“I’ve listened to countless speeches in this hall, but I can say this: None were bolder, none more courageous and forthright than the one delivered by President Trump today” –Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
The wisdom of President Trump’s United Nations speech last week was nothing less than a demonstration to that dubious organization of how it might adopt the timeless political principles of the American founding—and a proclamation, in fact, that the international body must do so if it is to retain any interest at all for Americans. Against the sophism known as international law, Trump advocated the reality of the democratic politics of sovereign nations.
Trump’s stinging political language—e.g., Venezuela’s “socialist dictatorship,” “radical Islamic terrorism,” and of course “Rocket Man”—drew appropriate attention, but Trump went well beyond those jibes to expose the series of misconceptions upon which the U.N. is mistakenly based.
For decades, the U.N. has presented the spectacle of its member dictatorships claiming to protect human rights or terrorist regimes speaking for supposed shared goals of a common humanity. It is a farce. Trump’s attacks, with his American alternative, exposed the twisted logic that led to these absurdities. They are the creation of Woodrow Wilson, who was both the prominent political scientist of his day and 28th U.S. president, a theorist who—unfortunately—was afforded the opportunity to put his ideas into practice.
In keeping with his distortion of American domestic politics, Wilson is also behind the fault in our foreign policy. The foundation of Wilsonian political science is a repudiation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence and a counter-declaration that the only hope for reforming America is in abandoning equal natural rights. According to Wilson, America had to be deconstructed—a task Wilson assigned to the rule of experts in an administrative state the objective of which was to replace constitutional government.
In foreign policy Wilsonianism attempts to replace low and unexceptional American national interest with the supposedly noble interests of “humanity.” His idea for a League of Nations was advanced to pursue this goal. Lurking behind the push for and support of this object are the academic musings of the young scholar Wilson, who argued that socialism was really the perfection of democracy.
Socialism denies that individual rights produce a private sphere safe from the control of government—so private property is always at risk, as is the individual conscience.
This corruption of democracy and lowering of the meaning of humanity sets the stage for the thuggish third world regimes who—without surprising those who understand the corrosive roots of the U.N.—seem to dominate it. This relativism is keeping, too, with Franklin Roosevelt’s conception that the U.N. would make Stalin’s Soviet Union a key member. Progressive political philosophy and economics saw increasing international order—irrespective of the means used to produce that order—as the inescapable goal of world history.
Eventually humanity would see a global administrative state that would produce human security by banishing famine, disease, and war. Of course, the elimination of war by a global entity would mean the snuffing out of “rebellions” (such as that of the Americans against the British Empire) and the establishment of what amounts to a global tyranny. It would be the sole possessor of weapons and the master of the force required to use them.
In place of this parade of horrors, President Trump’s U.N. remarks recommended America’s unique version of sovereignty, a sovereignty of the people, all created equal, against arbitrary government.
Trump’s proposed reconstituting of the U.N. has the same purpose as his ambition to reconstitute American politics: to prevent tyranny and protect individual freedom. Trump repudiates the Wilson-FDR view of globalist order to reclaim the exceptional character of American sovereignty:
The greatest in the United States Constitution is its first three beautiful words. They are: “We the people.”
Generations of Americans have sacrificed to maintain the promise of those words, the promise of our country, and of our great history. In America, the people govern, the people rule, and the people are sovereign. I was elected not to take power, but to give power to the American people, where it belongs.
Trump thus repudiated the language of the globalist foreign policy elites, both Left and Right, with their talk of “realism” and “idealism” and “the end of history.” Globalism affirms the Hegelian insistence that only the “rational is real,” making transnational rules—independent of citizen consent—the sovereign ones. Such rules, we are told, would serve to replace the “anarchy of freedom”—a power diminishing thing globalists appear to fear much more than straight up tyranny—as we see attempted in socialist dictatorships:
The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented. From the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela, wherever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and devastation and failure.
Here, Trump was denouncing not only the Maduro dictatorship in Venezuela but also the reigning Wilsonianism in the United States.
In place of European distortions of Western Civilization, Trump wants Americans to appreciate the heritage of their revolution, both its religious and philosophic bases, which should be the model of the democratic revolutions throughout the world. One of the greatest American patriots, John Adams, wrote that the American Revolution was “effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.”
In other words, Trump brought to the world stage what he gave to America: blunt speech about political reality that defies the elites who blindly support international order over the national interest.
The U.N. speech makes clear that Trump’s version of sovereignty requires fundamental principles of natural rights in the formation of a social contract among citizens—equality, liberty, consent of the governed, and constitutional government. In deconstructing the administrative state at home, Trump is restoring borders, emphasizing political economy over international economics, and reestablishing American military power. As this promotes the common good, so all nations, each in its diverse ways, can promote the good of all nations by striving to be their own best version of themselves:
The United States of America has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world, and the greatest defenders of sovereignty, security, and prosperity for all.
Now we are calling for a great reawakening of nations, for the revival of their spirits, their pride, their people, and their patriotism.
The “first bond” of a nation, Trump noted, is to its own people: “This bond is the source of America’s strength and that of every responsible nation represented here today.” We do not advance the cause of “humanity” by surrendering our sovereignty to the amorphous goals of theoretic politicians governing Utopias that have never and will never exist. A sovereign nation has a duty to its actual citizens in the here and now if it seeks to preserve a future of peace and prosperity going forward. That is what Trump explained, in plain language, to the denizens of the U.N. and to their partisans at home.
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Splendid discourse, Dr. Masugi.
PRESIDENT TRUMP’s U.N. speech should be read aloud just prior to the National Anthem at every NFL football game.
Forty-two (42) minutes may be too long. “…To overcome the perils of the present and to achieve the promise of the future, we must begin with the wisdom of the past. …We will fight together, sacrifice together, and stand together for peace, for freedom, for justice, for family, for humanity, and for the almighty God who made us all. …”
Security. Prosperity. Sovereignty. Play Ball!
Along with the Gettysburg Address and the excerpts from the Federalist Papers. The Federalist Papers are not even taught below college level. Many people do not know what they are.
40 million Kurds have waited 98 years on Woodrow Wilson’s promise of self-determination:
“…What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing peculiar to ourselves.
It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice
and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world, as against force and selfish aggression.
All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us. …”*
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/558aedd4c5af1d2485c876afb938dadfb17d7a60d7a10b3ed16fd9b7d9ea929a.jpg
Iraqi Kurds celebrate with the Kurdish flag in the streets of the northern city
of Kirkuk on September 25, 2017, as they vote in a referendum on independence.
(AFP PHOTO AHMAD AL-RUBAYE, for Times of Israel.)
Five million Iraqi Kurds were eligible to vote on Sept, 25, 2017, ninety-eight years after the Treaty of Versailles.
Might take a bit longer for” justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world.”
3.440, 616 votes were cast, 91.83% voted YES: The ballot was available in Kurdish, Arabic, Turkish and Syriac and presented the question, “Do you want the Kurdistan region and the Kurdistani areas outside the region’s administration to become an independent state?”
http://www.rudaw.net/RefLanding.aspx?pageid=329292
*“Fourteen Points Speech” A speech delivered by President Woodrow Wilson of the United States to a joint session of the United States Congress on January 8, 1918, intended to assure the country that the war was
being fought for a moral cause and for peace in Europe after World War I.
The Fourteen Points became the basis for the terms of the German surrender, as
negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and documented in the Treaty of Versailles.
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“practical strength rooted in moral confidence”
Best six words of this century, from:
“Israel’s Lamentable Temple Mount Appeasement”
By: Ben Weingarten September 21, 2017
http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/israels-lamentable-temple-mount-appeasement/
The internet is the battleground for “practical strength rooted in moral confidence”.
amgreatness.com needs to stop the spam trolls. They seem to be targeted bots painting commenters for cyberwar, not random at all.
I just flagged and blocked another one, but it makes me less inclined to speak here: American Greatness should be safe from cyber attack.
I wish I had lived in the Age of Political Pamphlets. The Federalist Papers did not have electronic attachments trying to hack Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison into silence.
Kurdish Independence would upset a lot of apple carts in the MidEast. The International community is opposed because Turkey and Iran are opposed. If a Kurdish state were created, it would be an island surrounded by hostile nations, not unlike Israel. That of course would make them a reliable ally. Kurds as a nationality seem far more business like and far less given to exremism than much of the mideast. I have been wondering why it has not been initiated already.
Turkey’s Kurds live in the watershed of the Tigris and Euphrates. The rainfall, and feeder rivers in Iraqi Kurdistan is part of that watershed. The Tigris is the border between Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, where Syria’s Kurds have established their autonomous Rojava. The Euphrates enters Syria at Jarabulus, just west of Kobane, also in Rojava.
I can not find a map that overlays where the Kurds live in all four nations with the watershed, but this map of Iraqi Kurdistan shows the Tigris south through Mosul to Laqlaq as “Areas claimed by the Iraqi Kurdish Government”: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/afe4b3e918e2a9bc5916aa2bdae9ac9ef7ecefb17553b58249981b09d22fb069.png
This is the best map I could find of the Tigris-Euphrates watershed: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b5ebfd0187be6c36e54e6939f5841f2ededb7c6b580c7b4ec928a4732c8dd461.jpg October 2015 Iraq watershed water-from-the-euphrates-and-tigris-rivers-is-shared-by-turkey-syria-and-iraq Source: a 2015 report on malnutrition and water resources:
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2015/10/24/is-malnutrition-the-cost-of-civilization/
That 2015 report on malnutrition noted: “The world’s first international water treaty, a cuneiform tablet now hanging in the Louvre, ended the war between Lagash and Umma.” That was in 2,350 BCE, when Mesopatamians spoke Sumerian…in what is now southern Iraq.
Turkey, Syria, and Iraq have had many meetings to resolve water issues since the 1960’s, but this review stops in 2003. Other reports have some meetings until 2011, when Syria’s civil war started.
http://www.transboundarywaters.orst.edu/research/case_studies/Tigris-Euphrates_New.htm
The Mosul dam was a great concern when ISIS took over Mosul, but the Kurds never let ISIS get control of the dam.
Iraqi Kurds would be ideal arbiters of the water issues between Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. It is probably why Syria is now open to negotiation with Rojava after ISIS is destroyed. A good way for Iraqi Kurds to ‘change the conversation’ would be to call for a quadri-lateral with Turkey, Iraq, and Syria on water allocation of the Tigris-Euphrates.
Kurds, mostly Sunni muslim, are also very tolerant and inclusive of other minorities, especially the Yazidis, and Christians so displaced from Iraq and Syria, by wars, and ISIS.
Hi Ken,
Are you insane? If you want to fix the UN, move its headquarters to Brussels, cut its funding by 90% and then have the USA quit.
Lol, the bulk of the bureaucrats at the UN are thieves and incompetents who view concepts such as free speech and the rule of law as threats to their livelihood. Why exactly should the US continue to indulge them?
I liked Trump’s speech. Trump is ignoring the reality that in order to gain power, the UN must gain governing and administrative power over independent nations. The U.N. wants power and they are going to continue to try to creep and wedge starting with seemingly benign treaties such as “international children’s rights” and “disabled rights”. These treaties if signed would give the U.N. power to interfere in domestic policy, to interfere in the operations of U.S. social service organizations, the expenditure of tax dollars and possible overriding of state and local laws. Fortunately, the U.S. has not signed on to any of these treaties and hopefully never will.