There is no denying that we live and operate in a global environment. With the advent and widespread integration of new technology the world we live in has gotten smaller and more connected. While there are certainly many benefits to a more connected and integrated world, we cannot deny a certain number of inherent risks to our new reality.
The risks and drawbacks do not necessarily mean that as a nation we should retreat out of the world stage and shut our doors to opportunities with other countries and governments. Nor should we ignore that our own presence in this world requires a certain level of responsibility to our global friends and neighbors. We are very much a part of this planet and the only way to change that would be to cease to exist.
In the same sense, we must also realize that not every actor or country on the world stage is our friend or ally. Not every power at work on our globe has ours or anyone else’s best interests at stake. Throughout history, today, and anytime in the future, there will always be individuals or groups intent upon despotism. Rarely do these powers openly proclaim the nefarious aspects of their intentions. Instead, they exclusively market big promises and morally lofty goals. It is for this reason that as individuals on a local scale, all the way up to a nation on a global scale, we need to critically assess the actions and outcomes of all events and promises in order to differentiate between the potential for evil, born of either evil thought or thoughtlessness, and of otherwise constructive initiatives. (In all cases either will be advertised as good.)
In our nation we enjoy a well established system of checks and balances. These checks and balances exist to safeguard us from the inevitable tyranny inherent to man’s imperfect nature. They include various elements of government such as separation of powers, term limits, elections, and above all, a formal written constitution which outlines our system of government and succinctly places certain limitations of government in order to protect the rights of the people it serves.
It is equally important that we maintain a system of checks and balances on a global scale. The most fundamental system of global checks and balances is a separation of powers which is achieved naturally through national sovereignty.
If we relinquish our national sovereignty to a global government, we not only lose the autonomy over our own national checks and balances but we diminish or outright lose our nation’s standing as an independent entity. It is a national independence that allows countries to determine and administer their own laws and to choose whether or not to participate in specific global treaties or initiatives. It is our national independence that allows us to deliberate over policies in order to critically assess the morality and risks associated to those policies. In short, independent nationality is the most fundamental system of checks and balances to global power.
need to capture the elements of “treaties” and various global councils that administer law over nations and subsequently serve as an undeclared global government.
The alternative is a globalized central authority which could not possibly have the knowledge or agility of policy to act with in the best interest of any local community. Centralized authority lies on the opposite end of the spectrum of political rule to that of a representative self government.
In the wake of the covid-19 pandemic it has become abundantly evident that excessive dependence on global manufacturing puts the people of our country at significant health and economic risks. This is especially true when that global manufacturing is heavily dependent on non-ally nations such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
We suffered a significant shortage in critical goods from face masks to medication because much of our supply of these items were, and still are, sourced out of china. Many manufacturing companies were able to convert their various operations to begin manufacturing some of these supplies, however, because so many of these companies were not originally tooled to make these items it was not a simple matter of upscaling current production to meet increased demand. It required significant changes to manufacturing processes, supply chains and company operations. Many of these companies executed these operations very well, but it still took considerable time to complete. During that time the disease continued to spread and supplies were not available. The result was a much larger pandemic.
When foreign countries hold leverage over us in the form of being a largely sole provider of goods, they place us at a significant strategic disadvantage. National sovereignty is critical to our national security. Any form of global dependence we hold is a liability to the security of our nation and its members. For the bleeding hearts in our group, it also poses a significant liability to any of the people or countries who in turn depend on our support, technology or philanthropy for their wellbeing.
Again, this doesn’t mean that we should avoid cooperation and opportunity with other countries, only that we must conduct our operations with respect to our strategic security and in a manner that maintains a system of national independence so as to ensure a secure (read domestic) supply chain of essential goods and services. This requires that we maintain laws and administrations that support and promote domestic manufacturing, particularly for critical health and defense goods.
It also requires that we not overly rely on global entities for our national policy. Another key revelation of the covid-19 pandemic was the World Health Organization’s (WHO) over-reliance on what we now understand to be incorrect information disseminated out of the CCP. During the very early stages of the pandemic the CCP asserted the virus was not human to human transmittable and dramatically underreported its number of cases. The WHO did not challenge or seek to verify any of the information the CCP gave despite knowing the CCP’s propensity for false information.
The result was that the WHO sat on what information they did have for at least five days. When they finally conveyed the information to the rest of the world they did not recommend any action and even condemned the U.S. president’s call to restrict travel from that region. This transfer of false and incomplete information resulted in what could have been a localized disaster turning into a global pandemic.
Increased measures of skepticism and critical thinking could have dramatically reduced the death and economic destruction that resulted from our over-reliance on the World Health Organization. This is precisely the danger inherent to national over-reliance on centralized global organizations and authority. Those globalized central points of information create singular weak points for infiltration that if exploited, have incredibly wide ranging consequences.
Given the very strong ties between the CCP and the Director-General of the WHO, it would appear that infiltration of this central week point is exactly what occurred in the WHO’s poor handling of the covid-19 pandemic. It is also clearly evident that the more nationalistic policies of our current administration from supporting domestic manufacturing to earlier international travel restrictions could have greatly reduced the spread of the virus as well as its negative effects on our economy.
While the realities of global commerce and politics are an integrated part of our nation and lives, it is important that we maintain our national sovereignty. We need to retain the exclusive right to our own laws and protection of human rights.