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For a Free World Order
For those who haven't noticed, the “new world order” proclaimed by President George Herbert Walker Bush before a joint session of Congress on the eleventh of September, 1990 (yes, I know) has pretty much turned out to be a bust. But here it is as he tried to imagine it: We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective -- a new world order -- can emerge: a new era -- freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony. A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor. Today that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we've known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak. This is the vision that I shared with President Gorbachev in Helsinki. He and other leaders from Europe, the Gulf, and around the world understand that how we manage this crisis today could shape the future for generations to come. Apparently President Bush and world leaders did not understand the implications of their own goals, or if they did, their understanding was insufficient, as their management of the Persian Gulf crisis produced no new order, but sought to preserve the old order instead. The result, of course, was violent disorder. Regardless of what anyone thinks about the 2003 Iraq war, we can virtually all agree that had the elder President Bush followed through and eliminated the cause of the 1990 crisis—the Hussein regime—the 2003 war would almost certainly have never been necessary. Toppling the Hussein regime in 1991 would also have sent a very new message to the old order: dictatorships that engage in military aggression and adventurism will no longer be tolerated as they were during the cold war. But Cold War international institutions like the United Nations and NATO were never really reformed following the collapse of the Soviet Union and world communism. Designed essentially to prevent global thermonuclear war between the US and the USSR, these rules never changed even though the game itself has since changed completely. As the world’s first post-collectivist political party, the Liberal Capitalist Party believes it’s time to turn a page in international relations. From the cold war order and the alleged new world order, the time has come for the international community to progress to a free world order, based on the proven western liberal meta-virtues of life, liberty and property, manifested in institutions of representative democracy, capitalism and trade, civil rights, and universal suffrage. During the cold war, it was preferable to support foreign dictatorships that were anti-Soviet rather than throw the geopolitical dice again in an attempt to support foreign liberal reform. Whether intended or not, the support of foreign anti-Soviet dictatorship proved to be the linchpin of of the ultimately successful US policy of Soviet containment. But the cold war is over now. The Soviet Union is no more, and much of the nuclear material from the weapons that were once pointed at us now fuel US nuclear power plants. There is no longer an existential pressure to contend with. Thus the time has come to end the cold war practice of recognizing the world’s dictatorships as legitimate, sovereign national governments. Even though the United States essentially created the United Nations, and hosts it, we don’t really have the political power to dissolve it. And it would take the mightiest optimist imaginable to believe that it is within the realm of possibility to reform the UN with its dismal track record of ineffectiveness and the astonishing depth of its corruption exposed in the wake of the Oil for Food scandal. But mostly the United Nations is beyond the reach of reform because too much power within the organization is held by the world’s dictatorships, and they use this power to protect and further the interests of their junta regimes. Since the UN cannot be reformed, it must be replaced. It must be supplanted by an international organization that is not open to dictatorships as voting members. Being wholly controlled by liberal democracies, this organization will no longer recognize dictatorships as legitimate states, and will no longer recognize unelected governments as sovereign. Free nations will instead only recognize the rights of juntas as properly being no more than that of any other private entity, such as a corporation. As the new body evolves and emerges, the UN will gradually be demoted from an international law making body to an international service agency, which is, after all, exactly what the organization appears to do best. To this end the Liberal Capitalist Party supports the creation of a Treaty of Nations Organization, headquartered in London, England. The primary goal of the organization should be to bring as many nations as possible up to Treaty standards of government and into the Treaty. |
The road to wisdom? Well it's plain
and simple to express:
Err, and err,
and err again,
but less, and less, and less.
-Piet Hein
Big Ideas for a Better World