|
Responsibility #13
(written prior to July 1992)
To the People of the United States of America:
We continue in this essay discussion of the Publius conditions for causing foreign nations to "be much more disposed to cultivate our friendship than provoke our resentment." In the last paper we elaborated on the second condition, "that our trade [be] prudently regulated", with respect to the sale of arms.
In all trade, and in all relations with foreign nations, we should exercise and require reciprocation of the golden rule. That is, do unto other nations as you would have them do unto you.
We should be true believers and consistent practitioners of free trade. There may be times for temporary trade protection measures, while competing nations are actively encouraged to reciprocate free trade policies. But America must resist the pressure of politicians who advocate discriminatory trade measures to protect industries which fail to compete. If we believe in the free enterprise system, it should know no boundaries.
Akin to the sale of arms is the export of materials, that we regulate domestically for the benefit of the health or morality of our citizens. We have been and are, in effect, at war with a number of countries because of their exportation of drugs. We are two-faced, unless we regulate our trade to respect the health and morality of citizens of other nations, to the extent we do for our own people. In later essays measures to enhance the health and morality of our citizens will be proposed.
The third Publius condition is that "our militia [be] properly organized and disciplined." Discipline starts at the top. The top of our military services is the Commander in Chief (the President). After our forefathers declared our independence, they were reluctant to have a strong central government. So they tried the Articles of Confederation, having a single legislative body and no President. We won the Revolutionary War, inspite of the fact that our federation-of-states government was unable to give requisite support to our military forces.
The weaknesses of the federated government, during and after the war, were sorely recognized. As a result our founding fathers created our Constitution. They were still reluctant to establish a strong central government with a powerful President, who was also to serve as Commander in Chief. To protect the country from abuses of office by the President, or military adventurism by the Commander in Chief, the Constitution entailed checks and balances among the President, the Congress, the Judiciary, and the States.
Although the Constitution provided for divided responsibilities and powers between the executive and legislative branches, in foreign policy and in the control of our armed forces, it was quite specific that only the Congress could declare war. As cited in Responsibility #12, only 5 of 200 plus military actions in our history were congressionally declared wars. No matter what name you apply to them (e.g.,police actions) the Korean, Vietnam, and Desert Storm conflicts were full-blown wars. But they were not declared as such by Congress; thereby the constitutional checks and balances were violated.
We reached the nadir of undeclared wars with the Vietnam episode. The conduct and loss of that conflict caused a lack of respect for America throughout the world. It set the stage for the taunting of the USA by several nations, and by international terrorist groups. It contributed greatly to continuing domestic disunity, the present extent of our immorality, and the breaking down of the strength of our families.
In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the Congress sought to recapture legislative authority, that had been relinquished to the President, by passing (and overriding the President's veto of) The War Powers Resolution of 1973. The objectives of the Resolution have failed to be achieved. The executive branch has taken the position that the Resolution is unconstitutional, that the Congress has sought to compromise the prerogatives of the Presidency. The Congress has not forcibly pushed to resolve the impasse. Since passage of the Resolution, four Presidents have determined that U.S. forces should be used to advance American interests.
In four suits filed in federal court, members of Congress sought to have the President's military actions in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, and the Persian Gulf declared unconstitutional. All four times the courts gave Congress the response: if you choose not to confront the President, it is not the task of the Judiciary to do so. The next President proceeded to invade Panama, and to commit nearly our total conventional military capability to full-scale offensive hostilities in Desert Storm, without declarations of war by Congress.
The jury is still out, as to whether the bottom lines for the military actions in the 1980s and early 1990s were good or bad for the USA. They certainly were costly in lives and domestic tranquillity, for the nations upon which we wreaked offensive operations. We will never know, whether we could have achieved the same or better results through patient economic, political and non-offensive military pressures. In any case a number of nations are, as a result, more prone to "provoke our resentment" than "to cultivate our friendship."
Worse still, perhaps, is the disunity that is caused in our country, by the suspicions and allegations that our motives were less than honorable. Could the Presidents' decisions to commit our military forces have been swayed by oil prices, by electorate approval ratings, by reelection prospects, by power for his party, to divert attention from a lack of a domestic policy, to spur a declining or lack luster economy, etc.?
With the end of the Cold War, and with the wholesale rejection of Communism, we have again the opportunity to foster peace and prosperity, for all peoples through an approach to world government. After World War I the League of Nations failed to be effective to these ends, in part due to the lack of participation by America. At the end of World War II there were great hopes for the new United Nations.
In the period October 1946 through February 1949, Publius II authored "The New Federalist" papers. The New Federalist sought "to fill a growing need resulting from the rapid rise of the movement for international federal union, whether on an Atlantic, a European, or a world scale." In the late 1940s the Iron Curtain fell and the Cold War began. The schism between the East and the West, the free nations and communist strongholds, precluded the visions of the United Nations. Now it is time to try again, with much greater prospects of success.
Publius IV
|