights and democratic values — give us a singular advantage in building a future in which the forces of freedom and cooperation prevail over those of division, dictatorship and destruction.

Devotion to human rights and democratic values — as shown in Egypt, where Clinton stuck by another friend, Hosni Mubarak, against a popular uprising. The woman has some friends!

“Any system of world order, to be sustainable, must be accepted as just — not only by leaders, but also by citizens,” he writes.

The suggestion that Kissinger cares what ordinary citizens anywhere think is ridiculous. What he cares about is states, which he puts in one of two categories: those that buckle under to the Indispensable Empire and those that do not.

Henry, er, Hillary in 2016? You might want to rethink that.

But is gun control opposed by only a minority of people? It’s not so clear. According to Gallup poll from late 2013 49% of people agree that the laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict. 13% support less strict laws. 37% support keeping things the same and 1% have no opinion. Contra Clinton the subject of gun control is practically a 50/50 split.

Clinton continued, “I was disappointed that the Congress did not pass universal background checks after the horrors of the shootings at Sandy Hook.”

While Americans are divided on gun control more generally, if we are talking about universal background checks, the statistics change dramatically. 79% favor universal background checks for gun buyers, including those purchasing weapons at gun shows and from private sellers, with 13% opposed.

But background checks have little to no effect on  criminals acquiring guns because most criminals acquire their guns through theft, black market transactions or personal acquaintances. A mere 1.7 percent obtain firearms from anyone (dealer or non-dealer) at a gun show or flea market.

It’s naive to believe more laws would have an effect on criminals. After all, by definition criminals rarely follow. Rather than preventing guns from getting into the hands of criminals, universal background checks simply terrorize law-abiding gun owners and potential gun owners. Furthermore, background checks have historically been used to disarm marginalized and oppressed groups, especially minorities.

The fact is that Hillary Clinton is not for gun control. She is for gun centralization. She wants to limit possession of guns to the government and people the government approves of. To enforce this policy of gun centralization, she is perfectly willing to resort to violence of her own.

After all, how do gun “control” supporters plan to prevent certain people from getting guns? Those laws will be enforced by police with their own guns.

The only minority terrorizing the majority is the government. Governments were responsible for more deaths than all private individuals combined in the 20^th century, with killing approximately 260,000,000 people. This is the type of organization Hillary wants to put in charge of who does or doesn’t get guns? A proper plan for reducing gun violence would be to take guns away from the government. But that doesn’t fly with the supporters of gun centralization, like Hillary.

Terrorism, as defined by Merriam-Webster, is the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal. Hillary obviously has a political goal in mind: Gun centralization. That is, keeping guns in the hands of the government and those the government deems worthy. Her means? Limiting who can or can’t own guns using the threat of police violence.

Gun control opponents are not terrorizing anyone. On the contrary, politicians who support gun control are the terrorists. And we cannot let a minority of people, and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people, hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.

When governments can’t trust each other to keep dirty secrets, they are likely to adjust their behavior. If they hesitate to conspire, then they will be less able to work together to impose the wills of political elites. If they restrict their own lines of communication, then they will be less effective at doing dirty deeds. If they restructure for efficiency, which will be extremely difficult for institutions laden with entrenched bureaucracy and cultures of privilege and rank, then they will probably be less of a burden on citizens and less profitable for political cronies.

If foreign governments don’t knuckle under to US power as easily, it means that it will be more difficult for the US to trade Guantanamo detainees for favors, shield CIA operatives from prosecution, and persuade foreign leaders to not publicly criticize US war policy — to name a few things revealed in the diplomatic cable releases.

WikiLeaks-type activity will affect the behavior of foreign governments even when they aren’t dealing with the US. The example WikiLeaks is making of the most powerful government in the world should make any leading politician uneasy. Once WikiLeaks and its emerging competitors strike other countries just as hard, the arrogance of governments will be shaken and anti-establishment movements be energized. If government cannot decisively win the information war against WikiLeaks, a culture of whistle-blowing may emerge as an effective check against government and corporate power.

WikiLeaks-type activity is bad for politicians, but good for honest folk. It decreases the power of elites, which gives individuals space to broaden their spheres of freedom. It helps make whistle-blowing safer and more effective, which reduces the risk of being required to check conscience or dignity at the door when entering the workplace. What the free world needs is not tighter control of information, but more leaks and more people disseminating leaks.