Albright And The New World Order

If it's the New World Order you want, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is ready to serve it up. Speaking at commencement exercises at Harvard in June, Madame secretary delivered herself of about as clear a statement of the globalist agenda as the world's globo-crat elites are willing to unveil. But once you penetrate her code words, what you see is an agenda that most Americans will want no part of.

The dominant metaphor for Mrs. Albright's speech was the Marshall Plan, and it just so happened that the day of her address was the 50th anniversary of her predecessor's announcement of his neat little scheme for the Americanization of Europe in 1947. Marshall happened to be speaking at Harvard also, which perhaps tells you something.

The Marshall Plan has become one of the holiest cows in the foreign policy establishment's barn, and while it did do a lot for European economic recovery after World War II, it also locked Europe into the post-war American hegemony. European economic and political elites became wedded to their American counterparts, and the Marshall Plan helped make sure that no significant political or economic development would take place in Europe without American approval.

Along with NATO, the Bretton Woods agreement, the United Nations and the founding of the Defense Department and the CIA, the Marshall Plan was a major brick in the architecture of the emerging American empire. For those who like empires, that was justification enough, although the imperial crusade did have some practical justification as a struggle against communism.

But for most of those who designed and pushed the new American hegemony, anti-communism was at best icing on the imperial cake. Now that Bolshevism has vanished as a serious threat, the partisans of the global empire are still crusading.

NATO AS WORLD POWER

Mrs. Albright's purpose at Harvard was to come up with something like cogent reasons why the crusade should keep going, which was no small mission. The best she or anyone else can do is regurgitate all the bromides about "America's responsibility,' picking up the burden of leadership" and avoiding another Hitler. Of course there is no Hitler or Stalin or even a measly little Kaiser around to justify continuing the crusade, but not to worry. Mrs. Albright managed to invent new enemies anyway.

"Unlike Marshall's generation," she throbbed, "we face no single galvanizing threat. The dangers we confront are less visible and more diverse, some as old as ethnic conflict, some as new as letter bombs, some as subtle as climate changes and some as deadly as nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands."

We may concede Mrs. Albright's assumption that all these are evils, but it's still not clear why it's America's business to fix all of them or even how we could vix anyof them. Nevertheless, she had some ideas along those lines too.

"To defend against these threats, we must take advantage of the historic opportunity that now exists to bring the world together in an international system based on democracy, open markets law and a commitment to peace.' Well, there you have it. Without using the phrase "New world Order," the secretary managed to convey the basic idea of a global state that the phrase expresses.

"An international system," of course, could simply mean an informal consensus among independent states to adhere to certain rules and pursue certain goals, but that's not quite what Mrs. Albright had in mind. The "system" is going to be "based" on 'democracy, open markets, law and a commitment to peace." "Democracy" can only mean reconstructing the internal political systems of sovereign nations to suit the tastes of the globo-crats, and don't imagine that American "democracy" will be exempt.

"Law" is even clearer, since law is (a) formal, written into the actual rules that govern states and (b) compulsive requiring states and their peoples to behave in certain ways. "Commitment to peace" is largely feel-good flap doodle, but the "international system" that gleams in Mrs. Albright's eye would probably involve limiting the sovereign war-making powers of independent states as well as reconstructing their internal social arrangements. "Open markets" is simply a code word for the global free trade that the globo-crats are using to level the living standards of advanced economies like our to those of the Third World.

You can't say that George Marshall and the globo-crats of this generation are rolling over in their graves. What Mrs. Albright was peddling 50 years after his speech at Harvard was largely the same globalist crusade on which he helped embark us. But that crusade had some connection to our real national interests. Mrs Albright's doesn't and why we should want to keep waging this war on enemies that don't exist anymore is a question no globo-crat can answer.