President Trump Gives the Globalists Another Lesson – But More Are Needed The bad ideas that spawned the UN are deeply entrenched in the West. by Bruce Thornton
Donald Trump’s address to the UN once again has challenged the failing bloated institution, especially when its damage to our country and its Constitutional order by allowing globalist elites to chip away at our sovereignty in order to serve the “international community” of the “new world order” globalist elites. Much of our foreign policy errors and crises spring from the near century of the UN’s bad ideas and feckless idealism.
Wielding his signature straight talk, Trump delivered a much-needed home truth: “What is the purpose of the United Nations?” he asked, and quickly answered, “For the most part, at least for now, all they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up. It’s empty words, and empty words don’t solve wars.”
In other words, a typical hypertrophied bureaucracy riddled with professional deformation––the chronic abuse that served the institution and its treasonous clerks rather than the alleged purpose for which it was created and financed–– mostly by U.S. taxpayers.
Greed and ambition we’ll have with us always, but the bad ideas that spawned the UN are deeply entrenched in the West. The seed idealistic globalism began with Immanuel Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” in 1795. In it, Kant imagined innovations like a “federation of free states” that could form a “pacific alliance” that would “forever terminate all wars.” Kant understood that the world of his times was not yet ready for such a dream, but he believed that “the uniformity of the progress of the human mind” would reach such a goal.
During the following century the growth of new technologies and global trade seemingly promised a global “harmony of interests,” yet also more lethal and destructive wars too devastating and costly for business, giving impetus to Kant’s ambitious vision. By the outbreak of World War I, numerous downpayments on Kant’s dream had produced multilateral agreements, conventions, and treaties aimed at “establishing and securing international peace by placing it upon a foundation of international understanding, international appreciation, and international cooperation,” as Nicholas Murray Butler said in 1932.
Before then, agreements like the three Geneva Conventions (1864, 1906, 1929) had established collective laws for the humane treatment of the sick and wounded in battle, and later for prisoners. The Hague Conventions had similar ambitions. The first (1899) called for an international Court of Arbitration, and restrictions on aerial bombardment and the use of poison gas. The second (1907) convention expanded restrictions to naval warfare practice and armaments, as well as other changes to slowing down what host Tsar Nicholas II called the “accelerating arms race” that was “transforming armed peace into crushing burdens that weighs on all nations and, if prolonged, will lead to the very cataclysm it seeks to avert.”
And what did the West get for this feckless idealism and parchment barriers? The Great War with its eight and a half million dead, millions more civilians killed, extensive destruction of infrastructure, and a whole generation “lost” to the gruesome horrors of trench warfare, high explosives, and poison gas. As Winston Churchill wrote later, “When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.”
Also terminally maligned was the Versailles Treaty’s doubling-down on the globalist proliferation of new multilateral agreements that actually made the war the “war to end all wars,” as H.G. Wells erroneously put it in 1914. In fact––as French Marshal Ferdinand Foch predicted correctly when the treaty was signed in1919––“This is not Peace. It is an Armistice for twenty years.”
During those 20 years appeared fever-dreams like the Kellog-Briand pact of 1928 that set naïve Kantian goals of ending war and creating an international “harmony of interests.” Forty-nine nations, including the future Axis powers Germany, Japan, and Italy, agreed to “condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another,” and “agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts. . . shall never be sought except by pacific means.” This pledge––in three years, with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria––would prove the truth of Thomas Hobbes’s wisdom that “covenants, without the sword, are but mere words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”
Most consequential and dangerous of the Versailles Treaty’s Kantian settlement, was the League of Nations. Like its idiot child the UN, the League was weakened by a fatal flaw––the lack of a “sword,” a sufficient military force to deter and punish violators of its rules and resolutions. Moreover, the League’s policy of international peace through collective security was vitiated by the remaining primacy of national interests, and by the vast diversity in beliefs, principles, interests, governments, and morals among the soverign nation members.
The first failed test of the League came in 1923, when Mussolini, using the pretext of some Italian diplomats murdered in Epirus, engineered the takeover of the Greek island of Corfu bombarding its main harbor and a fortress housing Greek and Armenian refugees, killing 15.
Greece appealed to the League of Nations, but the League’s response that could have determined the bona fides of its authority and viability of its institutions, was missing. As Harold Nicolson of the British Foreign Office recognized, the crisis was precisely what the League promised to solve peacefully: “[S]hould the [League] Assembly fail,” he wrote, “in such flagrant circumstances, to enforce obedience to the Covenant, it was realized that the authority of the League would be forever impaired.”
In the end, that’s exactly what happened. National interests–– of France, who needed Mussolini’s support for occupation of the Ruhr; and of the British, who refused to deploy their fleet unilaterally––bypassed the League for the Council of Ambassadors where such interests and realpolitik horse-trading among big countries took precedence. While Italy was left unpunished, Greece was made to pay it reparations as the price of Italy’s withdrawal, creating the moral risk of further member aggression.
The Secretary-General of the League pointed out the damage: “[T]his challenge has brought into question the fundamental principles which lie at the root of the public law of the new world order established by the League.” This recognition could easily be applied to the UN, where big and powerful nations pursue their national and ideological interests, and prioritize them over the UN’s lofty principle, justice, and rules.
This century-long history of the West repeating the naïve idealism of Kant’s dreams by trying over and over to ignore or refashion the permanent reality of human nature’s destructive passions, reached its acme with the creation of the dysfunctional, dangerous United Nations.
Trump’s admonitions have been a necessary start for leaving the UN and repossessing Turtle Bay, but it will take the help of Congress and voters to end our entanglement with the interests and follies of foreign countries that damage our own, and to stop the waste of taxpayer money spent on the UN. And we still have rivals––both veto-bearing UN Security Council Members–– gunning for us.
As Gordon Chang recently warned, we face burgeoning threats from China and Russia––the “Axis of War”––cooperating to reduce the power and influence of our country, and expand their own. We can no longer indulge the bloody fantasies of the past, but return to the millennia of foreign policy realism of Plato in the Laws: “Every state by nature is at war with every other state, and peace is just a name.”
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