Both former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton and Weekly Standard senior editor Andrew Ferguson do an excellent job of eviscerating Barack Obama's incredibly vacuous Berlin speech. But as moronic as Obama's "one world" rhetoric may be, it still offers an insight into the thought of Barack Obama and reveals him to be very European in his thinking.
The particular from the speech line Bolton and Ferguson analyze is "there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one." Yes it's a dumb line, but what makes it interesting is that the aspiration expressed is no different from the aspirations of empires. From the Assyrians to the Persians to the Macedonians, Romans, Mongols, Aztecs, British, French, Germans, Japanese, and communists, the ultimate aim of an empire is to control the world, to secure their interests for all time by subjecting the world to their power. Traditionally, this has been accomplished by military conquest.
Then World War I and World War II devastated Europe and much of the rest of the world, leaving the United States and the Soviet Union as the dominant powers in the world. The lesson the Europeans took from the the World Wars was that militaristic imperialism was the cause of the wars and that multilateral cooperations was needed to restrain the these destructive ambitions. At the same time, Western European powers, bowing to political pressure based on the evils of imperialism, divested themselves of their colonies abroad (although the remains of the British Empire are a commonwealth with the Queen as their sovereign).* Instead of building empires through military might, Western Europe looked to political integration under the United States' military umbrella to create an empire founded not on conquest, but on cooperative treaties and institutions (e.g. the Euro, the European Commission, etc.). Given Europe's history in the twentieth century, this wasn't a bad idea, even if the result has been something of a monstrosity, but I digress.
Given that Obama apparently doesn't plan to launch massive wars of conquest, the only realistic alternative to achieving his vision of one world standing together would be something along the lines of EU model where nations cede their sovereignty to supra-national institutions. In other words, Obama is willing to cede the sovereignty of the United States (or some measure of it) in exchange for a united world. If Obama is serious about this one world nonsense, a President Obama would be bad for United States' sovereignty.
*Of course, the Soviets often supported this political pressure surreptitiously so as to make these newly independent states dependent on them.
The particular from the speech line Bolton and Ferguson analyze is "there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one." Yes it's a dumb line, but what makes it interesting is that the aspiration expressed is no different from the aspirations of empires. From the Assyrians to the Persians to the Macedonians, Romans, Mongols, Aztecs, British, French, Germans, Japanese, and communists, the ultimate aim of an empire is to control the world, to secure their interests for all time by subjecting the world to their power. Traditionally, this has been accomplished by military conquest.
Then World War I and World War II devastated Europe and much of the rest of the world, leaving the United States and the Soviet Union as the dominant powers in the world. The lesson the Europeans took from the the World Wars was that militaristic imperialism was the cause of the wars and that multilateral cooperations was needed to restrain the these destructive ambitions. At the same time, Western European powers, bowing to political pressure based on the evils of imperialism, divested themselves of their colonies abroad (although the remains of the British Empire are a commonwealth with the Queen as their sovereign).* Instead of building empires through military might, Western Europe looked to political integration under the United States' military umbrella to create an empire founded not on conquest, but on cooperative treaties and institutions (e.g. the Euro, the European Commission, etc.). Given Europe's history in the twentieth century, this wasn't a bad idea, even if the result has been something of a monstrosity, but I digress.
Given that Obama apparently doesn't plan to launch massive wars of conquest, the only realistic alternative to achieving his vision of one world standing together would be something along the lines of EU model where nations cede their sovereignty to supra-national institutions. In other words, Obama is willing to cede the sovereignty of the United States (or some measure of it) in exchange for a united world. If Obama is serious about this one world nonsense, a President Obama would be bad for United States' sovereignty.
*Of course, the Soviets often supported this political pressure surreptitiously so as to make these newly independent states dependent on them.
No comments:
Post a Comment