President Donald J. Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel participate in a pull aside meeting Wednesday, June 5, 2019, at the Southsea Common in Portsmouth, England following the D-Day Commemorative event.
(Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
UPDATE 7.30.22: Tensions with China are escalating quickly as a potential visit by Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan has encouraged a protest by China. President Donald Trump has condemned the plan saying that it would “only make it worse.” The Hill’s Jared Gans reports:
Former President Trump on Friday criticized Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) planned trip to Taiwan, which has been condemned by China but generally praised by congressional Republicans.
Beijing has warned Pelosi against visiting the island, saying it would challenge a “red line” and will be met with “resolute countermeasures.” The Chinese government has stepped up military drills near Taiwan, which it claims sovereignty over, in the past few months.
Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social that “the China mess is the last thing she should be involved in — She will only make it worse.”
“Everything she touches,” he wrote, “turns to Chaos, Disruption, and ‘Crap.’”
UPDATE 7.12.22: The “war for globalism” wouldn’t be anywhere if it didn’t generate some support. On the front line of the propaganda machine greasing the skids for the globalist war machine are the mainstream media outlets, who pump up the populace of western countries for war to quell any unrest. At The American Conservative, Ted Galen Carpenter calls the elite press the “handmaid of war,” writing:
Far too often, the elite U.S. press has been a reliable mouthpiece for Washington’s dubious foreign policies. That was true during the Cold War, except for a brief period of disillusionment and dissent once the Vietnam War became such an obvious debacle. That period of more vigorous scrutiny and skepticism did not last long, however. When George H. W. Bush launched his drive for U.S. military intervention in the Persian Gulf to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other elite outlets were fully on board with that agenda, as their shamelessly biased treatment of the relevant issues confirmed. That pro-interventionist bias became even more flagrant during the Balkan crises of the 1990s, the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Washington’s subsequent campaigns for forcible regime change in Libya and Syria. There was very little daylight between the official U.S. government positions on those issues and the dominant media narratives.
A similar pattern has emerged with press coverage of the war in Ukraine. Once again, pro-interventionist accounts dominate the airwaves and the leading editorial and op-ed pages. That was especially true of the first weeks of the war, when the media overwhelmingly supported the argument that America must “stand with Ukraine.” The imbalance has eased slightly as concerns about the costs and risks of the Biden administration’s policy of lavishing military and financial aid on Kiev mount. Nevertheless, hawks still provide the vast majority of commentaries on the war in top-tier establishment forums.
The elite U.S. press has even served as a conduit for outright Ukrainian propaganda. During the early weeks of the war, American news outlets circulated the story about the “Ghost of Kiev”—the fighter pilot who supposedly became an ace in a matter of days by shooting down numerous Russian warplanes. That account had all the characteristics of transparent propaganda, and the Ukrainian military ultimately conceded that the story was fictional. In the meantime, however, it had served its purpose to influence credulous Western audiences.
UPDATE 5.13.22: After Joe Biden moved into the White House, Americans quickly began to see a return to the transnational progressivism on display during the Obama era. The Biden administration has entered what Douglas MacGregor calls “A war for globalism in Ukraine.” He writes in The American Conservative:
Statements by the U.S. Secretaries of Defense and State that Washington wants to “weaken” Russia make it clear that Washington’s allegedly benevolent “rules-based order” is of no benefit to Russia. In fact, the statements simply confirm in Russian minds the belief that the U.S. is a co-belligerent in Ukraine’s war for NATO expansion.
Perhaps even more important is the suggestion that Poland, NATO’s proverbial wild child, would provide so-called “peacekeeping forces” to Ukraine. It’s no secret to Europeans that Poland dominated most of Ukraine for nearly 400 years, or that Moldova, though technically Romanian, spent 300 years as a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. Washington’s apparent readiness to introduce revanchist Polish forces into Western Ukraine and, potentially, revanchist Romanian forces into Moldova suggests that Washington’s globalists will do anything to harm Russia even if it involves advancing the territorial ambitions of Russia’s historic enemies.
War still tests the legitimacy of those who govern inside the warring states, as well as the resilience of their societies. This observation applies to the Biden Administration as much as it does to the governments of Zelensky and Putin. As he presides over fiscal crisis, scarcity, and rising criminality in America, and displays his willful ignorance of Eastern Europe and its peoples, President Biden and his supporters on the Hill are stirring a regional pot that could quickly boil over with dangerous consequences for Washington and its NATO partners. As Sigmund Freud wrote of Biden’s “internationalist” predecessor Woodrow Wilson, Biden “has a marvelous ability to ignore facts and believe what he wants.” However, it’s much tougher now than it was in 1917 to pull the wool over Americans’ eyes.
Washington actively cultivated Ukraine’s war with Russia for many years, harnessing Ukrainian nationalism—the incendiary force globalists claim to loathe—in service to their cause. It worked. Now the same globalists are prolonging the war with arms, advice, and encouragement, even though Ukraine is being destroyed.
Originally posted on August 14, 2019.
At American Greatness, John Fonte applauds the Trump administration for reasserting American sovereignty and encouraging renewed sovereignty for all nation-states. Fonte explains the administration’s push back against global progressive left-liberalism. He writes (abridged):
With the Brexit referendum, the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of conservative democratic nationalists throughout the West, the global governance project has been seriously challenged for the first time. It appears that the “arc of history” has been altered.
So, what is this conflict between democratic sovereignty and transnational progressivism (or globalism) all about?
It is about the oldest questions in politics, examined by Plato and Aristotle: who should rule and on what basis? Who makes the rules by which we are governed?
The American nation-state under the Obama Administration was promoting transnational progressivism and diminishing democratic sovereignty.
Recognizing this new transnationalist challenge in September 2000, John Bolton, in a University of Chicago law journal article, portrayed a coming conflict between “Globalists and Americanists.” At that time, 19 years ago, Bolton warned that we must take global governance seriously as a threat to democratic sovereignty.
A decade later, the Obama Administration in the name of the liberal global order was strong-arming democratic nation-states into adhering to progressive social policies concerning radical feminism, abortion, LGBT, and gender issue.
Meanwhile, the EU forced the removal of democratically elected leaders in Italy and Greece, and, led by Germany, facilitated mass migration from the developing world without the consent of the people of Europe’s democratic nation-states.
It appears that the “rules” have changed as the liberal global order envisioned by Reagan-Thatcher conservatives has morphed into the transnational progressive order of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel.
This is what President Obama meant when he told the United Nations in 2016 that by “binding ourselves to international laws and institutions” and that by “giving up freedom of action” and “binding ourselves to international rules over the long term” America would actually enhance its security. Thus, in the utopian vision of the transnationalists, the American caterpillar is transformed into the global governance butterfly.
For decades conservative thinking has ignored the globalist challenge. The good news is that the Trump Administration is taking the conflict between democratic sovereignty and global governance seriously.
During his U.N. speech in 2017, President Trump mentioned sovereignty more than 20 times. He began by declaring “In foreign affairs we are renewing the principle of sovereignty.” He stated, “Our success depends upon a coalition of strong and independent nations that embrace their sovereignty to promote security, prosperity, and peace.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking in Brussels, declared “our mission is to reassert sovereignty, reform the liberal international order, and we want our friends to help us and exert their sovereignty as well.” The speech was called, “Restoring the Role of the Nation-State in the Liberal International Order.” In other words, Pompeo argued that the liberal global order has moved too far away from the ideal of sovereignty and needed to be “restored” and “reformed.”
The old conservative formula, that essentially ignored the transnational progressive challenge externally—and the identity politics-multiculturalist challenge internally—is not adequate to face the contemporary threats from global progressive left-liberalism.
On both fronts, externally and internally, we are now involved in a conflict that will determine, not simply the direction of politics, but the existence of the democratic nation-state in America, Britain, the West, and throughout the world.
Read more here.
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