Many Prefer that US Continue to Police the World

By MARK ANDERSON

Chicago nnIt seems Washington’s consensus foreign policy should forever consist of America leading and bleeding to police the world. And there’s no ironclad guarantee that other nations will lend America sufficient financial and military support.

That’s the crux of a Chicago speech given Oct. 18 by former NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

The former Danish Prime Minister, who headed NATO from 2009-2014, said the US cannot be a mere gatekeeper in leading a global crusade against terror.

Instead, Rasmussen said the US must continue spending the multi-billions required to be the world’s invincible top cop, since, in his view, America’s the only nation with the resources and the prestige to do so.

He bluntly stated, “Whether you like it or not, you’re destined to lead.”

That was the tip of the spear in his speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA), given to the audience as if he was speaking directly to the American people.

The CCGA is the former Chicago Council on Foreign Relations—a plutocratic cousin of the Rockefeller-linked Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The CCGA has some 200 programs a year dedicated to a world economic and military order in which the US must avoid “isolationism” of any kind and remain the permanent leader in the nebulous “war on terror.”

All nationalistic or America-first tendencies, no matter how slight or well-reasoned, are dismissed or condemned. That stance unavoidably requires surrendering degrees of US independence to an internationalist system that is not altogether in line with our Constitution.

Furthermore, Mr. Rasmussen made it clear that the Bretton Woods economic conference, which happened when WW II ended (under his hero, President Harry Truman), gave the world what Rasmussen called “a rules-based liberal democratic world order.”

And that economic order, he said in almost sacred terms, is worth defending to the death, even if it means that America’s men and women in uniform must be the primary protectors.

Strange, I don’t recall any oath that says Americans should defend the Constitution from all enemies, and defend Bretton Woods from the same.

The overriding problem with Bretton Woods, held in New Hampshire in 1944, is that it laid the cornerstone for the eventual World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

And those agencies are “birds of a feather” with NAFTA, CAFTA and other alphabet-soup trade deals that have exported or closed much of America’s industrial base, with steep job losses. Moreover, the IMF has toppled poorer nations with unpayable debt schemes, which in turn causes the very unrest and violence that the US, as top cop, is often summoned to quell.

Yet, Rasmussen went a step further and proposed a never-heard-of “Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Area,” or TAFTA—a grid for even more trade deals likely to hammer the shrinking middle class even more. Must we go down this road again?

Rasmussen seemed sold on his own arguments and many in the Chicago audience apparently agreed. But as the US retools for a new president and a new Congress, his arguments should be greeted with plenty of questions. Here’s one: Should America continue a world-policing role it has been carrying out for decades already, much to the depletion of blood and treasure, while arguably making more enemies than it has defeated?

And, by the way, we’re getting painfully close to war with nuclear-armed Russia, especially by way of Syria, and it cannot be stated with total confidence that the West is always wearing the “white hats” these days, as the former NATO head would have you believe. So, in the name of sanity, it’s time to look beyond Rasmussen and the rest of the internationalist clique and seek wiser counsel.

Mark Anderson is a veteran journalist who divides his time between Texas and Michigan. Email him at truthhound2@yahoo.com.

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2016

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