WHAT THEY SAY AND DO: RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AS A NATIONAL SECURITY LENS

Counterintuitive to the traditional national security expert, who still tends to focus only on hard power factors rather than soft issues like human rights, religious freedom can be newly envisioned as a comprehensive framework through which to analyze the ideational impulses and resulting policies of leaders and regimes that pose risks to US national security. By looking at (a) a country's political pronouncements, (b) how it treats its own people, (c) how it acts in its neighborhood, and (d) how it acts on the international stage regarding religious liberty, the US can achieve a thoughtful, additional lens for evaluating security concerns.