Category: POLITICS

Our nation’s 238th birthday took place on the 4th of July and corresponded with Ramparts of Civilization’s 4th birthday, also born on the Fourth of July as a celebration of and defender for the accomplishments of that great day so many years ago, and the many other examples of similar greatness throughout the long and compelling story of western civilization.  July 4th, 1776 held one of the most treasured places in the pantheon of western civilization’s accomplishments, in its bold recognition of the individual as primary to the story,  rulers as a servant to the people, and not the other way around.  The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men as a right of their birth, are created equal and by their existence as equal men, maintain unalienable rights, that of life, liberty, and their individual pursuit of happiness.   It declared that government existed to preserve these rights and was instituted among people, deriving its powers from the consent of the governed.

The revolutionary words stimulated the passions of an extraordinary generation of people, and by 1789, had achieved the miracle of a constitution designed on those principles, and a series of carefully lain limitations and balances to maintain them.   Through the wrenching pain of a civil war, the sins toward an indigenous culture, the stain of a hypocritical enslavement of a race of people born under the same protections, the calamitous world of market crashes and the impact of two massive world wars, the founding documents preserved a means of governance that led to the freeist, most prosperous society on earth.  The United States was a beacon to those who came from environments with less or no respect for those unalienable rights, and flourished as the singular example of what was possible when a person’s talents are freed and left to their own devices.  The United States became not only the most desired, but the most powerful country on earth, an accomplishment achieved through the power of words and a people’s respect for their meaning.

It devised a council of elective representatives that would create a nation of laws, a judiciary that would ejudicate them and an executive that would see the laws were faithfully executed.  The Chief Executive was asked to swear a specific oath:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States

The key concept of the Chief Executive was that of the defender of the Constitution, that he would seek election to that critical post to help lead the nation towards a future in the Constitution’s image, not his own image.

On November 4th, 2008, the nation elected someone who presented themselves as a Constitutional scholar, and on January 20th, 2009, swore the very oath above as the 44th President of the United States.

And that was pretty much the last time the Constitution was basis for any consideration of this particular man, Barack Obama.  The first hint of this individual’s determination to not to uphold, but overturn the carefully constructed checks and balances that had brought the country such prosperity, was illuminated five days before his first election as President in October 2008:

And he meant it.  To him transformation meant the necessary destruction of that which came before him. Facing a recession caused by a fiscal crisis, he ignored the multiple previous examples of successful resolution of recessions by removing the hand of government upon the economy through tax cuts and relief from regulation, and went instead for a boundless stimulus spending process, that significantly lengthened the recession and injected into government a massive increase in size that all but doomed any future ability to achieve budgetary control.  When budgets were suggested to control the out of control spending, he ignored the concept of presenting a budget altogether.  In the 232 years of governance  and 43 Presidents before him the nation had incurred a 10.6 trillion dollar deficit.  In the six years he has been in office he has almost doubled the deficit and will have expanded it 2 1/2 times, to 22 Trillion dollars when he leaves office.  He achieved the largest grab of governmental control over the private economy in history when Obamacare was enacted in 2011 without a single opposition vote of support, then rather than enforce it as law of the land, has amended it  without any legal basis over twenty times to fit his purposes.

When he was unable to persuade the opposition or even at times his own party in regard to so called immigration reform or global warning legislation, he simply went over their heads by injecting regulations not based on any law, and ignored laws that were already there.  If the voting population could not be persuaded his ideas were sufficiently mainstream, he determined to change the make-up of the voting population, allowing hundreds of thousands to illegally enter the country, ignoring the laws of border security he had sworn to uphold, precariously putting his country’s whole southern border at risk to calamity, disease, and crime, as well as forever changing the voting demographics to something more of his liking.

He entered people’s private property through increased power of the NSA, the corruption of the IRS, and awesome power of his regulatory commissions to reek havoc.  He turned the power of the IRS on citizens who had differing views then his and sought to destroy them, He sent his minions from ACORN to corrupt voting processes and secure voting assurance for his desire to transform.  He promoted class warfare to hide his failures, and promote the innate power achieved in securing a dependent population to the whims of government control.

He purposefully undercut the painfully won strategy to secure Iraq for the simple concept of proving his notion that the previous administrations’ policy were wrong, and he was willing to waste the sacrifice of over 4000 American deaths and countless casualties to prove it by withdrawing all military support from the shakiest of new democracies, surrounded by ravenous neighbors.  He may have illegally supplied weapons to the most dangerous of opponents to the Assad regime in Syria, sacrificing the life of his Libyan ambassador to prevent exposure of the arms process, ultimately arming the very insurgents who have declared a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and threaten to destabilize the entire middle east. He destabilized governments in Libya and Egypt, supported long term sworn enemies of American policy in the Middle East.  He slashed the military at the very time when the nation’s position and influence was growing more perilous by his actions, securing for Russia and China more aggressive policies toward their neighbors, and in Russia’s case, allowing the largest baldfaced land grab since World War II, in Russia’s consumption of Ukraine’s Crimea region.

Obama institutionalized a pattern of behavior more fitting of a despot than an elected leader in his desire to “transform”.  He envisions a certain utopia from his actions, an America radically transformed into a socialist democracy fundamentally ruled by one party, with a bounty secured to a progressively dependent population obtained from a steadily diminishing group of producers, the majority fed by continuous immigration with promises of access to the bounty, a financial indebtedness that will remove America forever as the securer of the world’s free trade and markets, and an emasculated military that will prevent any influence on the more dangerous developments in world events, leaving her vulnerable within her own borders.  The concept of a series of checks and balances that would prevent this utopia are anathema to him, and he is gambling on the country’s unwillingness to call him to account for his actions, until they are irreversible. To him its all so obvious, and reasonable.  If the checks and balances of the system require him to persuade, and he can not, he will need to simply do “something” – He will do what he wants – its Economic Patriotism:

When we look up in 2016, we will see the ruins of a republic and lament its passing.  Like all great national efforts before it,  America’s own hubris brought to the position of power its own poison pill, and we swallowed it in 2008.

‘Preserve, Protect, Defend the Constitution’ will be actually our own epitaph, for by standing by passively helpless while this individual remade the country, whose founding principles he hates, in his own image, we cemented our own demise.

Presidents of the United States from its inception have felt a pull to leave some form of recognizable imprint on the destiny of the country that would suggest a contribution worthy of the nation’s Olympian founders.  Since the end of World War II, this has been elevated by the nation’s position as the undisputed economic and military superpower in the world.  At its most identifiable, the policy considerations bear the vaunted label of the chief executive himself as the “architect” of the policy – the Truman Doctrine, the Kennedy Doctrine, the Nixon Doctrine, the Reagan Doctrine, the Bush Doctrine.  The establishment of a recognizable doctrine implies the formal intellectual understanding of the world’s various historical forces and the United States’ position within it.  It secures for the President his legacy – a measurable effect upon world history that will have legions of intellectuals debating the doctrine’s merits years after – a permanent accolade to the view of this individual as an effective and wise “leader”.

Last week, President Obama felt the need to use the commencement address at West Point Military Academy to try to put form to his foreign policy actions over the previous 51/2 years as President as a logical and consistent doctrine of international management that he hoped would cement a legacy of his time at the helm.  An Obama Doctrine, as it were.

The tenets of a doctrine tend to allow for a very contracted definition for what in each case was an extremely complex set of policies that drove the machine of the policy and the tremendous patience and investment in seeing it through:                                                        Truman Doctrine : Peace Through Containment                                                                   Kennedy Doctrine : Peace Through Competition of Ideas                                                      Nixon Doctrine : Peace Through Détente and Balance of Power                                            Reagan Doctrine: Peace Through Strength                                                                                Bush Doctrine: Peace Through Freedom as Universal Ideal

The evolution of a doctrine that holds merit is magnified by its survivorship over future administrations and its continuing logic in changing circumstances, but most profoundly by its ultimate success in accomplishing its goals.  The penultimate examples are Truman’s and Reagan’s Doctrines, which are effective bookends of the same strategic overview.  President Truman, burdened with the colossal responsibility of an entire continent in collapse as the detris of a crushing military conflict and facing the ominous reality of a megamilitary power in the Soviet Union with a antithical set of ideals as to a future world, saw presciently in an obscure State Department policist George Kennan a means to achieve peaceful containment sufficient for the time required for a free world to recover from its prostrate position juxtaposed to the Russian dominant force.  Kennan’s famous Long Telegram, published February, 1946, was a foundation on which a whole set of complex structures were laid – the Marshall Plan, NATO, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank – were developed under Truman’s clear headed understanding of how long the battle would take and what on what fields the battles would be fought.

For thirty years, Truman’s doctrine served to provide the United States the breathing time and protection it needed to avoid direct conflict until the time when the free world’s resources could be fully marshaled to secure a permanent result.  That occurred in 1980 with the election of President Reagan.  The Reagan Doctrine was natural outgrowth of the Truman process, though few recognized it as such in its time.  Reagan saw that containment has reached its evolutionary position where the enormous progress of democratic economies were in position to roll back the hegemony of the communist tyranny in the world.  ‘Peace Through Strength’ was the metaphor for the simultaneous release of the economic might of the free world, the advance of technologic innovation into the military force, and the exposure of the deficiencies of the communist world and the aspirations of its subjected populations.  In spectacular form, the combined tenets achieved in the life of the two terms of the Reagan Administration, the victory of this ‘cold war” strategy fruition in the collapse of Russian hegemony in Europe and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991.

What is to be made of President Obama’s attempt to define a ‘premeditated’ thinking to the American actions in an apparent series of passive and confoundingly self-defeating responses to one calamity after another on the world stage?  Is there a thinking process that secures a positive outcome in the parade of foreign policy apparent setbacks in the withdrawal of troops from a hard won victory in Iraq, the simultaneous surge and withdrawal strategy in Afghanistan, the red line declarations and subsequent lack of follow through in Syria, the appeasement strategy for nuclear weapon control with a autocratic Islamist regime in Iran, the aggressive military detachment of a functional government from Libya into the current dangerous  chaos that cost America a terror attack and loss of an Ambassador and that rules the Libyan people today?   What doctrine describes the dithering support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the demonization of the Mubarak and now Sisi regimes, the peripheral disappointment and minimal sanctions for a bald land grab of the Crimea by Russia, and the continuing whining regarding past American policies?

The doctrine of Obama as outlined in his West Point speech shows the reality that the ‘doctrine’ followed the disparate actions, and not the other way around.  The speech, a collection of verbosities and generous interpretations of outcomes, suggests the Obama Doctrine to be ‘Peace Through Controlled Decline’.  America must lead and when necessary militarily without asking anyone’s permission, but not”rushing into military adventures without thinking through the consequences, without building support or legitimacy for our actions“.  America must not be responsible for crises in the world that do not involve our direct national security interests, but “needs to energize the global effort to combat climate change, a creeping national security crisis that will help shape your time in uniform, as we are called on to respond to refugee flows and natural disasters, and conflicts over water and food, which is why, next year, I intend to make sure America is out front in putting together a global framework to preserve our planet.” The concept of American Exceptionalism is not a foreign concept to this President, simply a concept that has been misinterpreted by all the Presidents before him –  “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.”  America must be prepared to face her enemies with complete resolve and where necessary military action and sacrifice but only with the near certainty of no collateral damage- ” But as I said last year, in taking direct action, we must uphold standards that reflect our values. That means taking strikes only when we face a continuing, imminent threat, and only where there is no certainty — there is near certainty of no civilian casualties, for our actions should meet a simple test: We must not create more enemies than we take off the battlefield“.

Doctrines and Legacies often intertwine, but the more modern of our politicians progressively confuse that legacies are earned, not managed. The genetic flaw in President Obama’s makeup is his confusion of instinctual intelligence for the hard work of learned strategy.  It is depressingly clear every time this President opens his mouth of his alarming ignorance of history and events and his willingness to interpret every event as reflecting his need to insert his personal spin as the defining historical participant . Charles Krauthammer perceptively lays this out in his essay “Emptiness at West Point” which he states more than anything reflected the President’s increasing irrelevance and “smallness”.  In the process of “leading from behind” , the two most politically skinned leaders in American history in Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton have put America in potentially irreversible waters in five short years.  A circular Doctrine that sees contrary events as having been guided by the same unidentifiable plan has placed not only America, but the world, in a perceptively more dangerous place.  Now that is a legacy likely to leave a lasting impression.

 

 

 

On November 30th 2010, Ramparts of Civilization focused on an obscure, in your face politician representing Great Britain at the assembly of the European Union named Nigel Farage as People We Should Know #5, for his aggressive framing of the concepts liberty and national sovereignty in the temple of supra-national rule.

I don’t want to say I told you so, but…

This past week saw ascendance of Nigel Farage’s UKIP party in Great Britain’s local council elections that sent a shudder through the establishment parties and bewilderment from a media press that assumed ideas such as national sovereignty and personal freedom a relic of the past.  Farage’s party is positioned to change the discussion in a hurry.  His Britishcentric party is one of multitude of  similar movements that have blossomed in the United States and Europe.  The response of the establishment is aggressive and predictable, painting the movements as ‘Potemkin village’ parties hiding a dark racist streak and evil intent.  The spector of national socialism is blanketed over the liberal vision of the movements, ignoring the history of the marriage of racial politics and socialist central planning having coming directly from socialism’s fascistic genetics.

The triad of the resurgence of European nationalism is based on three anti’s:  anti-supra-nationalism, anti-tax, and anti-immigration.  From the Netherland’s Geert Wilders Freedom Party to Marine LePen’s National Front in France, local political strength is now starting to effect national politics that has the European Union taking notice.  Local nationalism in Switzerland, Finland, Hungary, and Austria are recognizably recruiting individuals from across society’s spectrum, while Greece’s Golden Dawn has more the shadowing of previous darker traditional European racial xenophobia. America’s Tea Party trails only in that it has yet to identify a unifying national spokesman for the movement.

The national parties each have a local inflection, but the response is to decades of progressive socialist trampling on the rights of individual entrepreneurship and expression, and the progressive superceding of democratic local corrective capacities.  Nigel Farage’s ascendance was initially tied to his disdain for the European Union’s arrogance in naming a “President of Europe” , the remarkably frumpy Belgian bureaucrat Herman Von Rompuy, who has secured that position for the past 5 years, accelerating the rule of Europe by fiat through regulation rather than local democratic debate.

In 782 AD, Charlemagne secured his rule over Europe by massacring 4500 Saxons at Verden who refused to bow to his edict to convert to Christianity and accept his rule.  Von Rompuy has achieved the same power through the massacre of considerably more than 4500 personal freedoms through his onerous regulations.  It is this central un-elected dictate that drives the national parties resurgence.  It is certainly more complicated than the liberal media’s desire to paint the movements as hatred of “other”.

The anti-immigration plank of these parties has left them open to the racism arguments, but the philosophical arguments are certainly more complex.  In many cases, the argument is regarding the progressive assault on culture that liberal doctrine is so aggressively  undertaking.  For the United States, it is what is considered the founding twin tower elements of individual freedom and individual responsibility for lives that are being derided, and has led to a resistance in the form of the Tea Party. The principles of limited government with identified checks and balances was placed to prevent a central government from usurping the capacity of individuals to achieve their own vision quests.  In Europe the hard won cultural maturity of Western civilization, forged through hundreds of years of bloody conflict, and  based on the rule of law as secured by the power of elected assembly has been under the attack of unfettered immigration, from cultures with no similar cultural respect for these tenets.  The liberal agenda has been on identifying the world as ruled by an entity known as homosapien, with its herds allowed to freely cross borders and graze in uninhibited fashion on the fruits of the local produce, the herd to be culled and organized by the all seeing, all knowing council of elders, assuring a “fair” distribution of the herd’s resources.

So Nigel Farage’s smile grows and grows, and the scowl of the liberal minders gets more scowly by the minute.  They are infuriated this beer swilling pack smoking politician continues to resonate with the very populations that they are trying to regulate out of existence. The very actions of Farage’s unapologetic beer swilling and pack smoking are the height of insult, because they seem to reflect a statement of personal freedom to voters,  rather than a nasty habit that should be regulated out of Farage’s personal choice for his own good.  In four short years, Farage has made the transition from derided peripheral clown to socialist globalism’s worst nightmare, a politician who makes sense across social stratifications.

Liberalism will do their best to paint the politicians of the nationalist surge as the second coming of Hitler.  It will be the challenge of these parties to identify with politicians that articulate the positive character of the message without attaching to the baser darkness of the xenophobic crowd.

Once again, we live in interesting times.

 

 

On October 24, 1973, in response to the rapidly deteriorating position of the Arab forces during the Yom Kippur War against Israel, The Soviet leader Brezhnev sent President Nixon a communique stating

“I will say it straight that if you find it impossible to act jointly with us in this matter, we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider taking appropriate steps unilaterally.  We cannot allow arbitrariness on the part of Israel.”

The Russian leader was expressing  to the leader  of the United States its determination to increase its belligerence with any evidence of increasing Israeli advantage in the conflict against its Arab client states.  Brezhnev was implying that the Soviet Union was expecting the United States to stand aside as the Soviets injected military forces into the region, or face the consequences of direct contact between the Cold War foes themselves.

There is no video of the President of the United States’ response to this provocative communique.  There is no public response, as none was necessary.  The United States proceeded to reinforce Israel through supply, move Sixth Fleet forces into the Eastern Mediterranean, and increase the readiness status of its world wide forces.  The Soviet Union understood exactly what this meant.  The President of the Soviet Politburo Nicolai Podgorny pretended  bewilderment at the aggressive response, and expressed it was not reasonable that the Soviet Union be engaged in a war with the United States because of Egypt and Syria, and the KGB head Andropov recommended reduced Russian provocation because the United States was clearly “too nervous”.  The Soviet Union recognized that a regional conflict had been elevated silently by the United States president to the position of the direct national interests of the United States, and was therefore no longer a conflict with controllable consequence.

This moment achieved the elements necessary for all parties to determine to find a way out one of the most dangerous moments for the world since World War II.  The cold war foes the United States and the Soviet Union understood the rules of the game – and the capacities of each without the need for either to assert in public these rules and thereby risk possible humiliation and loss of control of dangerous moments.

This careful understanding of capacity, national interest, regional roles and need to control events without potentially dangerous humiliation was the central focus of all diplomatic efforts during the Cold War.  Presidents, whether Democrat or Republican, knew that, what was at stake when they expressed themselves was inherently and fundamentally more than their personal reputations.  The President of the United States and the Premier of the Soviet Union realized that in public they were the personification of the national identity of their powerful countries, and their spartan use of words had to reflect their profound responsibilities, their actions, to send clear and precisely understood messages as to consequences.

This was the diplomatic concept that President Obama has spent almost six years of Presidency undermining and disassembling.  From the public disdain for the previous President’s foreign policy, to the public apology tour of the President across the world, to the inaction and indifference to constant challenges to American prestige across the globe, to inane public announcements of so called “red lines” for the United States which are crossed then ignored, to the pathetic public “reset” with its traditional global opponent without the careful development of alternative responses for poor behavior- the president has publically and foolishly confused his public persona with the country he represents.  This narcissism is leading to calamity after calamity and somewhere someone is going to make a tragic mistake.

During the republican convention of 2012, the actor Clint Eastwood pretended to have a conversation with the President, speaking  to an empty chair. The unfortunate truth is that this actor’s prop may have been the most illuminating caricature of this President that could possibly be made.  The picture of the empty Presidential podium above has become an unfortunate symbol of this president, as he has with every overexposed public word, become increasingly irrelevant to management of world events.  The latest “red line” announced by the President, the movement of Russian troops into the Ukraine to reinforce their Crimean interests, was humiliatingly ignored as soon as he said it.  The enormous danger of having a leader who believes his personal views are the world’s views is progressively coming to bear.  Having the most powerful country in the world, led down an incalculable path by the most irrelevant man in the world,  is a story that is going to have a tragic ending, and stories like that, are ominous and ugly for all of us inhabitants.