Posted on 10/30/2018 6:52:41 AM PDT by Jack Black
y old friend Ronald Radosh, writing in the Daily Beast about President Trumps recent United Nations speech, notes, there was a critical word tucked into Donald Trumps U.N. speech . . . that word is sovereignty and we should all understand what the president means when he invokes it.
I agree, let us understand what he means.
What is sovereignty? I wrote a 450-page book on the subject (Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or be Ruled by Others?) but in the end it all comes down to two words: who decides? Who decides a nations tax policy, foreign policy, trade policy, immigration policy? Will it be the people in the nation themselves or supranational global institutions?
A year ago, President Trump told the U.N. General Assembly, In America the people govern, the people rule, and the people are sovereign. Abraham Lincoln defined sovereignty as a political authority without a political superior. American leaders who have valued our own sovereignty have also valued the sovereignty of our friends and allies. Thus, Ronald Reagan in his inaugural address declared:
To those neighbors and allies who share our freedom. . . . We will match loyalty with loyalty. We will strive for mutually beneficial relations. We will not use our friendship to impose on their sovereignty, for our own sovereignty is not for sale.
Like Lincoln and Reagan, Trump defends sovereigntythat is, independent self-governmentas a positive principle. Radosh tells us that Trumps version of sovereignty might sound very nice, but it has darker consequences. It is the promotion of isolationism and nationalism. Let us take these two points one at a time.
Old-School Internationalism
Far from any hint of isolationism, Trumps 2018 U.N. speech literally bristled with a robust internationalism. In paragraph after paragraph, the president cited current examples of, and future proposals for, international cooperation. He praised President Ban Ki-moon and heralded the successful completion of a brand new trade deal with South Korea. He gave a special thanks to Japanese President Shinzo Abe of Japan, as well as South Koreas Ban for facilitating the difficult negotiations with North Korea. While also thanking Chinas President Xi Jinping for assisting in this process, Trump did not hesitate to condemn dishonest Chinese trade practices. The president lauded Jordan and Egypt and declared that the United States would work with the Gulf Cooperation Council to advance prosperity, stability, and security in the Middle East.
He congratulated India, a free society of over a billion people, successfully lifting countless millions out of poverty; the Polish people for supporting the construction of a Baltic pipeline and standing up for their independence, their security, and their sovereignty; and Israel celebrating its 70th anniversary as a thriving democracy in the Holy Land.
As American statesmen from Alexander Hamilton through Henry Clay, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and Reagan have done, he has called for fair and reciprocal trade policies with other nations (emphasis on the reciprocal). While, at the same time, like his patriotic predecessors, he is willing to use tariffs when it is in the interests of American workers, the American middle class, and our manufacturing base, to do so.
What we are seeing in Trumps policy is not isolationism, but classical internationalism. The prefix inter in the compound term inter-nationalism signifies relations between nations. As anyone familiar with U.N. documents or the writings of international relations professors, or the analysts at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) would be well awareand as Radosh should knowthe concept of globalism differs from internationalism. Globalism implies not traditional internationalism, but a transnational or supranational dimension beyond or above the nation-state.
This is certainly the case with the International Criminal Court (ICC) which in its enabling Rome Statute asserts authority over nation-states (including democratic ones) that have not consented to the authority of this global court.
Radosh writes, For this reason (loss of American sovereignty) he [Trump] and John Bolton favor pulling the United States out the International Criminal Court, which Trump says, claims near universal jurisdiction over the citizens of every country. Radosh would be more credible if he bothered to get his facts right, by say, typing in a simple Google search of International Criminal Court and looking at its membership list. It takes about a minute. Ron, the United States cannot pull out of the ICC because we have never been in it. The Senate never ratified the Rome Statute.
What John Bolton announced last month was that the Trump administration was no longer going to assist the ICC (by providing intelligence, documents, etc.) as the Bush and Obama administrations have done in the past. The reason for this change in foreign policy is that the ICC Prosecutor for the first time is proposing to investigate American soldiers and officials for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan. Interestingly, when she was secretary of state, Radoshs preferred 2016 presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, told an audience in Nairobi that it was a great regret that the United States was not a member of the International Criminal Court.
Noble Nationalism
Let us now take up the issue of nationalism. Here, it depends upon what one means by nationalism. During the 20th century, statesmen as disparate as Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, David Ben Gurion, Charles de Gaulle, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher were called nationalists and they clearly were democratic nationalists, which is often used interchangeably with the concept of patriotism. Hence, in contemporary world politics, Benjamin Netanyahu is considered a democratic nationalist and a quintessential Israeli patriot.
It appears that what has triggered Radosh is Trumps praise for the conservative government in Poland, which is taking seriously its election campaign promises to reform a corrupt judiciary. Radosh repeats the false progressive-liberal narrative that Poland is becoming authoritarian and moving away from democracy. He notes the EU sued Poland for steps it has taken to undermine an independent judiciary.
So, what is going on in Poland? The conservative Law and Justice government has inherited a corrupt judicial system that was established in 1989 in roundtable talks between the reformed Communists and the anti-Communist Solidarity movement. Ultimately, the former Communists proved to be better negotiators.
Writing in National Review Online, Michael Brendan Dougherty described the unfortunate results of the roundtable negotiations. For decades, the Polish judiciary was run like a medieval guild, with judges nominating their own successors. On occasion, the sons of existing judges would get preferential treatment over qualified law professors. Judges protected one another from lawsuits and pay freezes. Further, the judiciary influenced by post-Communist elites repeatedly blocked transparency initiatives that would have revealed more perpetrators and collaborators of the crimes of the Communist-era dictatorship.
The Law and Justice government, whose leadership was formed by the most uncompromising anti-Communist elements in the Solidarity movement, is attempting to democratize the judiciary. In the final analysis, their judicial reforms will mean that democratically elected officials (rather than the sitting judges themselves) will play a role in the appointment of new judges. After all, in most Western democraciesincluding the United States and Germanydemocratically elected officials participate in the process of choosing judges, otherwise one would have an unaccountable and undemocratic judicial oligarchy.
Radosh writes that Trump in his U.N. address did not mention Hungary, but its likely [Stephen] Miller had Victor Orban and his Fidesz Party in mind when the president declared that each sovereign nation should concentrate on upholding national borders, destroying criminal gangs, and set[ting] its own immigration policy in accordance with its national interests. Radosh then tells us that [w]hat Trump means is all nations should echo his immigration policy.
What is Radoshs point? That it is somehow problematic for sovereign nations to uphold their borders, destroy transnational criminal gangs, and establish immigration policy on the basis of national interests because this is what Trump recommends? The implication is clear, if Trump is for it, it must be prima facie bad, no matter what the merits of the policy.
Democratic Sovereignty Rightly Understood In point of fact, the presidents remarks on sovereignty, borders, and immigration are on an even higher plain than simple public policy. They are directly related to the core principle of American constitutional democracygovernment by consent of the governedthe right of a free people to rule themselves.
Alexander Hamilton expressed this principle of democratic sovereignty succinctly in Federalist 1, when he declared the purpose of the American experiment in self-government was to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend . . . on accident and force.
Illegal mass migration in the United States and Europe brings into clear focus the crucial choice that Hamilton presented at Americas birth. Are policies decided by reflection and choice or by accident and force? Clearly, in the case of illegal immigration, We the people are not making policy based upon reflection and choice, but, as Hamilton feared might happen, immigration policy is being made for us by accident and in some cases (with MS-13) by force.
Most importantly, in direct contradiction to the core principle of our democratic republic government by consent of the governed, de-facto migration policy is being made without (and essentially against) the consent of the citizens of this country.
What President Trump did in his second U.N. speech was to take the Founders concept of independent self-government and articulate a universal principle of democratic sovereignty. Further, he correctly emphasized that Sovereign and independent nations are the only vehicle where freedom has ever survived, [and] democracy has ever endured. Put otherwise, constitutional democracy and individual freedom do not exist (and are not militarily protected) within transnational and global institutions but only in sovereign nation-states and in alliances of sovereign states (NATO rather than the EU).
Returning to Self-Rule
Let us return to the two most important words in world politics: who decides? Who decides a nations immigration policy? The people in the host nation? A transnational organization like the U.N. or EU? Or the migrants voting with their feet against the wishes of the people in the host nation? As I write these words, yet another caravan of thousands of foreign migrants is heading for the U.S. border, highlighting the centrality of Hamiltons existential question, once again.
I believe the president is declaring that just as Americans have the right of self-government, the Hungarians today are a free people and they have the right (and they have expressed this right by voting overwhelmingly for Fidesz and border control in a free democratic election) to decide for themselves their own immigration policy, rather than having that policy decided for them by the supranational European Union (with the prodding of the two overbearing nations in that Union: Germany and France) or by the migrants themselves who arrive in Hungary and other sovereign European nations without the consent of the governed.
Our president is simply saying that democratic sovereign peoples have the moral right to rule themselves. Once an excellent historian, but now severely afflicted with, and apparently traumatized by, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Ronald Radosh finds this core principle of American constitutional morality objectionable.
All sorts of wretched liberal rags are permitted in "News" but not American Greatness.
This is unfortunate.
I have no connection with American Greatness other than satisfied reader.
This seems to be heart of the entire political divide: Globalism vs Nationalism.
The Left despises nationalism. This is where they connect Trump to Hitler. Hitler was a nationalist. That is (apparently) pure evil. Trump is a nationalist. Therefore, Trump is Hitler.
For the Left, the nation state is just an unacceptable idea. No nations. No sovereignty. No borders. No national laws (who needs the Constitution?). International law as administered by the UN is all the world needs.
This is a fundamental divide. This was what Obama meant when he said he would fundamentally transform America.
Bush League Republicans had intended to subsume American sovereignty to the UN if they had gotten the final amnesty to tip the balance in the US.
Now this is what our high school and university students should be reading and discussing, not the globalist pablum ladled out by their Leftist texts and teachers. Perhaps they wouldn’t sound so clueless when questioned by those “man on the street” interviews that leave us hopeless for the future of the USA.
free society of over a billion people, successfully lifting countless millions out of poverty;
And 60% still crap in the street.
The fundamental transformation began during GHW Bush.
It has been a bipartisan policy of non-enforcement since then that has changed the country.
Prior to that the only places you would find Spanish speaking people were the southwest and S. FL.
Now everywhere has barrios and bodegas.
But to win, they have to keep their intentions hidden.
Good luck with that. Half the population is awake and President Trump is like a Trumpet player at a library.
For those who don’t know, Ron Radosh is an author who has exposed, through the Venona files, communist infiltration into the US during the twentieth century and exposed the Rosenbergs as the traitors they were. He’s now on the outs with his former friend, David Horowitz.
The President drives people crazy.
Might as well attempt to explain intelligence to a raock, for all the good it will do to explain the concept of Sovereignty to a Communist sucking Liberal. Waste of time and energy.
Just the other day I saw a clip of Oswald Moseley (British Fascist leader) in his old age. He was asked if he were still a fascist or if he had any regrets. He answered carefully and made a point that the British Union of Fascists failed to recognize the importance of human freedom. They basically compromised on that issue because they were interested in transforming society and the economy in a way that they considered beneficial. But he had come to realize that compromising human freedom was a fatal mistake.
Moseley is quite an interesting character. I won’t defend him, but his arguments against Globalism were true in the 1930s and they are just as true today. Personally, I would strictly avoid any talk of “Jewish Bankers” (and Moseley wasn’t much of an anti-Semite) but I do think that hidden money men (from many cultures around the world) are pulling the strings and trying to handicap countries like the USA. That Globalist Elite is the great enemy. Mosely was wrong about a lot of things. But he was right about Globalism.
And if he came to the realization that Human Freedom is of vital importance, then he was doubly ahead of today’s batch of socialists who seek one world government that controls everyone’s life at the 50,000 foot level. That’s a disaster waiting to happen.
These guys are consistently the best opinion zine out there, surpassing American Thinker, and much more in touch with the MAGA agenda than older outlets like National Review.
It's important that more people on FR get a chance to be exposed to their columns, which are frequently the best argued ones supporting the Trump Agenda. (The Federalist seems to be doing a good job lately, too.)
One thing you can do in the meanwhile is start a ping list for people who are interested in this outlet. You can put me on it.
cranky Walter Cronkite complains to a globalist cabal that Americans will find giving up some of their sovereignty to a world government “a bitter pill to swallow” but he was quite willing to shove it down our throats anyway.
And that is globalism vs. sovereign liberty in a nutshell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezfxkKXGdag
Bush League Republicans had intended to subsume American sovereignty to the UN if they had gotten the final amnesty to tip the balance in the US.
Hitler was a socialist. Bernie ?Sanders is a socialist. Therefore, what?
The primary difference between Naziism and Communism (other than nobody claims that “real Naziism has never been tried”) is that the Communists were internationalist socialists, while the Nazis were socialist nationalists. Other than that, they’re essentially the same thing.
bump
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