America First Is Globalism

America First Is Globalism

by

R.E. Prindle

 

The Wall Street Journal continues to amaze.  Tuesday, May 3, 2016, p. A11, Bret Stephens posted to his column Global View what I imagine he considers a scathing denunciation of Donald Trump.  What Brett doesn’t seem to understand is that there is no particular virtue in globalism.  It is merely a state of affairs.  Donald Trump is a globalist, I am a globalist, we are all globalists.  We have to be, globalism is here and now.

If Bret believes that the Chinese don’t place China First, Africans don’t place Africa First and Moslems Moslems First he is dreaming fantastic dreams.  Trump says what everyone else is saying about their peoples; he is saying that yes globalism is here and in that context we have to place America’s interests before everyone else’s interests.  The White Man’s Burden has been laid down Bret; let that monkey ride someone else’s back.  In a dog eat dog’s world, Mondo Cane, one has to bark loud and bite hard not roll over and expose one’s tummy.  Those who roll over are called pussys, Bret.  No one respects them.  That is the situation our current leadership, so-called, has placed us.

The problem with you Bret is that you think your interpretation of globalism is the gold standard and there is no other interpretation.  Trump has bluntly stated the China First position:  they are raping America.  With impunity they hack our computers, take whatever information they want, as part of the cyber war.  We grouse but make no retaliation even though we have the means to shut their computers down.  To defend ourselves, if I interpret you correctly Bret would be a violation of globalism.

Further, China has no more respect for our borders than Mexico.  Chinese flood our country with illegals.  Bert apparently considers open borders ‘a reasonable immigration policy’.  Your opinion and your opinion alone Bert.  The better opinion is that no immigration at all is the most reasonable policy.  Your opinion is not sacred just because it is your opinion.   You are not the arbiter on immigration.

Bret insultingly says of Trump’s America First position:

Either Mr. Trump stumbled upon his worldview through a dense fog of historical ignorance.  Or he is seriously attempting to resurrect the most disastrous and discreditable strain of American foreign policy for a new generation of American ignoramuses.

You willfully misinterpret the phrase America First.  First does not mean only.  First means to look at international or global affairs considering one’s own welfare as paramount.  To impoverish ourselves to enrich others is the height of foolishness.  To use your example of England in WWII, the English if they had considered their own welfare first, would never have entered into WWII.  That war bankrupted them completely, impoverished them for a whole decade or more, left them a no-rate power and stripped them of their colonial empire and that with the connivance of FDR.

FDR himself stripped the US of its ‘inexhaustible resources’ in the short period of seven years, 1938-45.  He gave those resources away for free to enemies like the Soviet Union.  Stalin didn’t even say:  Thanks, Suckers; he said:  You got anything left? as he annexed the whole of Central Europe.

Neither England nor the US had any dog in the Nazi-Communist struggle so how were American Firsters disastrous and by whom were they discredited or, actually, defamed?  They couldn’t have been more disastrous then that fool FDR and they were discredited by those who wished the US ill.

Donald Trump probably knows his history better than you do Bret.  Better bone up on current scholarship; your understanding is outdated not Trump’s.