Let’s just come right out and say it: Mike Pompeo would make a great president.

Think about it: He’s whip-smart, tough as nails, uber-capable, fiercely patriotic, and a natural-born leader. Yep, he’d make a helluva president. Maybe this cycle, maybe next cycle, maybe next-next cycle, but our nation will have missed an opportunity if Mike Pompeo doesn’t one day put his left hand on the Bible, raise his right hand, and take the Oath of Office.

Pompeo’s excellence didn’t just come to us. Here’s what we wrote a little more than two years ago, near the end of Donald Trump’s term in office:

Attorney General William Barr leaves office on Wednesday. And when he does, it’s possible that President Donald Trump will bring in a replacement who arrests the entire Biden Crime Family and overturns the results of the November 3 election. It’s possible. Not likely, but possible. And barring that, we already know who the president’s best hire was: Michael Richard Pompeo.

We in our humble shop don’t agree on everything — far from it. But we agree on this.

We think Donald Trump, if he were asked, would agree as well. Why? Because he and his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, once suggested that in addition to Pompeo’s duties as secretary of state, he could also take on the duties of secretary of defense — at the same time. It seems like a crazy idea, but both Trump and his right-hand man had such confidence in Pompeo’s leadership abilities that they believed he could be, at the same time, our nation’s chief diplomat and the CEO of our military. That’s high praise.

We mention all this because Pompeo has a new book out, released just today: Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love. In it he talks about how, as the only four-year national security member of Trump’s cabinet, he worked to impose a remarkably successful “America First” foreign policy. This includes wrecking ISIS; keeping Russia, Iran, and North Korea in check; forcing our NATO allies off the dole; pushing for religious liberty around the globe; undoing the Obama administration’s two worst blunders, the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuke deal; and, most remarkably, moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem while also brokering the Abraham Accords — the normalization of relations between the Jewish state and several of its Arab neighbors.

In the book, Pompeo talks about his commitment to our founding principles and his own Christian faith, and how he led “a much-needed generational transformation of America’s relationship with China.” And it’s this topic — China — that really gets Pompeo going, because he rightly considers the Communist Chinese to be an existential threat to our nation and our way of life.

Toward the end of a recent podcast with Ben Domenech, Pompeo was asked what he thought our nation’s next administration needs to do to confront the menace of China:

I’ll do it in one word: reciprocity. If the Chinese can buy land near our military facilities, we should be able to buy land near their military facilities. … If they can use propaganda on the telephones of our children, we should be able to put our propaganda on the phones of their children. … The theory of the case is, we’ve let them have one set of rules, and we’ve bent the knee and kowtowed to them and had an entirely different set of rules, and that can’t continue.

So, think “reciprocity” across economic, military, commercial, education, research, diplomacy — if you get all of those things reciprocal, we’ll be in a pretty darn good place. It’ll be a dog fight. It will not be linear. It will not be easy. There will be real costs. But in the end, we will crush the Chinese Communist Party just as we did the Soviets.

Pompeo, 59, graduated first in his class at West Point in 1986. Not second, not 10th, not 76th out of 85, like Joe Biden at Syracuse Law School. First out of 973 cadets. Then he served as a tank platoon leader in Germany during the Cold War, then went to Harvard Law School and edited the Law Review, then he started an aerospace company with three West Point classmates in Witchita, then he ran for Congress, then he served as CIA director, and then he served as secretary of state. Talk about a résumé.

As for whether he’ll run in 2024, Pompeo says that he and his wife have yet to make the decision. “But,” he stresses, “that decision won’t turn on who decides to get in the race.”

Mike Pompeo doesn’t have the raw appeal, the charisma, and the showmanship of Donald Trump. Nor is he able to promote himself through his work as the governor of a hugely influential state like Florida’s Ron DeSantis.

But Mike Pompeo is a serious man and a serious American Patriot.