Reaganism vs. the New World Order
The dedication of the Ronald Reagan Library in November 1991 was a happy victory party for those who call themselves the Reagan Alumni – the grassroots conservatives who made it all happen. Several thousand of the faithful gathered on a mountain top in Simi Valley, California, to rejoice that they have found their “shining city on a hill.”
These were the remnant of the 27,000,000 Americans who voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964, kept the faith, stayed the course, discovered a new leader in an ex-movie star and after-dinner speaker, and carried him into the White House. It took faith, dedication and perseverance on the part of many people to accomplish that, considering the tremendous forces arrayed against them.
Ronald Reagan has had a momentous and lasting effect on America. He mainstreamed conservatism and made it the wave of the future. He proved that the key to economic well-being and more jobs is tax cuts, not government handouts and intervention. He made us proud to be Americans and he restored respect for traditional values. That includes the work ethic; he quoted his mother, Nellie Reagan, who taught him that, “when the going gets tough, you roll up your sleeves, not wring your hands.”
Reagan proved that military strength is the key to peace, victory over our enemies around the world, and liberation for the captive peoples. He won the Cold War without firing a shot. He started the tide that toppled the “evil empire” and knocked down the Berlin Wall. He replaced Mutual Assured Destruction with his Strategic Defense Initiative. In his speech at the dedication, Reagan reminded us that “a strong America is always desirable and necessary in this world.”
No politicians were visible among the thousands who attended the Library dedication, or at least nobody noticed any, except for the unique appearance of the five living Presidents. A cluster of media huddled on the sidelines, but they were just bystanders not players in the event. The day
belonged to the grassroots Americans who had invented and nurtured the conservative movement.
The joint appearance of all five men who have been President of the United States made the day historic. Ronald Reagan had run for President against each of the other four: against Nixon in 1968, against Ford in 1976, against Bush in the 1980 primaries, and against Carter in the 1980 general election.
Richard Nixon best fingered the ultimate meaning of the Reagan Presidency: “Ronald Reagan was on the right side, standing with the forces of good against the forces of evil in the world.” Indeed, history has justified the righteousness of his message. Nixon recalled that as Vice President he had traveled to Moscow and heard Nikita Khrushchev boast, “Your grandchildren will live under Communism.” Nixon had then responded, “Your grandchildren will live in freedom.” This week, Nixon admitted, “I was sure Khrushchev was wrong, but I was not sure I was right. Thanks to Ronald Reagan, my prediction came true.”
Gerald Ford pointed out what was so unique about Reagan. He is “able to articulate the highest hopes and deepest beliefs of Americans. People trust Ronald Reagan.” Indeed, they do. Ford added, “The United States won the cold war by staying strong and free.”
President George Bush praised Reagan for “leading the tide toward conservatism.” Bush said that Reagan “embodies the American character” and noted that “the oldest President of the United States was the youngest in spirit.”
At the Reagan Library dedication, emcee Charlton Heston recited some relevant lines from famous Americans ending with Abe Lincoln’s words, “Let us finish the work we have begun.” The grassroots Americans who recognized a leader in Ronald Reagan are now-looking for a new leader to finish the work of the Reagan Revolution.
At this time, they are uncertain about who will inherit the Reagan mantle, but they are sure someone will, because they share Reagan’s own optimistic faith in America. In his speech at the Library dedication, which was authentic Reaganism, he said: “America is no accident but part of God’s plan. . . . We Americans were uniquely situated to start the world over.”
The Fall of the Wall, and Gorbachev
I had the privilege of seeing the Berlin Wall in May 1990, at a wonderful moment in time when half of it had been demolished and half was still standing. That was a memorable experience. The 12-foot-high concrete wall, which stood all around the city of West Berlin from 1961 until 1989, was the supreme monument to the failure of Communism and to the yearning of men to be free – a yearning so passionate that they will risk any danger to reach freedom. The Wall proves that, even in the 20th century, men will still say, as Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death.”
A few months later, it thrilled the hearts of all longtime anti-Communists to see the noose around the neck of the mammoth statue of the founder of the Soviet secret police, and then see that evil man symbolically hanging from the gallows in front of the jeering Moscow crowd before he bit the dust. It’s impossible to count the numbers of deaths and the human misery and terror caused by the KGB and its predecessors over the past 70 years.
When I visited Eastern Europe on that 1990 trip, it was so refreshing to hear the Eastern Europeans speak out openly against Communism for the first time in some 70 years. They clearly understood, in a way that most Americans do not, that Communism itself is the enemy, not just the dictators who were so unceremoniously dislodged in the wave of liberation that was sweeping across the Soviet bloc.
Many Eastern Europeans with whom I spoke credited President Ronald Reagan’s widely-quoted phrase that the Soviet Union is an “evil empire” as the start of the anti-communist liberation movement. As that descriptive phrase reverberated behind the Iron Curtain, the captive peoples
were encouraged that an American President spoke words which they dared not utter.
I asked one member of Parliament in Hungary how long it has been since anyone believed in Marxism-Leninism. She replied, “Nobody believes in Marxism-Leninism; I have never met anyone who believes in Marxism-Leninism.”
I asked another member of Parliament in Hungary what he thought of the then prevailing American policy that Gorbachev was good for the West because of his moderate policies of
change, and that the United States should aid him politically and financially in order to keep him in power because the alternative might be worse. The Hungarian called this policy “disgusting and ignorant.” Calling Gorbachev “a great historical loser” who was gracefully retreating before the forces of history, this Hungarian leader predicted that no amount of money could keep Communism in place in the Soviet Union because the empire was crumbling from within.
Search for Stability vs. Liberty
From 1917 to 1989, Communist stability was protected by killing dissidents and escapees. Gorbachev deserves the credit for making the decision not to shoot those trying to flee across
the Iron Curtain. But that was the beginning of the end of his power because Communism cannot be maintained without terror.
That was very good news for those who cherish freedom, but it was bad news for the international bankers and multinational corporations who value stability more than liberty. The birth of freedom usually comes with volatile instability; in fact, freedom is generally not very orderly.
The eagerness of powerful bankers and businessmen for stability explains the mystery of why the Bush Administration worked so long and so hard to prop up Gorbachev, long past the point when it was clear that he was just a has-been Communist politician trying to hang on to the bureaucracy which the people inside the former Soviet Union hate with a passion. All the talk about “democracy” in the Soviet Union was fraudulent window-dressing because Gorbachev was
never elected.
This peculiar passion for stability is indicated by the rumor, no doubt apocryphal, that one of the upper floors in the State Department has a room called the Shrine, and every day Secretary James Baker and emissaries from President Bush and the Secretary of Commerce gather there to pay homage.
When this Shrine was supposedly installed a year ago, Mikhail Gorbachev was one of its High Priests and Saddam Hussein was the Devil to be exorcised. The United Nations was the “mecca” toward which all faces turned, and all the incantations ended with the holy response: “New World
Order.” There was no problem in passing the collection plate to support missionaries for this new religion. The multinationals and the international bankers are quite willing to donate petty change to win converts to the religion of Stability because they are betting that the bread they put on the waters will come back to them a thousandfold in taxpayer subsidies for their “sales” to nonpaying “customers” in Russia.
The reason why the international corporations wanted to keep Gorbachev in power and the Center as the government to deal with is the large amounts of money that the big banks
and corporations had loaned him. Who else could be called on to repay the loans, or at least the interest on the loans?
The Bush Administration calls it a good investment to give the exSoviets billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer-paid cash and other goodies. We are being told that a massive infusion of short-term “humanitarian” aid and long-term financial credits, all underwritten by the U.S. taxpayers, is a good “investment.” But there is no evidence to support that notion. It’s only a good “investment” for the multinationals who want to make U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed “sales” or loans. Paper promises of vague moves toward a free market economy are not enough to justify billions of dollars of U.S. aid.
The Bush Administration is talking about reducing our armed services by 700,000 men in order to make funds available for aid to the Russians. But why don’t the Russians reduce their standing army by 700,000 and put those men to work doing productive things, such as building housing,
making the trains and buses run on time, or transporting fuel and parts to activate idle equipment? Empty shelves in Russia are not caused by shortages, but by the failure of a state-controlled distribution system.
Night after night on U.S. television in December, we were told that America was suffering from a recession because Americans weren’t buying enough for Christmas. But it would have been very easy for retail stoics to have increased their “sales” if they could sell to nonpaying customers who would send the bills to the American taxpayers.
The Cost of the New World Order
It’s beginning to look as though New World Order means the American taxpayers assuming the burden of propping up and financing whatever boundaries, corrupt regimes, and deadbeats the international bankers and the multinational corporations want. The big banks loaned money to Gorbachev on terms that they would never give to Centerville Construction Company of Middletown, America, or to John Q. Farmer in Middlefarm, America. Why should the American
working man and woman be forced to donate to building the economy of the Soviet Union? Does the Soviet style of government and economy really matter enough to John Q. Truckdriver or Suzie Stenographer that they want to pay for it?
The banks want the U.S. taxpayers to cover their losses, either directly or through such middlemen as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), and the Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im).
Their foremost wheeler and dealer, Robert Strauss, pleaded on CBS’s Face the Nation to “give democracy a chance in Russia.” Translated, that means let companies like Archer-Daniels-Midland (where Strauss served as general counsel and a member of the board of directors for 10 years before becoming Ambassador to the Soviet Union) bill the American taxpayers for the shipment of billions of dollars worth of food products.
The foreign handout artists have revived an old smear word to hurl at those who oppose their designs. They yell “isolationist” at anyone who opposes the racket of picking the pockets of American taxpayers for the benefit of foreigners or multinational corporations.The word is an irreIevancy — there is no way America could possibly enjoy “isolation.” We have bases all over the world; our Navy patrols the seas; our space ships patrol the skies.
The issue is, is our policy designed to protect America, or is it serving special interests at home and other nations abroad?
Our record of trying to play Grand Master and moving foreign rulers around on the chess board of international politics has not scored very well. The Shah, Batista, Marcos, Somoza, Baby Doc, and Diem were all toppled with the approval of the U.S. State Department – but who can say that those countries are better off (or that the world is safer) as a result? Any American President who thinks he can keep “order” in the world should be asked if he is ready to take on the task of bringing peace to Ireland.
Two wars that we didn’t win, more than 100,000 battle deaths, the humiliation of defeat in Saigon, and tens of billions of taxpayer dollars wasted on foreign giveaways, have soured the American people on the whole idea of trying to run the world and settle other nation’s disputes. George Bush was incredibly lucky with his Gulf War victory, which came about almost without American casualties or sacrifice. It is not believable that such a uniqueevent could be repeated, nor is it credible that the nation’s enthusiasm for liberating Kuwait could have been sustained over a longer period.
The issue is not isolationism or interventionism, or whether our priorities are foreign or domestic, or even war or peace. The issue is whether our government is pursuing an America First policy or an America Last policy. We’re fed up with playing Uncle Sap for the rest of the world.
Will the U.N. Dictate the New World Order?
President Bush’s New World Order appears to include an expanded role for the United Nations to make our international policy decisions. This is unfortunate. It would be better if the U.N. remained what it was during the 1970s and 1980s: just a side show in the heart of New York City, where overpaid representatives from a hundred foreign nations vied with one another to criticize America.
The vehicle for this new role is several United Nations treaties which are lurking in the U.S. Senate cloakroom awaiting ratification. Despite repeated invocation of the word “rights” (civil, political, economic, social, cultural, women’s, child’s), these U.N. treaties would not give Americans any
rights whatsoever.
They would not add a minuscule of benefit to the marvelous human rights proclaimed by our Declaration of Independence, guaranteed by our Constitution, and extended by our federal and state laws. The treaties actually imperil existing American rights by using treaty-law to change U.S. domestic federal and state laws and to upset the balance of power within our unique system of federalism.
These U.N. treaties were signed years ago by President Jimmy Carter and lay dormant in a bottom drawer all during the Reagan Administration. They should stay there because they would override provisions of our Constitution, create a host of new litigation, subject us to supervision by busybody bureaucrats in the United Nations, and diminish our national sovereignty.
The centerpiece of this cluster of treaties is the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which President Bush recently asked the Senate to ratify. It would have all the above adverse effects.
Article 26 illustrates the dangers of writing treaty-law with terms which have no legislative or judicial definitions in international law, and which may be defined in the future by non-American bodies. Article 26 states: “All persons are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.” The phrase “equal protection of the law” is well defined in American law to mean not that every person must be treated equally, but that persons
similarly situated must be treated equally, and that the classification for different treatment must be rationally prescribed by a legislature. In the U.N. treaty, the phrase is a blank check to an international tribunal which no one can assume will accept the U.S. definition.
Article 5(1) and Article 20 of the treaty conflict with our First Amendment by forbidding “propaganda for war” and “incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.” Who is going to decide those terms? And who will enforce the U.N. prohibitions?
This treaty forbids “discrimination” on the ground of sex (as well as other factors) and would not permit any deviation from this strict requirement even “in time of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation.” The treaty would thus override U.S. laws that exempt women from registration and conscription.
This treaty would change the marriage laws of most of our 50 states by imposing an equality that would take away fundamental legal rights now possessed by American wives. The treaty would also take away the rights of state legislatures to enact the marriage laws desired by the people of each state.
Article 6 requires that capital punishment “be imposed only for the most serious crimes.” Do we want the U.N. bureaucracy deciding what is “serious” rather than our own legislatures and juries?
Article 50 is a tremendous interference with the distribution of power in the American federal system because it would invest the Federal Government with power to enforce the treaty in “all parts” of our country “without any limitations or exceptions.” Under our federal system, the Federal Government has no jurisdiction over many areas of law, but the treaty would purport to change all this.
The treaty sets up a Human Rights Committee of 18 members (on which the United States might not have even one member) to which other governments could complain that we are violating the treaty. This provides another route for anti-American propaganda and legal action to wind
through the international bureaucracy.
Recognizing the treaty’s many defects, the State Department has devised complex “reservations,” “statements of understanding,” and “declarations” to purport to safeguard American rights. The validity of such statements is questionable, and our experience with the SALT I Agreements of 1972 should teach us the futility of attaching unilateral statements to international agreements.
We should invite other nations to imitate the American system of individual freedom, private property, and economic prosperity, but trying to accommodate our successful system to failed systems in other lands means that everybody loses. If these U.N. treaties are the guidelines of the New World Order, then Big Brother is rising from the East River in New York City, and Americans are not going to like it at all.
(An analysis of the United Nations Convention on Discrimination Against Women is contained in the Phyllis Schlafly Report of September 1990 entitled “The Follies of the U.N. Treaty on Women. ” An analysis of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is contained in the Phyllis Schlafly Report of April 1991 entitled “Lessons of the Gulf War.”
Soviet Breakup Shows Need for SDI
The breakup of the Soviet Union proves the continuing need to build and deploy our Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).
During the three days of the August 1991 coup, we didn’t know who controlled the awesome Soviet nuclear arsenal, or what their intentions might be. We have to assume that control of Soviet ICBMs was in the hands of a nervous, unstable bunch of putsch thugs, some of whom were drunk or suicidal at critical times.
Just suppose one of the drunks – in panic, or in “fun,” or by mistake – had launched one SS-18. Millions of Americans could be dead today. Just one ICBM streaking toward America would have put George Bush in the hot seat with only two options: order a nuclear attack on Russia, or do
nothing. Neither option could save American lives.
Who controlled the Soviet nuclear missiles when the coup plotters put Gorbachev under house arrest? The military and the KGB were split between the pro-coup forces and the anti-coup forces. Nothing in U.S. strategic planning prepared us for this surprise circumstance. Our experts had always assumed that Gorbachev had total “button” control through possession of the computer launch codes.
For the past 20 years, U.S. strategic doctrine has prohibited our building any means of shooting down enemy missiles and has required us to keep our 250 million people totally exposed to nuclear attack. The rationale for this peculiar policy was the assumption that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was controlled by men who could be negotiated with, bargained with, and “treatied” with, and that they would be rational enough to be deterred by the threat of massive retaliation from U.S. weapons.
This doctrine is known as Mutual Assured Destruction. Some of us have always thought it was a MAD strategy, and it is downright ridiculous today. The now-discredited MAD doctrine is based on the assumption that we can afford to ignore military capabilities and rely instead on our President dealing with the enemy and his intentions. But it’s impossible to deal with intentions when we don’t know whose intentions we are talking about.
The breakup of the Soviet Union makes it clear that relying on treaties is absurd. Today’s treaty-signer may be dead, displaced, disgraced, or dumped to Siberia tomorrow. We can’t predict the motives, stability, or sanity of whoever will be in charge next month or next year.
The Soviet Union has 11,000 strategic nuclear warheads mounted on intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine launched ballistic missiles, or strategic bombers. All these tremendously destructive weapons have the capability of hitting American targets. In addition, the Soviets have another 17,000 tactical nuclear weapons that cannot reach the United States. These include cruise and ballistic missiles, bombs on aircraft, and artillery shells.
The Soviet coup should teach us that the only rational U.S. strategy is to protect our people against the capabilities of foreign nations instead of against their presumed intentions. Within the next nine years, six Third World nations are expected to have ICBMs able to deliver nuclear, chemical and biological warheads, and another 15 nations are expected to have missiles with shorter ranges.
We also need missile defenses as an insurance policy against an accidental launch of a missile by anyone, any time, from anywhere. And accidents can happen. In 1986 a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine prowling off our East Coast caught fire and sank. Fortunately, none of its missiles was accidentally launched. In the early 1980s, a Soviet submarine accidentally launched a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile. Fortunately, it happened in Soviet waters and traveled only a few hundred
yards.
Former Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger summed up our challenge: “As long as the world is capable of producing such surprises, we urgently need to develop and deploy an effective space-based strategic defense against the thousands of Soviet nuclear intercontinental missiles, the control of which was dangerously uncertain for at least 72 hours.”
