What Motivates American Globalism?
It is too easy, and dangerously misleading, to examine the most controversial globalist policies combined with America’s most obvious weaknesses and conclude that American power, and the future of globalism is in jeopardy. In both there is nuance and hidden strength. Understanding this ambiguity offers both hope for the future and a clearer sense of what choices face Americans today.
It is important to recognize that while other Western Nations from New Zealand to Sweden are participants in globalist policies, and that globalist theories may have originated from Europe, the influencers and institutions turning them into policy and pushing them onto the rest of the world are almost all American.
This distinction matters, because it frames the entire question of globalism in a manner that contradicts the term. Globalism is less about the dissolution of nations, and more about the extension of American global hegemony. Globalism, in this sense, isn’t global. It’s the latest iteration of American imperialism. This is expressed in every “globalist” imperative, from rapid and mandatory sacrifices to cope with a “climate crisis” to “equity” and racial redress, to trans ideology, gay rights, and mass immigration.
The motivation for American globalists demanding action to prevent “global boiling” is almost transparently imperialistic. By denying financing to nations in the Global South to develop economically viable energy solutions, they are condemned to become dependent on “renewables” which require a level of technological sophistication that only America and the West can offer. At the same time, of course, the elites in these nations are seduced by the promise of massive foreign aid to compensate for the “climate crimes” allegedly committed by Western oil companies, and bribed by the royalties attendant to massive new mines to extract the minerals necessary to build more resource intensive renewable energy technologies.
When pondering what could possibly motivate America’s globalist elites to push mass immigration, it is difficult to dismiss the possibility that it may stem from outright malevolence towards the legacy population descended from European settlers. After all, these new immigrants arrive almost exclusively from failed states, all too often bringing conflict and trauma with them. They receive what are by their standards exceedingly generous government support that burdens taxpayers and stretches public services. And they are constantly exposed to a narrative that blames colonialism for the problems in the nations they came from, and blames institutional racism for whatever challenges they may face here in America.
There is another reason, however, that also might explain the motivation for a policy of mass immigration. American birthrates are nowhere near sufficient to maintain a healthy balance between old retirees and young workers. While automation might solve the productivity challenge that comes with an aging population, automation cannot replace the dynamism that comes with a young population.
This argument – healthy nations need to have a young population and a growing population – has become a truism among neoliberal economists. And if the only place to find young people is in the few but still teeming pockets of fecundity left on earth – Sub-Saharan Africa and Central America – then that’s where they’ll be found. By the tens of millions. And since these new residents have linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and religious characteristics that diverge more profoundly from America’s legacy citizens than at any point during America’s prior waves of immigration, “equity” and multiculturalism must become the new establishment doctrine.
One still must ask, however, why assimilation can’t be tried with the same vigor with which it was successfully applied in previous centuries. And again, the answer is nuanced. Partly, again of course, because the leftist liberal mentality in America requires an excess of abashed regret and repentance on the part of all conscientious white people for their racist history.
But there may be more at work here. What better way for American globalists to extend American global hegemony than by making America a nation that overwhelms its own population by inviting in millions of migrants and catering to them in every possible way, economically and culturally? Do any of the impoverished multitudes eking out a life in Nigeria, or Honduras, dream of going to China? Russia? Or to they long to come to America, where they will have an apartment that is palatial by their standards, a car instead of a scooter, and free public education?
Perhaps, therefore, mass immigration and multiculturalism are part of the American globalist strategy to woo the world. Forget about Russia and China. They’re unwelcoming and racist, and we’re the good guys. Your future is with us.
The economics of America’s globalist strategy is deceptively effective. We may have trade deficits because we outsourced manufacturing, but there’s a sly but profound upside to these deficits. They help preserve the global appetite for dollars. We flood exporting nations with dollars when we buy their products. Then we balance our trade deficit by accepting foreign held dollars to purchase American assets, and as our swelling population creates demand driven price increases for everything from farmland to residential real estate, this domestic collateral for our otherwise fiat currency is worth more.
So it is as well with dollars we blithely print and ship overseas in the form of foreign aid, climate reparations, remittances sent by immigrants to their families overseas, Venezuelan oil, and ransoms to the Mullahs of Iran. With all these schemes, dollars pour into overseas accounts, our currency continues to circulate around the world, and so long as that’s true, we can print as many dollars as we want.
All of this, however, requires an expansionist, increasingly authoritarian government in America. Enforcing environmentalist restrictions – which also drive up prices for American assets as collateral for the dollar – diminishes America’s middle class. Hence the story must be tightly controlled. The climate catastrophe is happening now, and to cope we must accept that our middle class lifestyle is unsustainable. The foundation of American prosperity is racist exploitation and to atone requires reciprocal abuse and demographic replacement. White privilege and toxic masculinity are oppressive and must be broken.
You can’t sell this story to hard working families unless you censor news and social media and successfully divide the population by race instead of by class. And that is exactly what America’s institutions are trying to do.
On every level, geopolitical, demographic, cultural, corporate, and economic, a logic can be found in the American establishment’s choice of globalist policies. They may well succeed, erasing any possibility of an eventual multi-polar community of sovereign nations. But why? Why are they making these choices?
Why have American institutions promoted censorship to quash open debate over the policies they’ve chosen, policies destined to dramatically reduce America’s middle class and erase economic and political freedoms that have been taken for granted since the nation’s founding? Why have American institutions nurtured every cultural variant that might collapse birth rates; encouraging the sterilization of “trans” youth, encouraging homosexuality, stigmatizing women who prioritize motherhood over careers, and attacking traditional families as patriarchal anachronisms? Why have they chosen mass immigration as the demographic alternative to encouraging people to have more children? Or why not encourage immigration, but restrict it to applicants who speak English, have valuable skills, and a preexisting desire to assimilate? Why not allow everyone – including Americans – to develop natural gas and nuclear power, to lower the cost-of-living and more rapidly spread prosperity everywhere?
Are these choices merely the latest expression of the perennial human urge to build empires, the corruption of power? Or are they a product of genuine but misguided altruism, an elitist belief that only by wielding absolute power can they successfully cope with the climate crisis and the scourge of racism? Maybe all of this is merely a combination of megalomaniacal greed and megalomaniacal altruism. If so, there is still hope that an enlightened population can resist and overcome the incipient tyranny. But not so fast.
At this point the reader may howl with laughter, but what if the reasons for America’s current globalist strategy are not of this earth? In a recent X video, and with his usual lack of inhibition, Tucker Carlson raised the possibility that extraterrestrial visitors have negotiated agreements with the American deep state. That would explain a lot. Someone coming from another planet, visiting Earth and imbued with a dispassionate disregard for individual human life, might urge the global hegemon to cull the herd. It’s a nice planet you’ve got here, but there are too many of you. Clean it up, or we will.
That’s as good an explanation as any.
This article originally appeared in American Greatness.
Edward Ring is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Greatness, and a regular contributor to the California Globe. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Forbes, and other media outlets.
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