The fiscal imbalances caused by President Bush’s addiction to deficit spending, by over-indebtedness, by ordinary Americans’ negligible savings, by the huge and growing foreign debt, and by the falling dollar are all still there.

For the time being, the United States is able to issue and sell large quantities of low-cost debt, denominated in dollars, through Treasury bonds.  Right now, they yield less than the inflation rate, but as long as much of the world’s oil continues to be traded mainly in dollars, central banks around the world have to keep holding substantial dollar reserves.  Furthermore, to the extent that the OPEC cartel raises oil prices to capture the dollar’s constantly falling purchasing power vis-à-vis the euro—rather than simply because of chronic excess demand for oil as it peaks—it imposes on Europe the burden of sharing that part of the oil price hike that follows the falling dollar.  This, paradoxically, creates additional built-in support for the dollar, without which its current sickness could have been well nigh terminal.  Other countries’ dollar reserves are still invested in American assets, creating an artificial capital-accounts boost for the U.S. economy.

When the “petro-euro” becomes reality, the global demand for dollars will collapse […] World trade will cease being a scheme in which Washington prints dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy.  The U.S. economy will no longer enjoy the benefits of a gigantic subsidy provided by the goods and services of countries holding their reserves in dollars—notably, by Japan, who imports four fifths of her oil from the Middle East.  The fewer dollars circulating outside the United States will then translate into fewer goods and services that this country can obtain from abroad on what amounts to interest-free credit.  The current-account deficit—at present, $800 billion—will no longer be financed by foreign capital, because its influx would simply cease.  Global demand for shares of U.S. companies and Treasury bonds will collapse.  Without foreign investors, interest rates will zoom into double digits, and the Fed will find inflationary pressures simply irresistible. […]

For too long, Americans have assumed that they could maintain effortless prosperity by investing in assets that produce no profits—dot-coms in the late 1990’s, followed by housing—and then using them to generate spending cash.  Instead of helping America sober up, the Federal Reserve merely postponed the Big One by cutting rates […] More affordable liquidity, as it happens, is no cure for a credit crisis prompted by years of excess liquidity.  The underlying financial malaise is still there.  The Fed has saved the market, albeit temporarily, at the expense of the economy. [...]

Keeping the markets safe from jihadist mischief is necessary.  It will not save them in the long term, however, because the malaise is moral and spiritual.  Just like under San Andreas, the plates move past each other, producing cumulative strain.  The Fault that will produce the global meltdown is the gap between the postmodern heart and mind, the impossibility of ever consuming enough goods and services to feel sated, and the unwillingness to settle the bill for those goods and services in cash.  When mere servicing of the ever-growing tab leaves [...]]]> “The global economy is like the St. Andreas Fault: You know that a terminal disaster is inevitable, but you keep your fingers crossed and try not to think about it,” I wrote in the print issue of Chronicles seven months ago (“Waiting for the Big One,” March 2008). “When a tremor occurs, you often fear it could be the Big One and sometimes panic,” I went on, “but then, when the dust settles, you sigh with relief to find yourself alive and the Golden State still above the ocean.” Well, the Big One is nigh; and here’s the rest of that old column in which I argue that, in the end, the meltdown may be all for the best…

The fiscal imbalances caused by President Bush’s addiction to deficit spending, by over-indebtedness, by ordinary Americans’ negligible savings, by the huge and growing foreign debt, and by the falling dollar are all still there.

For the time being, the United States is able to issue and sell large quantities of low-cost debt, denominated in dollars, through Treasury bonds.  Right now, they yield less than the inflation rate, but as long as much of the world’s oil continues to be traded mainly in dollars, central banks around the world have to keep holding substantial dollar reserves.  Furthermore, to the extent that the OPEC cartel raises oil prices to capture the dollar’s constantly falling purchasing power vis-à-vis the euro—rather than simply because of chronic excess demand for oil as it peaks—it imposes on Europe the burden of sharing that part of the oil price hike that follows the falling dollar.  This, paradoxically, creates additional built-in support for the dollar, without which its current sickness could have been well nigh terminal.  Other countries’ dollar reserves are still invested in American assets, creating an artificial capital-accounts boost for the U.S. economy.

When the “petro-euro” becomes reality, the global demand for dollars will collapse […] World trade will cease being a scheme in which Washington prints dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy.  The U.S. economy will no longer enjoy the benefits of a gigantic subsidy provided by the goods and services of countries holding their reserves in dollars—notably, by Japan, who imports four fifths of her oil from the Middle East.  The fewer dollars circulating outside the United States will then translate into fewer goods and services that this country can obtain from abroad on what amounts to interest-free credit.  The current-account deficit—at present, $800 billion—will no longer be financed by foreign capital, because its influx would simply cease.  Global demand for shares of U.S. companies and Treasury bonds will collapse.  Without foreign investors, interest rates will zoom into double digits, and the Fed will find inflationary pressures simply irresistible. […]

For too long, Americans have assumed that they could maintain effortless prosperity by investing in assets that produce no profits—dot-coms in the late 1990’s, followed by housing—and then using them to generate spending cash.  Instead of helping America sober up, the Federal Reserve merely postponed the Big One by cutting rates […] More affordable liquidity, as it happens, is no cure for a credit crisis prompted by years of excess liquidity.  The underlying financial malaise is still there.  The Fed has saved the market, albeit temporarily, at the expense of the economy. [...]

Keeping the markets safe from jihadist mischief is necessary.  It will not save them in the long term, however, because the malaise is moral and spiritual.  Just like under San Andreas, the plates move past each other, producing cumulative strain.  The Fault that will produce the global meltdown is the gap between the postmodern heart and mind, the impossibility of ever consuming enough goods and services to feel sated, and the unwillingness to settle the bill for those goods and services in cash.  When mere servicing of the ever-growing tab leaves nothing for further consumption, however, the end will be nigh:

The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes anymore—cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones and perils; fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet cloth; every sort of citron wood, and articles of every kind made of ivory, costly wood, bronze, iron and marble; cargoes of cinnamon and spice, of incense, myrrh and frankincense, of wine and olive oil, of fine flour and wheat; cattle and sheep; horses and carriages; and bodies and souls of men (Revelation 18:11–13).

If reasonable men agree that our civilization is spiritually diseased, morally rotten, and demographically moribund, then a colossal, rapidly spreading global economic crisis should be neither feared nor wished away.  It may yet be our last best hope for survival.

The meltdown has to be rapid and brutal, however.  Only the collapse of hoi polloi confidence in the ability of the all-pervasive State to manage relief would force blighted billions to reexamine their lives and their assumptions.  By getting no relief from the collapsing State (including the European Union, the World Bank, the IMF, and Oxfam), they would rediscover self-reliance—or die.  Being disillusioned by progress, they would rediscover the value and force of tradition.  The ensuing struggle for diminishing resources may make them drop the neurotic becoming in favor of just being—that is, surviving.  The Hobbesian mayhem in New Orleans after Katrina offered a glimpse of what is to come.

A predictable benefit for the survivors would be the return of fertility to historically normal levels.  Even in darkest Tuscany or the Upper East Side, children would no longer be seen as a burden, an obstacle to self-fulfilment, and a financial liability.  In the aftermath of the burst bubble, they would regain their traditional value as economic assets and the long-term substitute for collapsed welfare programs, entitlements, and pension systems.  The family would reemerge as the essential social unit.  Amid collapsing political structures, all ideological “propositions” would be recognized as empty abstractions.  Communities linked to their native soil and bonded by kinship, memory, language, faith, and myth would be revived.  And in adversity, the eyes of men would be lifted, once again, to Heaven.

We do not know when this will happen, just as we don’t know when San Francisco will turn into rubble; but when it happens—and it will happen—the American interest demands that it takes the form of a short, sharp shock, utterly unmanageable by the ruling political and economic elite that is destroying us.

The pint is hand drawn over the course of five minutes as the bartender attempts to balance the slightly cloudy elixir, more golden than brown, with the creamy white head of foam. No American bar, even a brew pub, would make a customer wait so long, for fear of losing a sale. Here, the wait simply adds to the expectation, since we have sampled the ReAle already. There’s far more to do and to see in Rome than in Rockford, yet life here moves at a much more human pace.

The bar is literally a hole in the wall in Trastevere, its name painted roughly over an unfinished wooden door. Inside, eight or ten barstools line the bar and the opposite wall, and the bartender stands in a galley barely large enough for him to turn around. With his thin face, light mustache, and long, curly locks flowing down to his shoulders, he looks like a more delicate version of Weird Al Yankovic. That, and the little lamp next to the cash register, with its decoupage lampshade featuring images of Liza Minnelli, briefly give me pause, until the only other patron of the bar, a native Roman, turns and introduces himself.

He apologizes for the heated discussion that he and the bartender have been having. “In Italy, there are only two things that men argue about. And since he—” (tossing his head toward Weird Al) “—doesn’t like soccer, you know it has to be a woman.”

“I like American football—the Chicago Bears,” the bartender tells us, and Mark Kennedy and I explain that our hometown is not far from Chicago. That’s all the prompting that the other patron needs to begin a long disquisition on the superiority of soccer—not just over football, but over every other sport invented by man.

“In all other sports, you can stop the clock and challenge the rulings of the referees. In soccer, the ref’s decision is final, and the play keeps moving. And we have only a limited number of substitutions. Then, if someone gets hurt, you play with one man down.”

All of this “makes soccer more a game of chance than of skill. A weak team and a strong team can end up in a championship game, and the weak team might win. It’s the unpredictability that makes it so exciting.”

There’s more—much more—and I listen politely, but my thoughts have turned elsewhere. Our Italian friend may be talking about soccer rather than roulette or craps, but I hear echoes of Andrei Navrozov. Andrei’s passion for gambling may be (as he suggests) a rebellion against the increasing monotony of the modern world, as exemplified by life in the United States, but I wonder if there’s not something more, something that only a European living in a still vibrant city or town can understand. The men playing the tables at Aspinall’s likely have a somewhat different [...]]]> The weather in Rome has been on the chilly side, but compared with Rockford in January, it’s positively balmy. Warm enough, in fact, to risk a charge of heresy (or at least philistinism) by capping the first full day of The Rockford Institute’s 2008 Winter School with, not a glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, but a pint of beer. And not just any beer, but an unfiltered, heavily hopped light ale named ReAle, from the brewery of the commune of Borgorose, population 4,500, about 70 kilometers northeast of Rome. The ale is reminiscent of the best beers produced by the few remaining local breweries scattered throughout the Midwest. It takes a mass market to make a bad beer, and sadly, in the United States, very few local markets remain. For now, most of Europe has avoided our fate, but the E.U. bureaucrats in Brussels are doing their best to impose it from above.

The pint is hand drawn over the course of five minutes as the bartender attempts to balance the slightly cloudy elixir, more golden than brown, with the creamy white head of foam. No American bar, even a brew pub, would make a customer wait so long, for fear of losing a sale. Here, the wait simply adds to the expectation, since we have sampled the ReAle already. There’s far more to do and to see in Rome than in Rockford, yet life here moves at a much more human pace.

The bar is literally a hole in the wall in Trastevere, its name painted roughly over an unfinished wooden door. Inside, eight or ten barstools line the bar and the opposite wall, and the bartender stands in a galley barely large enough for him to turn around. With his thin face, light mustache, and long, curly locks flowing down to his shoulders, he looks like a more delicate version of Weird Al Yankovic. That, and the little lamp next to the cash register, with its decoupage lampshade featuring images of Liza Minnelli, briefly give me pause, until the only other patron of the bar, a native Roman, turns and introduces himself.

He apologizes for the heated discussion that he and the bartender have been having. “In Italy, there are only two things that men argue about. And since he—” (tossing his head toward Weird Al) “—doesn’t like soccer, you know it has to be a woman.”

“I like American football—the Chicago Bears,” the bartender tells us, and Mark Kennedy and I explain that our hometown is not far from Chicago. That’s all the prompting that the other patron needs to begin a long disquisition on the superiority of soccer—not just over football, but over every other sport invented by man.

“In all other sports, you can stop the clock and challenge the rulings of the referees. In soccer, the ref’s decision is final, and the play keeps moving. And we have only a limited number of substitutions. Then, if someone gets hurt, you play with one man down.”

All of this “makes soccer more a game of chance than of skill. A weak team and a strong team can end up in a championship game, and the weak team might win. It’s the unpredictability that makes it so exciting.”

There’s more—much more—and I listen politely, but my thoughts have turned elsewhere. Our Italian friend may be talking about soccer rather than roulette or craps, but I hear echoes of Andrei Navrozov. Andrei’s passion for gambling may be (as he suggests) a rebellion against the increasing monotony of the modern world, as exemplified by life in the United States, but I wonder if there’s not something more, something that only a European living in a still vibrant city or town can understand. The men playing the tables at Aspinall’s likely have a somewhat different outlook on their gaming than do the blue-haired ladies in lime-green leisure suits pulling the slots at Ho-Chunk Casino.

Today, my wife and I ate lunch at the Hostaria Farnese, a wonderful restaurant not much bigger than this bar, off of the Campo dei Fiori. We had eaten there twice on our previous trip in May 2000, and, other than now being denominated in euros rather than lira, the menu has not changed. Before lunch, we browsed the stalls of the daily market in the Campo, where the same woman gave us samples of the same prosciutto and bresaola that we’d tried over seven-and-a-half years ago.

Rockford’s downtown, over the same period, has been remade more than once, and some storefronts have housed two or three restaurants in succession. The monotony of life in much of America is a monotony of change. The stability of life in Rome is the very opposite of monotony, and perhaps that can make a game of chance more an affirmation of life than an act of desperation.

These thoughts are still inchoate a week later, as I stop in at the corner café for a quick espresso before the afternoon lectures. Quiet in the morning after 6:30 Mass, the café is bustling now, and I’ve finished my espresso before the soccer fan from the bar claps me on the shoulder and calls out, “Buona sera!” We chat briefly as we push our way up to the register, then fall silent as I pull out my wallet and fumble for change. The espresso is 70 eurocents, and I realize with pleasure that the three coins I’ve grabbed without looking make up the exact amount. A perfect espresso; a chance meeting; a random draw; and I walk out onto the cobbled streets of Rome a happy man.

Scott P. Richert is the executive editor of Chronicles.

This article first appeared in the March 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

In Darfur, war erupted in 2003. The rebels initially consisted of two groups: the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA), originally called the Darfur Liberation Front, supported by Eritrea; and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), thought to be receiving aid from Chad as well as Eritrea. Each rebel group has since split into several factions. The result is a kaleidoscopic war pitting Muslim against Muslim, Arab against African, black against black, ethnic group against ethnic group, tribe against tribe, and agriculturalist against nomad. An estimated 200,000 people have died, while another two million have been made refugees.

The response of the U.S. government has been to accuse Sudan of “genocide” in Darfur, to support a U.N. resolution calling Sudan’s actions there “crimes against humanity,” to demand that Khartoum agree to the deployment of a foreign peacekeeping force of up to 26,000 troops in Darfur and allow the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations unfettered access to the region, and to expand U.S. sanctions on Sudan.

In June 2007, Ethiopia launched a war in Ogaden against ethnic Somali rebels who call themselves the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) and are also backed by Eritrea. Many have described the situation in Ethiopia as similar to what is occurring in Darfur. While a U.N. team was permitted by Addis Ababa to visit Ogaden to investigate charges of Ethiopian atrocities, its findings were never released. In the meantime, human-rights groups, the Red Cross, Medicins Sans Frontieres, and independent journalists have been barred or expelled from the region.

Washington’s response has been to support Ethiopia, dismissing stories of atrocities by government troops as rebel propaganda. The Bush administration continues to support the Addis Ababa regime. The White House has not withdrawn one penny of its yearly gift of approximately half a billion dollars in foreign aid and continues to arm and train its military, the largest in Africa; and the Bush administration has declared Ethiopia eligible for the Excess Defense Articles program, which provides the regime with used American weapons and equipment free or at reduced prices.

Why the official outrage over Darfur, but not over Ogaden? There are three reasons: Islam, oil, and China.

Empires have often been established by governments in response to a perceived threat to a country’s security. The threat, real or imagined, is used to justify increased military spending, the establishment of overseas bases, and foreign interventions (political or military, directly or by proxy). If a threat can be depicted as a totalitarian ideology with millions of supporters, such policies can be implemented quickly and with little domestic opposition. The right to security becomes a right to control as many states or regions and their natural resources as possible. The Cold War is one example. Since September 11, the Bush administration has been seeking to emulate that example, claiming it is fighting a world war against “Islamic fundamentalism.” Islam has replaced the Soviet Bloc as the existential threat to America.

The goal of this “War on Terror,” publicly acknowledged by neoconservative supporters of the Bush administration, is to ensure that the United States remains the world’s hegemonic power for the 21st century. Maintaining this empire can only succeed if Washington accomplishes three tasks.

First, and most important, it must control the oil and gas resources of the Middle East and Central Asia—the source as well as the existing and planned distribution pipelines, including the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, South Caucasus, Trans-Caspian Gas, and Trans-Afghanistan pipelines. This will enable Washington to exert political pressure on rivals and hesitant [...]]]> Sudan and Ethiopia are neighboring countries that are both ruled by authoritarian regimes; each is engaged in a brutal counterinsurgency operation against rebel forces—the former, in Darfur; the latter, in Ogaden. Curiously, these countries are treated quite differently by Washington; and this difference reveals a great deal about the current modus operandi of the American Empire.

In Darfur, war erupted in 2003. The rebels initially consisted of two groups: the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA), originally called the Darfur Liberation Front, supported by Eritrea; and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), thought to be receiving aid from Chad as well as Eritrea. Each rebel group has since split into several factions. The result is a kaleidoscopic war pitting Muslim against Muslim, Arab against African, black against black, ethnic group against ethnic group, tribe against tribe, and agriculturalist against nomad. An estimated 200,000 people have died, while another two million have been made refugees.

The response of the U.S. government has been to accuse Sudan of “genocide” in Darfur, to support a U.N. resolution calling Sudan’s actions there “crimes against humanity,” to demand that Khartoum agree to the deployment of a foreign peacekeeping force of up to 26,000 troops in Darfur and allow the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations unfettered access to the region, and to expand U.S. sanctions on Sudan.

In June 2007, Ethiopia launched a war in Ogaden against ethnic Somali rebels who call themselves the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) and are also backed by Eritrea. Many have described the situation in Ethiopia as similar to what is occurring in Darfur. While a U.N. team was permitted by Addis Ababa to visit Ogaden to investigate charges of Ethiopian atrocities, its findings were never released. In the meantime, human-rights groups, the Red Cross, Medicins Sans Frontieres, and independent journalists have been barred or expelled from the region.

Washington’s response has been to support Ethiopia, dismissing stories of atrocities by government troops as rebel propaganda. The Bush administration continues to support the Addis Ababa regime. The White House has not withdrawn one penny of its yearly gift of approximately half a billion dollars in foreign aid and continues to arm and train its military, the largest in Africa; and the Bush administration has declared Ethiopia eligible for the Excess Defense Articles program, which provides the regime with used American weapons and equipment free or at reduced prices.

Why the official outrage over Darfur, but not over Ogaden? There are three reasons: Islam, oil, and China.

Empires have often been established by governments in response to a perceived threat to a country’s security. The threat, real or imagined, is used to justify increased military spending, the establishment of overseas bases, and foreign interventions (political or military, directly or by proxy). If a threat can be depicted as a totalitarian ideology with millions of supporters, such policies can be implemented quickly and with little domestic opposition. The right to security becomes a right to control as many states or regions and their natural resources as possible. The Cold War is one example. Since September 11, the Bush administration has been seeking to emulate that example, claiming it is fighting a world war against “Islamic fundamentalism.” Islam has replaced the Soviet Bloc as the existential threat to America.

The goal of this “War on Terror,” publicly acknowledged by neoconservative supporters of the Bush administration, is to ensure that the United States remains the world’s hegemonic power for the 21st century. Maintaining this empire can only succeed if Washington accomplishes three tasks.

First, and most important, it must control the oil and gas resources of the Middle East and Central Asia—the source as well as the existing and planned distribution pipelines, including the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, South Caucasus, Trans-Caspian Gas, and Trans-Afghanistan pipelines. This will enable Washington to exert political pressure on rivals and hesitant allies whose economies are dependent on this oil and gas—China, Europe, India, and Japan. At the same time, the United States will be able to undermine Russia’s economy and her international influence by reducing Moscow’s share of the Eurasian petroleum-export market. This is the strategy advocated in 1997 by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security advisor. Though Brzezinski opposed the neocons, this policy, outlined in his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, helped to formulate their current strategy.

Second, to exploit these resources efficiently, the United States must orchestrate “regime change”—i.e., install pro-American regimes—in Muslim countries. According to Gen. Wesley Clark in his book Winning Modern Wars, in addition to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, the Bush administration is targeting Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan for such regime change.

Third, regime change is a euphemism for the imperial dictum “divide and rule.” For neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, and Max Boot, regime change means fragmenting Muslim countries, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, into two or more separate states. Its most outspoken advocate, Ralph Peters, calls for redrawing the borders of virtually every Muslim country in the Middle East. The ethnic and racial balkanization of Islam, at least on a limited scale, appears to be part of the Bush administration’s foreign-policy agenda.

The politics of oil, regime change, and balkanization is the template applied by the Bush administration to Sudan. Sudan is the largest country in Africa and the most important one in the Sahel, a band of countries stretching across the width of the continent located south of the Arabs and north of Nigeria. Sudan is also the tenth-largest country in the world, covering an area roughly the size of Western Europe and with a fraction of the population. Strategically located south of Egypt and west of Saudi Arabia, she borders Libya, Central Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the Red Sea. She controls a vast stretch of the Nile, but, most importantly, Sudan has oil, discovered in the south of the country by Chevron in the 1970’s.

In the Cold War, the United States and Israel supported southern Sudanese secessionists—first, the Anya-Nya; then, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army—in hopes of overthrowing an African government considered an enemy of Israel and a friend of the Soviet Union. However, the U.N. military suppression of the attempt by Katanga to secede from the Congo dissuaded Washington from seeking to partition the Sudan—at that time. Regime change was sufficient.

With American and Israeli backing, southerners, who are culturally, linguistically, and religiously different from people in the Arabized North, fought two civil wars against the government of Sudan to secure independence. The first lasted from 1955 to 1972 and ended with the Addis Ababa peace agreement. Under its terms, the south was granted a large degree of political and cultural autonomy within a united Sudan.

The peace ended in 1983 when Khartoum attempted to undermine the political autonomy of the south and then sought to impose sharia (Islamic law) on southerners. A second civil war ensued, which lasted until 2005. It is estimated that, between 1955 and 2005, nearly two million south Sudanese died, and another four million were made refugees.

When the second civil war broke out, Washington again aided the secessionists. There were four phases to this policy, which reflected the motivations of four presidents. Ronald Reagan continued the traditional Cold War U.S. foreign policy. George H.W. Bush sought to punish Khartoum for refusing to support his Gulf War. Bill Clinton wanted to curb Khartoum’s sponsorship of terrorism. President George W. Bush is attempting to demonstrate to the Islamic militants what Washington can do to any Muslim state that meets with its disapproval: impose economic sanctions and political partition.

If her southern petroleum reserves are sufficiently developed, Sudan could become a major oil-producing country. The principal beneficiary, however, would be China, thanks to Executive Order 13067. In 1997, claiming Khartoum was harboring Islamic terrorists, persecuting Christians, and destabilizing neighboring states, the Clinton administration imposed a trade embargo on Sudan. U.S. businesses were prohibited from investing in Sudan’s oil industry. This disengagement resulted in the emergence of China as Sudan’s principal foreign investor. China now operates major oil concessions in the country.

If southern Sudan were to become an independent state, it would be the major oil-producing country in that region. And it would be non-Muslim and pro-American.

This would be a major “victory” for the Bush administration’s War on Terror. The U.S. government would have stripped the largest Arab state, and one of the largest Muslim countries in Africa, of more than one third of her territory and most of her petroleum reserves.

In January 2005, the Bush administration engineered a peace agreement between the war-weary adversaries, which established the necessary framework. Under its terms, Washington achieves three short-term objectives: a north-south partition of Sudan after six years; the resumption of U.S. oil operations in the country, which will likely lead to a U.S. monopolization of southern Sudan’s oil reserves; and the subsequent displacement of China from Sudan’s oil industry, ensuring that Beijing’s economy and military remain dependent on foreign oil companies—particularly those of the United States and her allies.

The long-term goal appears to be a further fragmentation of Sudan. This would serve as both a demonstration of Washington’s power and a preview of what Iran—and Pakistan, should Islamic radicals take over in the wake of Bhutto’s assassination—can expect. The crisis in Darfur provides the Bush administration with a pretext, allowing Washington to exploit ethnic, tribal, and racial conflicts among Muslims to precipitate the breakup of a Muslim state. Moreover, if Khartoum agrees to the stationing of 26,000 foreign troops in Darfur, the region effectively becomes an independent state. After that, the same scenario would likely be repeated in Kordofan, the Nuba Mountains, the Blue Nile, the Red Sea, and the Kassala provinces—all of which have grievances against the central government. If Khartoum refuses, rebels will receive enough arms and aid to reduce Sudan to the level of Somalia, with a de facto partition of the country among rival warlords.

Meanwhile, Christian Ethiopia, a traditional U.S. ally, has been elevated by Washington to the rank of a sub-imperial power. During the Cold War, Addis Ababa backed the U.S.-supported southern Sudanese secessionists but did not militarily intervene on their behalf. Such restraint was abandoned at the close of 2006, when Ethiopia, with Washington’s approval, invaded and occupied Somalia, yet another Muslim country the Bush administration deems an enemy of the United States. Ethiopia now serves as a U.S. proxy army in the Horn of Africa. In return, Washington will preserve Ethiopia’s status as the dominant military power in East Africa.

The occupation of Somalia has provoked Muslim insurgencies inside that country and in Ethiopia’s adjacent Somali-inhabited Ogaden. These uprisings have frustrated the U.S. goal of suppressing Islamic militants among Somalis and imposing a compliant, pro-American regime upon Somalia. Both Addis Ababa and the Bush administration accuse Eritrea of being behind these rebellions, providing rebels with arms, funds, training, and sanctuary. Ethiopia has now deployed 100,000 troops to the Eritrean border and is likely to attack that country by the end of the year. Her pretext will be a border dispute. (International arbitrators ruled in favor of Eritrea, but Ethiopia refuses to accept their verdict.) Behind this is the greater goal of implementing the Bush administration’s agenda of overthrowing the Eritrean government.

The Ethiopian military is already fighting at least three wars: a foreign war in Somalia, and two major domestic insurgencies—one against Somalis in Ogaden, and another against the Oromo, who are the largest ethnic group in the country and occupy nearly a third of its territory. A fourth war may very well be the breaking point for the overextended Ethiopian army, causing either a military defeat (and demoralization) or intense frustration from fighting a protracted guerrilla war. Without a loyal army, the pro-American regime in Addis Ababa will fall.

This illustrates the dysfunction of the American Empire. It promotes instability in select Muslim countries such as Sudan, claiming this will enhance the security of the United States. The opposite is true: Chessboard foreign policy only increases anti-Americanism and support for Islamic militants among Muslims worldwide, as numerous opinion polls throughout the Muslim world confirm. The U.S. government rewards Third World regimes, such as Ethiopia’s, that participate in its War on Terror. Washington’s embrace can be fatal, however. Such alliances often alienate significant portions of the populations in those countries, which, in turn, undermines the stability of pro-American regimes that rule them. Yet the Bush administration continues to pursue this self-defeating policy. Doing the same thing over and over again, while expecting a different outcome, is a mark of insanity.

Joseph E. Fallon writes from Rye, New York.

This article first appeared in the March 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Naturally, it is a federal holiday, but that fact alone does not convey the magnitude of this special day. For, unlike other federal holidays, this one carries with it a gravitas—a holiness—that says it is special. You can tell, because we don’t mark the day with fireworks and pop music, or the pardoning of a turkey, but by a singular devotion to the very words of our national religion’s founder. There’s no public debate over it. No one says, “Hey, it isn’t fair to the x’s and the y’s and the z’s if we focus on one tradition and ignore the others.” This is our tradition, and we are not ashamed.

In the former days, when we were weak and ignorant, we had to be taught to be ashamed of our Old Religion. At first, when the bigoted (“one who is obstinately convinced of the superiority of one’s own opinions and prejudiced against those who hold different opinions”) nature of our Old Faith was exposed, we attempted to sand down all the rough edges, especially when it came to our Former Big Day. We hired some members of another religion to write us some new songs, and we transformed our Former Big Day into a celebration of shopping. This, of course, would not do, because, despite what Milton Friedman had taught us, shopping alone could not serve as the basis of a truly national holiday, let alone a national religion.

It was only then that the Third Great Awakening dawned and we realized that we already had a new religion. The transition has been so smooth that many of us probably still do not notice the difference. The parallels, indeed, are striking. The prophet of our new religion came as a preacher of the Old One—and, like our Old Prophet, he preached revolution. Just as the Old Rabbi’s qualifications were called into question (“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”), so, too, have some criticized our doctor’s credentials. And what did the new prophet get for his selfless efforts? The same thing the Old One got!

One of our earliest hymnwriters, St. Bono, revealed the similarities between the two religions’ founders in a song—“Pride (In the Name of Love)”—that is now sung in a few of our old/new churches: “One Man come, He to justify; one man, to overthrow!” Yes, the Former was the “One Man, betrayed with a kiss.” But concerning the one who followed after—well, as St. Bono and every anchorperson, schoolteacher, president, and candidate of either party will confess to you boldly, not one of us is worthy to loosen his shoelaces.

Early morning, April 4,
a shot rings out in the Memphis sky—
“Free at last!” They took your life,
but they could not take your pride
In the name of love!

We knew that the Former Big Day had lost all of its meaning when most of us refused to call it by name, preferring to say “Holiday” instead. Our leaders still recognize Holiday, along with other minor festivals of different religions, but it is only when you look at the federal holiday of our new religion that you can see how a faith held in common by an entire nation is celebrated. Our President even set up a website devoted to it—mlkday.gov. (Imagine the reaction of the American people if they were to discover a dot-gov devoted to Holiday!)

Last December, the presidential candidates fiercely debated whether it was appropriate for one among their number to make use of a mysterious floating symbol of our Old Religion in connection with our Former Big Day. Then, in January, they lined up to proclaim, [...]]]> Americans are a people of deeply held religious conviction. If any has doubts, let him look on the most serious of our sacred holidays and believe.

Naturally, it is a federal holiday, but that fact alone does not convey the magnitude of this special day. For, unlike other federal holidays, this one carries with it a gravitas—a holiness—that says it is special. You can tell, because we don’t mark the day with fireworks and pop music, or the pardoning of a turkey, but by a singular devotion to the very words of our national religion’s founder. There’s no public debate over it. No one says, “Hey, it isn’t fair to the x’s and the y’s and the z’s if we focus on one tradition and ignore the others.” This is our tradition, and we are not ashamed.

In the former days, when we were weak and ignorant, we had to be taught to be ashamed of our Old Religion. At first, when the bigoted (“one who is obstinately convinced of the superiority of one’s own opinions and prejudiced against those who hold different opinions”) nature of our Old Faith was exposed, we attempted to sand down all the rough edges, especially when it came to our Former Big Day. We hired some members of another religion to write us some new songs, and we transformed our Former Big Day into a celebration of shopping. This, of course, would not do, because, despite what Milton Friedman had taught us, shopping alone could not serve as the basis of a truly national holiday, let alone a national religion.

It was only then that the Third Great Awakening dawned and we realized that we already had a new religion. The transition has been so smooth that many of us probably still do not notice the difference. The parallels, indeed, are striking. The prophet of our new religion came as a preacher of the Old One—and, like our Old Prophet, he preached revolution. Just as the Old Rabbi’s qualifications were called into question (“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”), so, too, have some criticized our doctor’s credentials. And what did the new prophet get for his selfless efforts? The same thing the Old One got!

One of our earliest hymnwriters, St. Bono, revealed the similarities between the two religions’ founders in a song—“Pride (In the Name of Love)”—that is now sung in a few of our old/new churches: “One Man come, He to justify; one man, to overthrow!” Yes, the Former was the “One Man, betrayed with a kiss.” But concerning the one who followed after—well, as St. Bono and every anchorperson, schoolteacher, president, and candidate of either party will confess to you boldly, not one of us is worthy to loosen his shoelaces.

Early morning, April 4,
a shot rings out in the Memphis sky—
“Free at last!” They took your life,
but they could not take your pride
In the name of love!

We knew that the Former Big Day had lost all of its meaning when most of us refused to call it by name, preferring to say “Holiday” instead. Our leaders still recognize Holiday, along with other minor festivals of different religions, but it is only when you look at the federal holiday of our new religion that you can see how a faith held in common by an entire nation is celebrated. Our President even set up a website devoted to it—mlkday.gov. (Imagine the reaction of the American people if they were to discover a dot-gov devoted to Holiday!)

Last December, the presidential candidates fiercely debated whether it was appropriate for one among their number to make use of a mysterious floating symbol of our Old Religion in connection with our Former Big Day. Then, in January, they lined up to proclaim, with one voice, their devotion to the new prophet. One called the prophet his “hero, . . . because [he] practiced the libertarian principles of civil disobedience and nonviolence.” Another, standing in the very pulpit where the fallen prophet once stood, showed he was the fulfillment of the Old Testament, the antitype of Moses instructing the people of God how to bring down the walls of Jericho. The prophet, said he, is an “icon.”

Such thoughts were echoed by the clergy of the Old Religion. One Catholic bishop proclaimed that the prophet “gave his life for the Gospel values of non-violence and peace for all.” A popular conservative Protestant pastor encouraged all of his followers, if they had the time, to rewrite their sermons in order to “make something” of the federal holiday, to celebrate the work of the prophet. If you need to “find a good word” to say about him, just “Google his name.” But please, “You need not belabor his sins.”

As all of this unitary devotion was occurring, we received confirmation that, thank godamighty, we are at last free of the Old Religion, when sports network ESPN announced its punishment for host Dana Jacobsen. While throwing a drunken fit on stage at a celebrity gala, she accidentally hollered “F--k Notre Dame” and “F--k Jesus,” too.

Now, ten days’ suspension with pay is more than sufficient a punishment for inveighing against our former Deity. I mean, it’s not like she stood up, in the bleak midwinter, and cried, “F--k Morehouse, and F--k Martin Luther King, Jr.!”

Aaron D. Wolf is the associate editor of Chronicles.

This article first appeared in the March 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

For comedy, the best act so far has been Mike Huckabee’s appearances in South Carolina, where he was flanked by Chuck Norris and Ric “The Nature Boy” Flair, whom he introduced as his secretaries of defense and homeland security. I think I would rather vote for Naitch, who knows he is an entertainer and not an athlete, than for a politician who would use a rassler as part of his act.

But even Huckabee’s clowning, deplorable as it is, falls far short of the performances of Bob Dole, backed up by Sam and Dave imitators singing “The Dole Man,” or the unintentional parody of priggish liberalism performed by Happy Hubert Humphrey, or Jimmy Carter’s antics (the “adultery in my heart” confession to Playboy or, best of all, his proclamation “I will never lie to you”—perhaps the greatest lie ever told by an American politician, and that is saying something). I have not even mentioned Jimmy’s wonderful family—his beer-bellied brother Billy or his evangelist sister who “converted” pornographer Larry Flynt. Flynt was so touched by grace that he did an Adam and Eve spread in Hustler, naturally in the best of taste. At least we have our memories!

Populists have often provided campaigns both with drama and with actual issues. The peroration to William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech was still being memorized by at least one schoolboy in the 1950’s, and Huey Long and George Wallace both scared the bejeezus out of the partitocrats. I do not know why Long was shot, but Governor Wallace certainly gave the GOP a good reason to eliminate him, as Martha Mitchell told the press before being hustled off to an institution. Chuck Colson, who went to Arthur Bremer’s apartment allegedly to plant Democrat propaganda, might know something, but he is not talking.

Political assassination is as American as apple pie, and, as I told Pat Buchanan, when he mentioned something about reforming the Republican Party, the last man who tried that was James Garfield, and he was murdered by a professed “Republican stalwart,” whose credo was “My party, right or wrong.” Threatening to reform either party is like getting between the lion and his prey.

The nearest thing to a populist in this race is the mild-mannered Ron Paul. Despite his timid demeanor—in the 50’s he would have inevitably been compared to Wally Cox—Dr. Paul has his zany side: He believes in the Constitution of the old American republic, and he actually thinks it has some relevance for America today. God bless him, I would vote for him if only for pretending to embrace such a heartwarming fantasy. As it is, I am convinced he believes what he says. (His candor and sincerity alone are enough to disqualify him as a serious presidential candidate in these United States.) Paul not only wants, in principle, to restore the republic but also opposes the continued erosion of states’ rights and U.S. sovereignty.

Ron Paul’s most flamboyant gesture in defense of the republic (one in which he is joined by the estimable Duncan Hunter) has been the denunciation of what is sometimes called the North American Union. The NAU is an alleged plot to merge the three countries of North America—the United States, Canada, and Mexico—into a union that will function something like the European Union. If the first step toward unification is represented by the “NAFTA Superhighway”—a free-trade hole in the American border stretching [...]]]> The long campaign of 2007-08, already sputtering out in fizzled squibs, childish ploys, and pointless personal recriminations, has offered few of the moments of drama or high comedy that Americans have rightly come to expect of our political candidates. The debates have been as drab as Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits, as wooden as Barack Obama’s imitation of Al Sharpton, and as predictable as Mitt Romney’s second thoughts on abortion and immigration.

For comedy, the best act so far has been Mike Huckabee’s appearances in South Carolina, where he was flanked by Chuck Norris and Ric “The Nature Boy” Flair, whom he introduced as his secretaries of defense and homeland security. I think I would rather vote for Naitch, who knows he is an entertainer and not an athlete, than for a politician who would use a rassler as part of his act.

But even Huckabee’s clowning, deplorable as it is, falls far short of the performances of Bob Dole, backed up by Sam and Dave imitators singing “The Dole Man,” or the unintentional parody of priggish liberalism performed by Happy Hubert Humphrey, or Jimmy Carter’s antics (the “adultery in my heart” confession to Playboy or, best of all, his proclamation “I will never lie to you”—perhaps the greatest lie ever told by an American politician, and that is saying something). I have not even mentioned Jimmy’s wonderful family—his beer-bellied brother Billy or his evangelist sister who “converted” pornographer Larry Flynt. Flynt was so touched by grace that he did an Adam and Eve spread in Hustler, naturally in the best of taste. At least we have our memories!

Populists have often provided campaigns both with drama and with actual issues. The peroration to William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech was still being memorized by at least one schoolboy in the 1950’s, and Huey Long and George Wallace both scared the bejeezus out of the partitocrats. I do not know why Long was shot, but Governor Wallace certainly gave the GOP a good reason to eliminate him, as Martha Mitchell told the press before being hustled off to an institution. Chuck Colson, who went to Arthur Bremer’s apartment allegedly to plant Democrat propaganda, might know something, but he is not talking.

Political assassination is as American as apple pie, and, as I told Pat Buchanan, when he mentioned something about reforming the Republican Party, the last man who tried that was James Garfield, and he was murdered by a professed “Republican stalwart,” whose credo was “My party, right or wrong.” Threatening to reform either party is like getting between the lion and his prey.

The nearest thing to a populist in this race is the mild-mannered Ron Paul. Despite his timid demeanor—in the 50’s he would have inevitably been compared to Wally Cox—Dr. Paul has his zany side: He believes in the Constitution of the old American republic, and he actually thinks it has some relevance for America today. God bless him, I would vote for him if only for pretending to embrace such a heartwarming fantasy. As it is, I am convinced he believes what he says. (His candor and sincerity alone are enough to disqualify him as a serious presidential candidate in these United States.) Paul not only wants, in principle, to restore the republic but also opposes the continued erosion of states’ rights and U.S. sovereignty.

Ron Paul’s most flamboyant gesture in defense of the republic (one in which he is joined by the estimable Duncan Hunter) has been the denunciation of what is sometimes called the North American Union. The NAU is an alleged plot to merge the three countries of North America—the United States, Canada, and Mexico—into a union that will function something like the European Union. If the first step toward unification is represented by the “NAFTA Superhighway”—a free-trade hole in the American border stretching from Mexico to Canada—the apogee will be the issuance of a new common currency, the Amero.

World government has been a treasured bugbear of the fringe right since the heyday of the John Birch Society, and the current conspiracy has supposedly been cooked up by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bush administration, and the usual globalist suspects. In 2005, the CFR issued a report, “Building a North American Community,” whose aspirations were echoed in the Bush administration’s plan “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America” (SPP), released after a meeting among George W. Bush, Vicente Fox, and Paul Martin. The plan, which is predicated on the idea that “our security and prosperity are mutually dependent and complementary,” calls for a joint task force to implement the goals: common security and a common market.

Representative Paul has denounced the SPP as “an unholy alliance of foreign consortiums and officials from several governments” that does not even enjoy the legal fig leaf of an official treaty. The more general conclusion he draws is that “decisions that affect millions of Americans are not being made by those Americans themselves, or even by their elected representatives in Congress,” but by “a handful of elites [who] use their government connections to bypass national legislatures and ignore our Constitution.”

The introduction of the NAFTA Superhighway and the SPP into the campaign debate naturally aroused snorts of contempt, and not without reason. The alleged plotters—the leaders of three democratic governments (the United States, Canada, and Mexico), joined by the beloved Republican governor of Texas (Rick Perry) and the most prestigious policy experts at the CFR (which includes most of the important senior members of past administrations)—are no back-alley conspirators. The CFR, of which both Presidents Bush are members, has never made a secret of its commitment to world government, and the American presidents and leading economists who have supported NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO express the consensus, not of the people of America, but of the people who own America and dictate the editorial policies of both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. If you find this statement shocking or surprising, you have not been paying attention to the world around you.

Only a good scout like Ron Paul (or Pat Buchanan before him) could sincerely believe that the erosion of sovereignty is an issue that will arouse the American electorate to cast off the chains of the party state that tells them how to treat their spouses and rear their children, whose children to reward with benefits at the expense of their own, and what to eat and where to smoke a cigar. As an impudent young man, I told my father that his generation—“the greatest generation”—had sold out our liberties by reelecting FDR and by accepting the withholding of federal income tax from our salaries. At least since the time my voice changed, I have known that I do not live in a free country: What I know about republican liberty I have learned from books.

There is no secret plot or conspiracy to undermine our national sovereignty, unless, by conspiracy, we mean the collective will of the political class. Messrs. Fox and Bush would be rightly outraged if they heard rumors of such suspicions. Opposing globalization today is like criticizing affirmative action, challenging women’s rights, or pointing out that homosexuals are a serious drain on our finite medical resources. All right-thinking people, whatever their party or orientation, support globalization. It is a movement whose virtues are so obvious that Cato staffers cannot even understand why anyone could be upset with the idea of a North American Union. Here is young Cato policy analyst Will Wilkinson on National Public Radio’s anti-business program, Marketplace:

There are some who believe a grave threat to American sovereignty looms over the horizon. A shadowy cabal, they say, is planning a massive “NAFTA superhighway,” a new North American currency, and a common market in goods and labor. It will all culminate in an E.U.-like North American Union. It turns out this is mostly fantasy. But the fantasy is more dream than nightmare. Because some aspects of a North American Union would leave Americans and our neighbors both richer and freer.

You see, he explains to the rubes, in making it more difficult for migrants to enter the United States, we have also made it harder for them to leave:

Those who do come now are more likely to stay. And this has increased the permanent population of undocumented Mexicans. The best solution to America’s immigration problem is not a wall or a new crackdown on the hiring of undocumented workers. It’s NAFTA’s unfinished business: a common North American labor market.

The real problem of illegal immigration is that it is illegal. If we simply throw our borders open to the world and say, “Give us . . . the wretched refuse of your teeming shores,” the problem will go away, and we shall all live happily ever after, as Cato’s Steve Moore once said in a debate with Peter Brimelow and me, buying our fruit from Korean grocers and hiring foreign nannies to take care of the children our wives refuse to rear themselves. We could adopt the same approach to other social ills: Legalize rape, and the rapist will be less reluctant to seek treatment for his problem; legalize armed robbery, and the robbers will more readily pay taxes on their earnings.

For the libertarians at Cato, globalization, free trade, and immigration present no problem, because, as the editor of the Wall Street Journal once famously declared, “The nation-state is finished.” Many libertarians would add that the demise of nation-states has come none too soon, since they never should have existed. They are not entirely wrong. Nationalism has almost as many sins on its record as the Marxism that killed hundreds of millions in the 20th century or the classical liberalism/libertarianism that destroyed the social and moral order of Europe and the United States. One of the only true insights Marxists ever had was that the liberal ruling class

has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

If the international system of large nation-states were to be replaced by confederations of regions and smaller communities, a Chestertonian might rejoice in the possibilities. Such a scenario is hardly likely, however, because it is not in the interest of the groups who preside today over the breaking of nations.

Some form of international empire will undoubtedly be the result of the current drive toward reducing and eliminating national sovereignty. This is hardly cause for alarm. Although many conservatives would like to believe that the nation-state is a universal phenomenon, it is, in fact, an historical creation, hardly older than the 15th century. The states of France and England, to name just two successful examples, were created by ambitious monarchies with the assistance of the equally ambitious aristocrats and businessmen who saw the nation-state as a vehicle for their own interests.

Even churches joined the movement—not only the Protestant national churches of England, Scotland, and Germany that toadied to the rulers who confiscated Church assets and distributed them to their friends, but the pliant and venal Catholic bishops of France and, eventually, of the Habsburg empire. In any such enterprise, factions develop, and the grandchildren of Henry VIII’s wool lords wrested power from Henry’s sister’s great-great-grandson, Charles I. However, the goal of the Roundheads was not to weaken the state but to strengthen it. The same can be said of the Jacobin lawyers who murdered the kindest man who ever sat upon the French throne, from Clovis to Napoleon III. Robespierre was as committed to nation-building as Louis XIV.

This is, of course, a Machiavellian point of view, one that concentrates exclusively on power. States and their governments can be looked at from several perspectives. From a Christian perspective, the rulers of this world have been empowered by God to protect the innocent and punish the wicked. From an ethnic and cultural point of view, our form of government reflects the character of the people: A system of loose monarchy, independent nobles, and sturdy freemen was an expression of the Anglo-Saxon character, just as the cult of plutocracy and celebrity, matched by the servility of the people, expresses the American character today. We laugh at the servility of the Indians and Pakistanis who choose party leaders on the strength of their last names (Gandhi and Bhutto), then go out to cheer for George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton.

In swearing eternal allegiance to the divinely appointed Clintons and Bushes, and in revering the traditions of the Morgans and Rockefellers, a prudent man might also take account of the basic facts of power. It was Gaetano Mosca who explained that the character of an elite impressed itself upon the character of the regime, and it is only a small step from Mosca’s insight to viewing regimes as the vehicles by which an elite maintains and extends its wealth and power.

What can be said of the nation-state applies to all forms of government, including Marxist dictatorships: They serve the interests of the ruling class or party. Just as the commune of medieval Florence was a corporate association of the greater guilds in the interest of the bankers and wool merchants, so (as Milovan Djilas argued) communist governments serve the interests of the party members who “eliminate every form of property except their own.”

For the old union of the United States, the handwriting has been on the wall for decades. A century ago, national business interests used their clout to eliminate the power of state governments to interfere in their ability to expand and monopolize new markets. Now, since at least the 1970’s, transnational business interests are working to eliminate the power of nation-states to interfere in their ability to expand and monopolize new markets. Global markets require global regulation in the interest of the global competitors who seek to be global monopolists, and global regulations require a global state with a global army, global courts, and global police. A Bill Gates or a Ross Perot can make billions by selling to select national governments, but trillions are available to those who will control a global government. Regional integration is only a necessary intermediate step. There is no point in complaining, just as there is no point in blaming the tiger who eats the missionary: The beasts are made this way.

International protests against globalization are led by Marxian leftists, who are the last people in the world to lead such a movement: They have been calling for some form of global regime since the Communist Manifesto. But American conservatives are scarcely in a better position. Since the creation of National Review, conservatives have sacrificed every principle of morality, tradition, and civilization upon the altar of a “free market” that has never really existed, certainly not in the United States. To be fair, all that conservatives ever really meant by the “free market” was big business. Today’s conservative editorialists are only doing what they have always done: They are shilling for their paymasters. Their intellectual ancestors shilled for liberal nation-states, but, for the conservative-libertarian movement, transnationalism, as the kids would say, is the new nationalism, a pretext for destroying everything real that we have inherited and replacing the reality of peoples and their traditions with the virtual reality sold to us by Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and the Hollywood-New York axis that shapes our dreams.

Our rulers, cheered on by their mouthpieces in the press, have even succeeded in cashing out the family, not only by promoting divorce, public schooling, and adultery, but by driving mothers into the workplace, outsourcing family functions to soccer teams, and persuading families to dine at corporate-owned junk-food restaurants such as McDonald’s or Applebee’s. Viewed in this light, the North American Union will be a comparatively trivial step in the evolution of post-human America.

Thomas Fleming is the editor of Chronicles.

This article first appeared in the March 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Only once before in our history has the percentage of foreign-born stock been higher, and that was in the decade before 1920, when it was just under 15 percent. We are likely to surpass that figure within a few years. Moreover, immigration today differs in kind from that great wave which preceded the Immigration Act of 1924. As Samuel Huntington and Pat Buchanan, among others, have taken pains to demonstrate, never before has the immigrant population been so overrepresented by a single ethnicity, nor has the integrity of our national borders been threatened. In addition, thanks to the priority given to family reunification in the Immigration Act of 1965, the United States is now besieged with new immigrants who have little to offer the nation other than their poverty and their willingness to do grunt labor for the predatory capitalists who are the primary beneficiaries of the naive or cynical politicians who have underwritten this national-suicide scenario.

In Immigration and the American Future, Chilton Williamson has compiled 13 essays and one interview that cover what he describes as “the total effect of mass immigration in its various aspects,” ranging from immigration’s impact on national security, its economic consequences, and its political ramifications to its cultural and environmental transformations, as well as its ethical challenges. All of the essays were commissioned specifically for this book, though shorter versions of two of them appeared earlier in Chronicles. And while there is certainly a diversity of perspective, the collection does not pretend to debate the fundamental question. To a greater or lesser degree, all the authors concur that present levels of immigration are unsustainable and that they imperil our national future. Of course, after years of being ignored by the political and media mainstream, the immigration threat has recently become an approved subject for discussion. However, the contributors to this volume are not johnny-come-latelies. Most have written extensively on immigration for a decade or more.

One of the great myths of the immigration debate is that immigrants continue to be an asset to an ever-expanding U.S. economy. They take jobs that Americans are unwilling to do; they pay taxes; they broaden the consumer base; and they bring skills that are sometimes in short supply. The problem with these popular assumptions is that they are either wholly false or merely half-truths which require a good deal of qualification. Several of the contributors to the present volume challenge such assumptions. For instance, are immigrants really an asset to the economy because they take jobs that shiftless (so it is implied) Americans are no longer willing to do? As Edwin S. Rubenstein argues (“Immigrants in America: A Statistical Overview”), “nothing could be further from the truth.” Examining the job displacement of American workers by illegals, Rubenstein notes that unemployment rates among U.S.-born workers are highest in precisely those occupations that have the greatest concentrations of illegal workers—construction trades, domestic service, landscaping. To take just one example, the unemployment rate among construction laborers was, as of 2004, 13 percent, tripling the national unemployment average. Are native-born workers abandoning these jobs because they no longer wish to engage in “menial [...]]]> It should be obvious to anyone who has taken the slightest trouble to examine the immigration question that America is faced not with an immigration “problem,” or even a “crisis,” but with a massive demographic invasion that, if not soon addressed by radical means, will permanently alter the nation’s social, economic, political, and cultural landscape. Currently, nearly 40 million Americans are of “foreign-born” stock. Of these, more than 50 percent are Latin Americans (over 30 percent Mexican). Current projections show that, by 2025, non-Hispanic whites will be a minority in at least nine states; by 2050, this number will have increased to 16 states.

Only once before in our history has the percentage of foreign-born stock been higher, and that was in the decade before 1920, when it was just under 15 percent. We are likely to surpass that figure within a few years. Moreover, immigration today differs in kind from that great wave which preceded the Immigration Act of 1924. As Samuel Huntington and Pat Buchanan, among others, have taken pains to demonstrate, never before has the immigrant population been so overrepresented by a single ethnicity, nor has the integrity of our national borders been threatened. In addition, thanks to the priority given to family reunification in the Immigration Act of 1965, the United States is now besieged with new immigrants who have little to offer the nation other than their poverty and their willingness to do grunt labor for the predatory capitalists who are the primary beneficiaries of the naive or cynical politicians who have underwritten this national-suicide scenario.

In Immigration and the American Future, Chilton Williamson has compiled 13 essays and one interview that cover what he describes as “the total effect of mass immigration in its various aspects,” ranging from immigration’s impact on national security, its economic consequences, and its political ramifications to its cultural and environmental transformations, as well as its ethical challenges. All of the essays were commissioned specifically for this book, though shorter versions of two of them appeared earlier in Chronicles. And while there is certainly a diversity of perspective, the collection does not pretend to debate the fundamental question. To a greater or lesser degree, all the authors concur that present levels of immigration are unsustainable and that they imperil our national future. Of course, after years of being ignored by the political and media mainstream, the immigration threat has recently become an approved subject for discussion. However, the contributors to this volume are not johnny-come-latelies. Most have written extensively on immigration for a decade or more.

One of the great myths of the immigration debate is that immigrants continue to be an asset to an ever-expanding U.S. economy. They take jobs that Americans are unwilling to do; they pay taxes; they broaden the consumer base; and they bring skills that are sometimes in short supply. The problem with these popular assumptions is that they are either wholly false or merely half-truths which require a good deal of qualification. Several of the contributors to the present volume challenge such assumptions. For instance, are immigrants really an asset to the economy because they take jobs that shiftless (so it is implied) Americans are no longer willing to do? As Edwin S. Rubenstein argues (“Immigrants in America: A Statistical Overview”), “nothing could be further from the truth.” Examining the job displacement of American workers by illegals, Rubenstein notes that unemployment rates among U.S.-born workers are highest in precisely those occupations that have the greatest concentrations of illegal workers—construction trades, domestic service, landscaping. To take just one example, the unemployment rate among construction laborers was, as of 2004, 13 percent, tripling the national unemployment average. Are native-born workers abandoning these jobs because they no longer wish to engage in “menial labor”? In fact, they have not abandoned these jobs at all. They are simply laid off and replaced with illegals or recently naturalized workers (Hispanic, more often than not) who will work for much less. David Hartman (“The Economics of Illegal Immigration to the United States”), whose Hartman Foundation funded this volume, provides the most telling number: In the construction trades, between 1972 and 2005, average hourly and weekly earnings dropped by 21.6 percent. Is it a coincidence that, during the same period, the number of immigrants (both legal and illegal) from Mexico alone rose by more than 350 percent?

Defenders of “amnesty” and of present levels of legal immigration argue that, as long as unemployment rates nationwide remain low, all is well. As for those workers who are displaced, it is often suggested, they should take advantage of the opportunity to obtain retraining in some skilled or semi-skilled occupation where the compensation is sufficient for their needs. This is cold comfort for those with hungry mouths to feed at home. In the first place, even with retraining, the competition workers face for good jobs is increasingly fierce. Many thousands of high-paying manufacturing jobs have simply gone overseas (or across the border), while others have been eliminated as a result of the flood of cheap imported goods entering American markets. In those manufacturing industries that remain, wages have been steadily declining. Drawing on U.S. Department of Labor statistics, Hartman shows that, since 1972, the “average real compensation per unit of output” in the manufacturing sector has plummeted by half. He is careful to note that several factors have contributed to this state of affairs but does not hesitate to assert that an “excessive labor supply” driven by immigration numbers is a primary one.

What about the oft-heard canard that immigrants contribute to the nation’s wealth through tax payments? Of course, it is true that naturalized workers pay state and federal income taxes like everyone else, and even illegals pay sales taxes. But this simplistic argument overlooks several negative factors. Immigrants entering the United States in recent decades are far more likely to be impoverished and to come from countries in which a culture of poverty is deeply ingrained. Rubenstein reveals that, as of 2004, more than 17 percent of all immigrants were impoverished; of these, the rates were far higher among immigrants from Latin America (e.g., 26 percent of Mexicans, 20 percent of Guatemalans). Immigrants of Asian origin, by contrast, are impoverished at rates either below the national average for native-born Americans (12 percent) or slightly above (e.g., Koreans, at 13.2 percent). Thus, most immigrants today are more likely to pay less in taxes than native-born workers and to become welfare dependent. Welfare dependency among immigrants from Third World countries has, in fact, become a chronic problem. It is true that the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act curtailed most disbursements of federally provided welfare to new immigrants (requiring them to wait five years after naturalization before becoming eligible). But the states have often filled the gap. Drawing on information provided by a 2004 Census Bureau survey, Rubenstein notes that almost 30 percent of all immigrant households are dependent upon “at least one major welfare program,” as opposed to 18.2 percent of native households. Among Latin Americans exclusively, the numbers are much higher. Forty-one percent of Hispanic immigrants receive some “means tested cash benefit.” One of these is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Although it is not technically a “welfare” program, the EITC subsidizes the incomes of impoverished workers with children. Rubenstein notes that the EITC is supposed to be disbursed only to workers with legal status, but “the IRS, with its celebrated kind-heartedness, allows immigrants to claim EITC benefits retroactively for up to three years before they obtain legal work status.” Thus, IRS policy rewards illegals for breaking the law and for doing work for which “they may very well not have paid taxes.” EITC, by the way, is a $30-billion annual program.

Other entitlements that are enjoyed by immigrants include public education and medical treatment. While illegal immigrants are not entitled to Medicaid, they cannot legally be denied emergency-room treatment, a service that, as Hartman argues, “includes much of what Medicaid would cover (at twice the cost).” Steven Greenhut, in “Greetings from Ground Zero,” an essay on the detrimental effects immigration is producing in Southern California, reports that

Southern California’s hospitals are being inundated by illegal immigrants who use them for all their health-care needs, from immunizations to check-ups to true emergency services. They do not pay anything for any of this.

In fact, more than half a dozen emergency rooms in the greater Los Angeles area have shut down in recent years, and a number of others are at risk of being forced into closure because of the enormous financial drain incurred by providing services to increasing numbers of patients with no health insurance. Other cities around the country report similar problems.

The costs of education are simply staggering. Most Americans are aware that, under the prevailing interpretation of the 14th Amendment, children born to illegal aliens automatically become U.S. citizens and are thus eligible for public education; few Americans seem cognizant, however, of the 1982 Supreme Court ruling Plyler v. Doe, which stipulates that the illegal siblings of those children also have rights to a public education. The Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimates that there are at least 1.5 million school-aged illegal immigrants in the United States, in addition to at least 2.5 million of their U.S.-born siblings. According to FAIR, if the cost of educating both groups is combined, the total K-12 expenditure in tax dollars nationwide is over $28 billion. In Texas alone, according to James Bernsen (“The Costs of Illegal Immigration to Texas”), the expenditure in 2004 was $3.6 billion, roughly 10.5 percent of the state’s entire K-12 education budget.

The overall economic effect of immigration is, without question, a fiscal loss. As Rubenstein reports, immigrants (legal and illegal) contribute roughly $12.5 billion annually to the economy (one tenth of one percent of GDP). On the deficit side, the drain on taxpayers amounts to over $200 billion annually; thus, the net fiscal result is a $187.5 billion burden on the public coffers. Confronted with such figures (which are widely available for those who care to look), it is difficult to see how anyone can still defend the present immigration status quo.

Washington is infested with pro-immigration lobbyists, however, so clearly, someone benefits. Peter Brimelow, who minces no words on this subject, argues (in “Big Business and Immigration: Inside the Mind of the Corporate Elite”) that

current immigration policy lends itself to explanation in the crudest Marxist terms. Quite simply, it is a savage attack by the American rich on the American poor (and middle class) . . .

George J. Borjas (in an interview with Brimelow) estimates that two percent of GDP is transferred annually from labor to capital as a result of the lowered wage rates made possible by immigration. (To put this in perspective, Washington currently spends 3.7 percent of the U.S. GDP annually on defense—a total of $439 billion.) The numbers would seem to justify Brimelow’s characterization of this plunder as a “savage attack,” yet elsewhere in the same essay, his analysis is somewhat less belligerent. Having worked as an editor at Forbes for a number of years, he is all too familiar with the self-justifications of the business class. In his view, their support for current immigration policy reveals a “state of prelapsarian innocence about their activities.” They ignore the displacement of native workers caused by their hiring practices, or they rationalize such practices by pretending to believe that importing foreign workers is essential for the greater good of the economy. This same innocence, Brimelow would have us believe, allows them to overlook the fact that a veritable “cornucopia of government subsidies” underwrites all this cheap labor.

Yet, sooner or later, the business class “will start to be alarmed by a policy which is destroying the country in which they live, and in which they hope their children and grandchildren will live.” This sanguine view owes something to Brimelow’s conviction that “[c]lass politics are relatively rare in American history” and that, in time, “there will be divisions within the business elite.” Such divisions, presumably, will help to foster a change in immigration policy. I hope, of course, that Brimelow is right about this, but some might argue that he, too, is suffering from a degree of “prelapsarian innocence.”

While economic indicators are important, the cultural transformations wrought by immigration are even more critical. Statistics are easily packaged for news broadcasts, but cultural change cannot be quantified and is often embedded in historical contexts that few in the mainstream media can be bothered to examine. In one of this volume’s key essays (“Up Mexico Way: The Cultural Transformation of America”), Thomas Fleming examines perhaps the most profound problem raised by mass immigration. “Any culture,” he writes, “that expects to absorb . . . a large population of aliens must have a coherent sense of itself.” It must be unified by a common language, by shared moral and religious traditions, by a deep sense of its own history. A collective belief in abstract “democratic values” and a passion for material affluence are not nearly enough. How is an authentic national identity transmitted? Does America still possess such an identity? Fleming insists that

strong institutions and traditions are required: a national literature and an accepted set of classics, effective schools that reflect and reinforce the moral and social outlook of the nation, a self-confident church . . . [and] some form of adolescent initiation such as universal military training.

By this standard, America has perhaps been fatally weakened, not only by the influx of foreign cultures and traditions, but by the erosion of her own cultural traditions and by the crumbling of those institutions that define her “common life.” Indeed, what binds Americans today is, ironically, the “mass culture that is destroying the American character.” By “mass culture,” Fleming presumably means a culture that is no longer rooted in regional and local custom, in networks of kinship, deference, and duty—a culture disseminated largely by the electronic media and shaped by a small but powerful deracinated elite consisting of capitalist profiteers, Hollywood producers and their hirelings, the advertising and entertainment industries (forgive the redundancy), and the better part of our academic intelligentsia, not to mention the music producers who provide the soundscape for our vacuous collective fantasies.

Such a “culture” is little prepared to withstand the unprecedented immigration onslaught that now faces us. In the past, an America with a much stronger sense of her own traditions and a more vigorous confidence in her shared moral convictions was able effectively to assimilate large numbers of immigrants without serious damage to her core identity. Today, however, a vast number of new immigrants belong to a culture that differs profoundly from the European culture planted here by the colonists. This is especially true of Latin Americans—of Mexicans, in particular. Delving at some length into Mexican history, Fleming reminds us of the “prevalence of the Indian element in the Mexican gene pool.” Though the Mexican elite class has “a great deal of European blood,” Mexico sees herself “as an indigenous nation”—one that has long harbored a good deal of hostility toward her gringo neighbor to the north. Moreover, hers is a culture in which violence and corruption are endemic. In one of the most eloquent essays in this collection, “Dystopia Unlimited: Or, The Flowers of Regress (and Catastrophe),” Chilton Williamson worries about the potential for the “Mexicanization of the American political system—that is to say, its destruction and barbarization.” The much-admired stability of the American system is rooted in Anglo-American respect for the rule of law, in a centuries-old antipathy toward tyranny. It is not difficult to see what a reconquista of the territories that once were Mexican will mean for such states as New Mexico and California, for there (and elsewhere), the Mexican tradition “of self-indulgent violence, sadism, lawlessness, intemperance, intolerance, and irresponsibility” is already much in evidence. Fleming suggests that, if we wish to see the face of an America overrun by Mexican immigrants, we should look at border cities such as Juárez and El Paso, which are “ugly hybrid[s] of the worst of American and Mexican cultures.” All along the border, “Mexico and America are redefining themselves and each other in a cultural equivalent of Spanglish.”

Many of the contributors to Immigration and the American Future do not provide much reason for optimism about that future, and with good reason. Still, there are signs that Americans may be waking from their demographic slumber. Roger D. McGrath (“National Sovereignty Goes Local”) surveys what might well be called a grassroots rebellion against the federal government’s “dereliction” of duty. In Arizona, Colorado, and Georgia, or in states as far from the Mexican border as Pennsylvania, state legislators and local authorities are becoming the avant-garde in this new resistance. Arizona’s Proposition 200, passed in 2004, has been a bellwether for similar legislative action elsewhere. Among other stipulations, it threatens with criminal penalties any public employee who fails to report illegal aliens or to verify the immigration status of those who apply for benefits. In Georgia, the Security and Immigration Compliance Act (2006) requires “employers to access a federal database to verify the legal residency of their workers, [and further requires] recipients of state benefits to prove that they are in the country legally.” Recent reports suggest that this is producing results. According to McGrath, “the once strong Latino home-buying market has declined precipitously since Governor Perdue signed the act into law.” And, of course, most Chronicles readers will already be familiar with Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, who has organized a posse for rounding up illegals and their “coyotes.” But Arpaio is hardly alone. All across the Southwest, county sheriffs are organizing. The Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition, for instance, formed in 2005 and has, since 2006, met with sheriffs in New Mexico, Arizona, and California to establish the Southwest Border Sheriff’s Coalition, in order to coordinate efforts in apprehending illegals.

These are just a few of the many signs of constructive revolt brewing in the heartland, but this revolt, since it is focused almost exclusively on the problem of illegal immigration, lacks the scope to deal with the larger immigration threat. In the years since the 1990 Immigration Act capped legal immigration at 700,000 per year, there have been only two years in which legal immigration has fallen below that number. Even worse, the 1990 cap exempts the additional foreigners who are brought in legally under the “immediate family” mandate of the 1965 Immigration Act. In 2006 alone, over 580,000 immigrants were admitted on that basis. Thus, well over a million new legal immigrants per year are taking up residence in a country that has virtually lost the will to assimilate them; even if the will were there, the immigrants are clearly too numerous for assimilation efforts to have any significant effect. More radical action is required.

Back in 2003, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) introduced the Mass Immigration Reduction Act. As the late Sam Francis predicted at the time, the act was smothered in its cradle, but Tancredo has continued to call for a moratorium on legal immigration—and clearly, this is an idea whose time has come. A moratorium (for, let’s say, 20 years—a biblical generation) would not solve all our immigration problems. Reducing the numbers, however drastically, would not undo the damage already done, but it would buy us some desperately needed time to ask just who we really are. In one of the final essays in Immigration and the American Future, Guido Vignelli (“False Rights, Real Duties, Prudent Rules: A Christian View of Immigration”) argues vigorously that a proper understanding of the Christian moral tradition permits a “preferential option for the nation.” As Pope John Paul II affirmed in 1985, a nation is a “spiritual heritage,” and, as Christians, we are obligated to “confirm, maintain, and develop it.” This is an “important task,” said the Pope, “in particular for those which must defend their own existence and essential identity . . . from the risks of a destruction generated from outside or of a decomposition from inside.” Let those who have ears hear.

Immigration and the American Future
Chilton Williamson, Jr., ed.
Rockford, IL: Chronicles Press; 307 pp., $29.95

Jack Trotter writes from Charleston, South Carolina.

This review first appeared in the March 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

VIEWS
The Loss of American Identity
by Roger D. McGrath
California, today—your state, tomorrow.

The Tragedy of Mexico
by Gregory McNamee
Riches unrealized.

NEWS
Facts? Who Needs ’Em!
by William Lutz
Some critical thinking in Texas.

REVIEWS
After the Deluge
by Jack Trotter

Chilton Williamson, Jr., ed.: Immigration and the American Future

Clark Stooksbury on Stephen F. Hayes’s Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President

Fr. Michael P. Orsi on Milton Walsh’s Ronald Knox as Apologist: Wit, Laughter and the Popish Creed

CORRESPONDENCE
Letter From Kansas City: The “Smart” Port
by Matthew A. Roberts

Letter From Louisville: Governor Berry and the Mad Mad Farmers’ Liberation Front
by Jerry Salyer

Letter From Athens: The Greek Conservative Revival
by Makis Voridis

VITAL SIGNS
Foreign Policy: Sudan, Ethiopia, and the American Empire
by Joseph E. Fallon

COLUMNS
The Bare Bodkin
by Joseph Sobran

Under the Black Flag
by Taki Theodoracopulos

Heresies
by Aaron D. Wolf

The Rockford Files
by Scott P. Richert

European Diary
by Andrei Navrozov

The American Interest
by Srdja Trifkovic

In the Dark
There Will Be Blood
by George McCartney

The Hundredth Meridian
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES

AMERICAN PROSCENIUM

CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY
Passage: After Seeing a Photograph of the Himalayas
and
Family Gathering
by Stella Nesanovich

ON THE COVER
Cover by Gregory McNamee.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.