Liberty and Tyranny
Page 17
For the Statist, however, U.S. foreign policy is another opportunity to enhance his own authority at the expense of the civil society. In 2007, then-senator Barack Obama set forth his views to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs:
In today’s globalized world, the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people. When narco-trafficking and corruption threaten democracy in Latin America, it’s America’s problem too. When poor villagers in Indonesia have no choice but to send chickens to market infected with avian flu, it cannot be seen as a distant concern. When religious schools in Pakistan teach hatred to young children, our children are threatened as well.
Whether it’s global terrorism or pandemic disease, dramatic climate change or the proliferation of weapons of mass annihilation, the threats we face at the dawn of the 21st century can no longer be contained by borders and boundaries….
And America must lead by reaching out to all those living disconnected lives of despair in the world’s forgotten corners—because while there will always be those who succumb to hate and strap bombs to their bodies, there are millions more who want to take another path—who want our beacon of hope to shine its light their way….
[Another way] America will lead again is to invest in our common humanity—to ensure that those who live in fear and want today can live with dignity and opportunity tomorrow.
We have heard much over the last six years about how America’s larger purpose in the world is to promote the spread of freedom—that it is the yearning of all who live in the shadow of tyranny and despair.
I agree. But this yearning is not satisfied by simply deposing a dictator and setting up a ballot box. The true desire of all mankind is not only to live free lives, but lives marked by dignity and opportunity; by security and simple justice.
Delivering on these universal aspirations requires basic sustenance like food and clean water; medicine and shelter. It also requires a society that is supported by the pillars of a sustainable democracy—a strong legislature, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, a vibrant civil society, a free press, and an honest police force. It requires building the capacity of the world’s weakest states and providing them what they need to reduce poverty, build healthy and educated communities, develop markets, and generate wealth. And it requires states that have the capacity to fight terrorism, halt the proliferation of deadly weapons, and build the health care infrastructure needed to prevent and treat such deadly diseases as HIV/AIDS and malaria….
But if the next President can restore the American people’s trust—if they know that he or she is acting with their best interests at heart, with prudence and wisdom and some measure of humility—then I believe the American people will be ready to see America lead again.11
Several elements of Obama’s global vision must be addressed. When he says, “The security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people,” what is meant by “security of all people” of the world? How, in every case, is America’s security related to their security? It clearly is not. And if a regime refuses to secure for its people that which America believes it should, what then? Moreover, are there not times when the security of other people conflicts with the security of America?
“And America must lead by reaching out to all those living disconnected lives of despair in the world’s forgotten corners.”
What does it mean to live a disconnected life of despair? If included among the disconnected, for example, are the millions of starving people living under the iron fist of North Korean communism, how do Americans reach out to them? But “disconnected lives of despair” appears to mean much more than the denial of liberty to people in the forgotten corners of the world. It is a messianic attitude that has no basis in reality.
“[Another way] America will lead again is to invest in our common humanity—to ensure that those who live in fear and want today can live with dignity and opportunity tomorrow.”
America will invest what and where? And how can America ensure that people in, say, Zimbabwe and scores of other places can live with dignity and opportunity? And does such a purpose and mission exclude Iraq, where Saddam Hussein was terrorizing and brutalizing large segments of the Iraqi population? And if not, why not?
“Delivering on these universal aspirations requires basic sustenance like food and clean water; medicine and shelter. It also requires a society that is supported by the pillars of a sustainable democracy—a strong legislature, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, a vibrant civil society, a free press, and an honest police force. It requires building the capacity of the world’s weakest states and providing them what they need to reduce poverty, build healthy and educated communities, develop markets, and generate wealth.”
And how are these things to be accomplished? No insight is provided into the myriad of complicated and complex obstacles—both within the United States and in other countries—that would have to be overcome, because they are too numerous to make tangible and too onerous to accomplish. Moreover, if the government were to compel Americans to give of their labor, treasure, and lives to chase the unachievable—an imagined global civil society—America could not survive or improve upon itself.
“But if the next President can restore the American people’s trust—if they know that he or she is acting with their best interests at heart, with prudence and wisdom and some measure of humility—then I believe the American people will be ready to see America lead again.”
How would this restore the American people’s trust, and in whom and what? How is committing them to a staggeringly unrealistic global task acting in their best interests? Where is the prudence and wisdom in such a reckless overstatement of human possibilities, which completely ignores history and man’s experience?
In truth, the Statist is and will be no more successful in his foreign policy promises than in his domestic promises. International utopianism has no better chance than its domestic brand.
But for all his talk of America changing the world, the Statist speaks not of American sovereignity but “global citizenship.”12
He speaks not of America as a nation-state but as one nation among many. Rather than maintain its superpower status and act in its own best interests, the United States should relinquish its hard-earned position in favor of multilateral power sharing and conduct foreign policy—including decisions about military action in its own defense—through coalitions and international organizations. In this way, America’s interests are subsumed and contained by the supposed interests of the whole. And the rest of the world will look approvingly upon the United States for empowering other countries to participate in decisions about America’s survival.
The Statist seeks treaties not to preserve and improve American society, but to commit the United States to a course of conduct that cannot be easily reversed with the change of administrations. He will enter into treaties that include the Convention on the Rights of the Child (signed in 1995 but not ratified due to sovereignty and other concerns); the Convention on All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (which the Senate has refused to ratify since President Carter signed it in 1980); the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (signed by Clinton in 1996, rejected by the Senate in 1999); the Kyoto Protocol on climate change (signed by Clinton in 1998 but never ratified; Bush withdrew it in 2001);13 the Convention on the Law of the Sea (which would restrict U.S. commercial and military operations, but the Senate has not taken it up); and the International Criminal Court (which the United States has not joined). In each instance, decisions will be made through international bureaucracies that do not have as their moral imperative the preservation and improvement of American society. This is a dangerous gambit.
America’s adversaries and enemies do not consider themselves global citizens. Nor are they constrained by international sensibilities and arrangements. A resurgent Russia, an aggressive China, communist movements growing in Latin America, rogue regimes in North Korea and Iran,
Islamic terrorism, to name a few, all reject the Statist’s Utopia as a weakness to be exploited. They are not motivated by world opinion but by their own desires. They seek strategic—economic and military—advantage. For example, while China locks up oil contracts with countries in Africa and Latin America and Russia lays claim to the North Pole to expand its access to crude oil, the Statist asserts that America is only “5 percent of the world’s population, [but] consumes one quarter of the world’s total energy supply,”14 suggesting that America must become poorer so the rest of the world might become richer. The Statist believes Americans are gluttonous and wasteful, taking from the world that which belongs to others, whereas the Conservative believes Americans are successful and productive, contributing to their own preservation and improvement. The United States also produces and supplies goods and services to the rest of the world, thereby improving their lot. Furthermore, many other countries are incapable of accessing or utilizing natural resources as a result of their own governments, cultures, and societies.
Despite the Statist’s lofty talk of global citizenship, in practice he protects if not augments his domestic position. Therefore, he opposes free trade, because it would alienate his union constituency, which sees protectionism as job security. He opposes the use of DDT to eradicate diseases in the most impoverished areas of the world, to appease his environmental acolytes, for whom DDT is a cause célèbre. The Statist will guard from the international community factions within American society that he considers essential to his authority. The Conservative, on the other hand, will restrict or prevent the provision of certain technologies and military know-how to hostile regimes (through such mechanisms as export controls), thereby limiting free trade with such regimes, not to benefit a favored constituency or enhance his own authority but to preserve America’s security—which, in turn, preserves free trade generally. Once again, the Statist is motivated to accumulate and maintain his authority, whereas the Conservative is motivated to preserve and improve the civil society.
The Statist also uses the idea of global citizenship to denigrate the effectiveness of war efforts that he does not lead and agitate the public against his political opponents. Indeed, the Statist adopts the language and tactics of America’s adversaries in criticizing American foreign and national security policies. For example, in the war on terrorism, the United States has been accused by various countries, self-described human rights groups, international bureaucrats, among others, of using torture in the interrogation and detention of al-Qaeda terrorists. These critics have attacked critically important, albeit rarely used, methodologies for securing intelligence and neutralizing the enemy as violations of terrorists’ human rights—including waterboarding, which simulates drowning. The technique has now been banned, but was used on only three terrorists—Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, Abu Zubaydah, Osama bin Laden’s chief of operations, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who the government says coordinated the attack on the USS Cole. The technique reportedly led to securing important information that prevented dozens of planned al-Qaeda attacks.15 The Statist has succeeded in characterizing something as torture that is not torture, for the purpose of banning even its judicious use. How is banning waterboarding—which Barack Obama did among his first acts as president—morally defensible when a few minutes of simulated drowning applied against the operational leader of 9/11 reportedly saved an untold number of innocent American lives?
Even the detention of al-Qaeda terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, under the watchful eyes of the media, antiwar groups, defense lawyers, and statist politicians who have toured the detention center over a period of years has been made controversial. Obama also issued an executive order that will close the facility within a year of his taking office. And the insistence on treating the detained terrorists as soldiers under international law (the Geneva Conventions),16 which specifically excludes them from such a designation since they are waging war illegally, and also treating them as quasi-American citizens for the purpose of applying constitutional-like due process standards in determining their fate, flies in the face of legal and historical precedent. How does American society benefit from these approaches? Terrorists, the earliest of whom were pirates, have never been considered equivalent to regular armed forces by any president up to now. Granting new rights to terrorists, which makes their barbarism more difficult to stop and their schemes more difficult to uncover, is not morally defensible.
While empowering the terrorist with new rights, thereby increasing the threat against Americans, the Statist claims violations of Americans’ civil liberties with the passage of the post-9/11 Patriot Act. As former terrorist prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has explained, the act “removes obstacles that have for years prevented the law-enforcement and counterintelligence sides of the government from pooling information to confront the terrorist threat. [And] it ushers several long-established investigative techniques into the era of 21st-century technology, bringing them to bear on terrorism with the same effectiveness they have long exhibited in rooting out far-less-heinous crimes, such as drug trafficking and health-care fraud.” The law provides for judicial review at every important stage as well.17 The Statist also has opposed the interception of enemy communications, such as email and cell phone contacts, without approval from a court. But his position is contrary to all legal precedent, historical practice, and highly impractical, given the speed by which such communications occur. Yet again he claims the practice threatens Americans’ civil liberties. Where is the actual evidence of widespread civil liberties’ abuses against American citizens? It is nonexistent.
The war against terrorism requires infiltration, interception, detention, and interrogation, all of which are aimed at preventing another catastrophic attack against American citizens within the United States and American soldiers on the battlefield. The post-9/11 mix of laws and policies instituted by President George W. Bush, which are intended to protect American society from mortal threats, did, in fact, succeed in securing the American people’s unalienable rights within the framework of the Constitution. The Statist knows this, but he is intolerant of the successful leadership of others, for it delays his own ascendancy. He must denigrate those who obstruct him. And once in power, his threshold for actual civil liberties violations is often lowered.
During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt ordered the unconstitutional internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans, which was upheld by an activist Supreme Court.18 Roosevelt remains among the Statist’s most adored leaders and the Court among his most venerated institutions. When Robert Kennedy served as attorney general of the United States in the 1960s, he did nothing to stop the illegal bugging of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s telephone by the FBI.19 Today, the federal Justice Department building is named after Kennedy. Under President Bill Clinton, the National Security Agency launched the Echelon surveillance program, in which the U.S. government routinely intercepts international email, telephone, and fax communications of citizen and terrorist alike.20 It drew virtually no attention from self-identified civil libertarian groups.
For the Conservative, there is no doubt that the relentless efforts of the Statist to criminalize war—by dragging strategic and operational decisions into the courtroom, where inexpert judicial activists second-guess an elected president and his military and intelligence experts—will make securing the nation against future attacks far more difficult. The extent to which the Statist is willing to expose the nation to known external threats during wartime demonstrates the zealotry with which he now pursues his ambitions.
EPILOGUE
A CONSERVATIVE MANIFESTO
SO DISTANT IS AMERICA
today from its founding principles that it is difficult to precisely describe the nature of American government. It is not strictly a constitutional republic, because the Constitution has been and continues to be easily altered by a judicial oligarchy that mostly enforces, if not expands, the Statist’s agenda. It is not strictly a representative republ
ic, because so many edicts are produced by a maze of administrative departments that are unknown to the public and detached from its sentiment. It is not strictly a federal republic, because the states that gave the central government life now live at its behest. What, then, is it? It is a society steadily transitioning toward statism. If the Conservative does not come to grips with the significance of this transformation, he will be devoured by it. The Republican Party acts as if it is without recourse. Republican administrations—with the exception of a brief eight-year respite under Ronald Reagan—more or less remain on the glide path set by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. The latest and most stunning example is the trillions of dollars in various bailout schemes that President George W. Bush oversaw in the last months of his administration. When asked about it, he made this remarkable statement: “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.”1
And he did more than that. In approving the expenditure of $17.4 billion in loans to General Motors and Chrysler, President Bush overrode Congress, which had rejected the plan, and in doing so violated the Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine. Just as another Republican president, Herbert Hoover, laid the foundation for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Bush has, in words and actions, done the same for President Barack Obama—the most ideologically pure Statist and committed counterrevolutionary to occupy the Oval Office.