Yet Gordon Brown regularly asserts that the war in Afghanistan is "vital" to British security.
The principle of "subsidiarity" is regularly asserted as a means of restoring authority to the UK's supreme court and promoting its ability on its own to interpret articles from the European convention on human rights.
The president of the Privy Council became a kind of prime minister; although holders of this office did not hesitate to show independence of Madrid in order to protect their interests, they remained supporters of absolutism, regularly asserting the authority of the royal government at the expense of regional and local rights.
Wary of antagonising Moscow's fears of western "encirclement" and feeding its well-oiled propaganda effort, which regularly asserts that Nato agreed at the end of the cold war not to station forces in the former Warsaw Pact countries, Nato has declined to establish permanent bases in the east.
Just to be clear, I am not one of those people whom Mr. Gunderson regularly asserts are "ideologically opposed" to your sector.
All of this happened, in other words, despite strong opposition and powerful pressure from a Washington eager to contain China and regularly asserting its desire to "pivot" militarily to Asia to do so.
The Chinese media regularly asserts that the government's tight reign on speech -- even sometimes for those proclaiming nationalist sentiments -- is a way of protecting its people from themselves.
It doesn't take much trawling of UKIP-ish forums to start coming up with handfuls of names from a hundred years ago, all of whose sole aim, it is regularly asserted, was to hoodwink the peoples of Europe into bowing before the supra-national metallic jaws of the EU beastie.
He declined to say how much money he regularly contributed, asserting, "It's not the amount, it's the principle".
The willingness to assert regularly such a doctrine would require a combination of moral clarity, grit and the ultimate ability to project military power that few nations within the European Union, our indispensable ally, appear likely to possess for the foreseeable future.
