There’s no doubt about it: President Obama embraces the one-world global view. So does his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.
Obama showed his hand even before he was president. On July 24, 2008, then–US senator Barack Obama spoke to the largest crowd of the presidential campaign in Berlin, Germany. More than two hundred thousand people thronged into the park in front of the site where the Berlin Wall, separating East and West Germany, communism and freedom, had once stood. All were anxious to hear the young senator who was stirring the American electorate and who might be an antidote to President George W. Bush, who was detested by Europeans.
The spectators got what they came for. Obama talked the talk, walked the walk. He spoke their language. Playing to the crowd, he told them that he came to Berlin not as a presidential candidate, but as a “citizen of the world.” His rhetoric soared as he repeatedly spoke of “global cooperation,” “global partnership,” “global commitment,” and the “burden of global citizenship”… that continue[s] to bind us together.”32
“I speak as a citizen of the world,” he told the crowd.33
Those few words, emphasizing Obama’s obvious embrace of globalism and global governance over nationalism, foretold his vision of a new world order. In this new paradigm, America is just one part of a worldwide decision-making process, instead of an independent—and, yes, nationalistic—country with historic political and cultural roots set deep in democracy that are often at odds with some of the rest of the world, including Europe.
This book is a wake-up call to all Americans who value our democratic traditions and culture, who still believe in the fundamental tenets of liberty and freedom that are the cornerstones of our great nation, and who applaud the uniqueness of America.
WHY GLOBAL GOVERNMENT WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED BY AMERICANS
David Brooks of the New York Times cited five reasons why Americans will never accept what he calls the “vaporous global-governance notion.”34
We’ll never accept it, first, because it is undemocratic. It is impossible to set up legitimate global authorities because there is no global democracy, no sense of common peoplehood and trust. So multilateral organizations can never look like legislatures, with open debate, up or down votes, and the losers accepting majority decisions.
Instead, they look like meetings of unelected elites, of technocrats who make decisions in secret and who rely upon intentionally impenetrable language, who settle differences through arcane fudges. Americans, like most peoples, will never surrender even a bit of their national democracy for the sake of multilateral technocracy.
Second, we will never accept global governance because it inevitably devolves into corruption. The panoply of UN scandals flows from a single source: the lack of democratic accountability. These supranational organizations exist in their own insular, self-indulgent aerie.
We will never accept global governance, third, because we love our Constitution and will never grant any other law supremacy over it. Like most peoples (Europeans are the exception), we will never allow transnational organizations to overrule our own laws, regulations and precedents. We think our Constitution is superior to the sloppy authority granted to, say, the International Criminal Court.
Fourth, we understand that these mushy international organizations liberate the barbaric and handcuff the civilized. Bodies like the U.N. can toss hapless resolutions at the Milosevices, the Saddams, or the butchers of Darfur, but they can do nothing to restrain them. Meanwhile, the forces of decency can be paralyzed as they wait for “the international community.”
Fifth, we know that when push comes to shove, all the grand talk about international norms is often just a cover for opposing the global elite’s bêtes noires of the moment—usually the U.S. or Israel. We will never grant legitimacy to forums that are so often manipulated for partisan ends.35
David Brooks is right, but there’s more. As a nation of states, it took us a long time to become a cohesive nation, trustful of all our fellow citizens. Indeed, before the American people came to trust one another fully in sharing our national sovereignty, we went through a cleansing process from 1861 to 1865—the American Civil War. As Abraham Lincoln famously said, we could no longer exist “half slave and half free.” He quoted the biblical prophecy that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
The states of the North—led by the unerring moral compass of the abolitionists—rejected the idea that they would have to share their country with slaveholders and the vast, feudal, class-conscious estates they ruled. The “slave power” became the enemy of the North and people of conscience were determined to purge it from America.
And they did.
As with the United Nations’ General Assembly, the slave power perpetuated its rule through the principle of one-state, one-vote in the US Senate. Southern defenders of slavery made sure that the number of free and slave states were equal so that they would not be outvoted in the Senate (increased population growth in the North made the House of Representatives an increasingly antislavery institution). Whenever a free state was admitted to the Union, for example Maine in 1820, a slave state (in 1820, Missouri) would be let in to offset it. When the Supreme Court ruled—in the Dred Scott decision of 1857—that Congress could not bar slavery in any territory, it led directly to the Civil War. The North would not subsist in a nation that permanently tolerated the spread of slavery.
Even in modern times, the civil rights movement fought to extirpate racial segregation from the southern states, eventually bringing them into conformity with the racial integration (sort of) practiced in the North.
Don’t we have a similar duty? Mustn’t we make sure that we are entering a world of free nations based on the rule of law, integrity, and respect for human rights that we fought so hard for before we sign away our sovereignty? That is not to say that we should undertake any global crusade to liberate and improve the world. But it is to say that we should look before we leap and check out to what kind of countries we are ceding our sovereignty.
Do we want to be in a global ruling partnership with Russia, China, or a collection of tiny, lightly populated, third world autocracies, riddled with corruption and dedicated to the enrichment of their leaders? These are not the kind of bedfellows we want in our government. They are not worthy of entrusting our sovereignty to them.
And we will not accept them.
Join us in this urgent fight to maintain our sovereignty and stop the forces of global governance.
But, if you do, be prepared to be identified as one of the “black helicopter crowd.”
You’ll be in good company.
TREATIES: HOW THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION WANTS TO UNDERMINE OUR SOVEREIGNTY
UN treaties are a favorite way of circumventing our national government and transferring our power, control, and resources to a new global entity. And the Obama administration is determined to destroy the very essence of our national sovereignty and transfer power from our elected Congress to the UN General Assembly—a body filled with corrupt, undemocratic, tyrannical nations that abuse human rights and do not share our values.
If Barack Obama is reelected in November 2012, his agenda for global governance through the United Nations will pick up steam. But even if he is defeated—or especially if he is defeated—he and his outgoing secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, are planning to use his remaining months in office to sign a series of treaties and international protocols that will bind our country for decades to come. We need to remember one fundamental but little known fact: Any treaty signed by the US but not yet ratified by the Senate is binding on our country—as if it had been ratified—until it is either rejected by the Senate or renounced by the president. This requirement—embedded in the Vienna Convention signed and ratified by the US—means that these treaties might come into force and effect even if we never ratify them.