Friends, my latest article, about the importance of national sovereignty, is currently soaring like an eagle (a Philadelphia Eagle perhaps?) over the virtual pages of
American Greatness. It's not to be missed, because a reassertion of American independence is what lies at the heart of "America First". Read on...
Sovereignty is Critical, Even in a
Cloud-Based World
First and
foremost, President Trump stands for (you guessed it) “America
First”. This means putting U.S. interests and values ahead of the
interests and values of people overseas, and of the internationalist
elite. It means insisting on trade deals that are fair and that
protect U.S. jobs and technological preeminence. It means avoiding
pointless foreign military adventures and spending our money on
domestic priorities instead. It means requiring our allies to pay
their way and shoulder their share of the burdens of maintaining
global peace and security. It means responding vigorously and
decisively to any and all challenges to our power and our way of
life. Lastly, it means upholding our territorial integrity,
including our borders and our immigration laws.
Nationalist
conservatives like me have been waiting for years for a conservative
Republican President who would give voice to America First
principles, and who would pursue an agenda based on U.S. sovereignty
and self-respect. Now, in Donald J. Trump, we have such a leader,
and not surprisingly the world is aghast. Good, I say! Shake the
world order to its foundations. It's about time. Luckily, there are
nationalists all over the world who share some of President Trump's
goals, both for the international community and for their own
countries. This will make it easier to build a new Trumpian world
order based on sovereignty. Thankfully, progress has already been
made.
There
is, however, a wrinkle to sovereignty which many conservatives have
not yet considered. We want the world to respect the United States
of America, including its territory, its trade interests, and its
laws. There is another side to this equation, however, and that is
the notion that, while we insist on other countries' respect for our
sovereignty, we must also be willing to respect theirs. Sovereignty,
after all, is the idea that a nation-state (any
nation-state) has the right, within its own territory, to make its
own decisions. We cherish this right for ourselves. Thus, to be
consistent, we cannot deny it to other countries.
In the past,
Americans have been too quick to violate the sovereign rights and
territorial integrity of other countries. We have projected military
power globally, especially with airstrikes and drone attacks,
whenever our interests demanded it, without regard to other
countries' rights. We have lectured other nations on the form of
government they ought to choose. We have used economic pressure,
including sanctions, to punish those who run their internal affairs
in a way that conflicts with our interests or values. We have even
invaded and occupied other countries for a long list of reasons, but
rarely, if ever, because our own national security necessitated it.
In a hypothetical
world that truly upheld the principle of sovereignty, all of these
actions would be deeply problematic and would rarely, if ever, be the
stated policy of the government of the United States. Rather, we
would acquire the habit of minding our own business and holding our
tongue when we disagreed with other countries' sovereign decisions –
and in so doing we would be setting them a good example, and perhaps
deterring them from seeking to interfere in our own internal affairs.
If only we had learned this lesson sooner... Would the Russians,
for example, ever have tried to manipulate our election process, if
we had not first stuck our noses into their flawed democracy,
praising dissidents and criticizing the conduct of Russian elections,
as indeed we do in so many parts of the world? It is an interesting
question.
There are
innumerable steps we can take to rebuild trust and confidence in the
key principle of national sovereignty worldwide, but as we speak
Congress is debating whether to take an important step forward. It
is discussing the CLOUD Act, which would create a framework for
resolution of disputes between nation-states related to access to
electronically-stored information. It may sound like an obscure
issue, but it is integral to the future of sovereignty.
The need for
something like the CLOUD Act arises in part from a case currently
before the Supreme Court. The Justice Department has been seeking
emails from Microsoft stored in their servers in Ireland. The U.S
government has taken the view that, if it desires data that can be
accessed in the U.S. via the internet, it need not consider the
privacy laws or the sovereignty of the country where the data is
actually stored. This, however, is a typically imperious attitude on
the part of the U.S. government, which tends to give short shrift to
privacy concerns in general (see the Nunes memo for proof!), and
which considers the sovereignty of other nation-states to be a
secondary concern.
The CLOUD Act
would seek to restore the balance in this equation by requiring the
U.S. government to seek access to data stored overseas via bilateral
agreements and negotiations with the affected sovereign state(s). In
this way, both companies' and individuals' rights to privacy would be
properly protected (we hope), and the sovereign rights of every
country involved would be upheld. Clearly, this is infinitely
preferably to a model whereby the U.S. government could blithely
reach up into the global computing cloud and snatch whatever
information it desired...
Data storage is
but one domain in which the question of sovereignty is germane, and
in which the U.S. has not taken the sovereignty of other countries
especially seriously. Who, then, are the enemies of sovereignty?
Sometimes, they
are deep state bureaucrats, who want no niceties of
constitutionalism, rule of law, or international comity to interfere
with their freedom of action. Sometimes, they are elite
internationalists, who see national independence as an obstacle to
their utopian striving for a New World Order. Sometimes, they are
international capitalists, who prize uniformity and pliability in
governments, rather than real self-government.
Whoever the
enemies of sovereignty may be, they are, in the end, the enemies of
the people of the United States of America, because, as President
Trump said in his State of the Union address, we desperately need
“reciprocity” in our relations with our countries. We need them
to respect our rights and independence, yes, but we need to respect
theirs in return. Any other formulation risks our freedoms and our
way of life, putting them in the hands of globalists and foreigners.
America First
means, therefore, “we'll do it our way, and you do it yours.”
That was what we fought for in 1776, and we should not surrender an
inch of those gains today or in the future.
Dr. Nicholas L.
Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred and blogs
at www.waddyisright.com.
