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Pat Buchanan on Foreign Policy2000 Reform Candidate for President |
First, with a more robust birth rate, its population is growing, while that of the West is declining. Second, immigration is bringing Islam back to Europe, 500 years after its expulsion from Spain and three centuries after the retreat from the Balkans began. Millions have come to fill spaces left empty by aging, dying, and aborted Europeans. Third, as there was once a church militant, there is today a mosque militant.
Fourth, Islam gives its believers clear, cogent, and coherent answers to the great questions: Who created me? Why am I here? How do I live righteously? Islam gives men a reason to live and a cause to die for. It is a fighting faith.
Lastly, Islam is a universal religion which claims it alone has the path to salvation and is destined to become the religion of all mankind. Islam divides the world into the lost and the elect, the Dar al-Harb and the Dar al-Islam.
For what is a nation?
Is it not a people of a common ancestry, culture, and language who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, share the same music, poetry, art, literature, held together, in Lincoln's words, by "bonds of affection, mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone"?
If that is what a nation is, can we truly say that America is still a nation?
China won the competition because China can pay its workers little, force them to work longer, and operate plants whose health, safety, and environmental standards would have their US competitors shut down as public nuisances. Thus did China, between 2004 and 2008, triple her share of the US tire market.
If Israel is to remain a Jewish state, a Palestinian state seems a national imperative. Yitzhak Rabin came to recognize this, but was assassinated. Ehud Barak came to recognize this and sought to bring it about. In his last days in office, Ehud Olmert warned, "if the two-state solution collapses," Israel will "face a South African-style struggle."
Due to Beijing's one-couple, one-child policy, which has led to tens of millions of aborted baby girls, 12% to 15% of young Chinese men will be unable to find wives. As single makes are responsible for most of society's violence, the presence of tens of millions of young single Chinese men portends a time of trouble in the Middle Kingdom. One reporter toured China to assess the impact of the draconian policy he called "gendercide" for its systematic extermination of baby girls.
"By the year 2020, there will be 30 million more men than women of marriageable age in the giant Empire. Nothing like this has ever happene to any civilization before. Speculation is now seething about what might happen: a war to cull the surplus males, a rise in crime, a huge expansion in the prostitution that is already a major industry in every Chinese city, a rise in homosexuality."
And as Rome passed away, so, the West is passing away, from the same causes and in much the same way. What the Danube and Rhine were to Rome, the Rio Grande and Mediterranean are to America and Europe, the frontiers of a civilization no longer defended.
The self-delusion about what is happening and the paralysis in the face of the crisis have no precedent. What can be said for a man who would allow his home to be invaded by strangers? What can be said for ruling elite that permits this to be done to the nation, and that celebrates it as a milestone of moral progress?
We are witnessing how nations perish. We are entered upon the final act of civilization. The last scene is the deconstruction of the nations. The penultimate scene, now well underway, is the invasion unresisted.
Answer: Neither today nor tomorrow does there appear to be any grievance between us so great as to justify war. War is possible. But whether it comes will depend upon China and upon us.
China today does not threaten any vital US interest. Even her annexation of Taiwan would not threaten us. Should Beijing establish her hegemony over the South China Sea, how would that imperil the United States? If South Korea and Japan were to follow the Philippines and ask us to close our bases, how would that threaten our survival as a great, free, and independent republic? While it might mean the end of our Asian hegemony, it would not mean the end of the United States.
In this most Christianized of countries, premarital sex, homosexual unions, and abortions are considered normal and moral by our cultural elites. Islamic societies reject them as immoral. Who does President Bush believe is right? At the UN, Christians cooperate with Muslims to defeat European and American progressives. Who does the president believe is on the side of "moral truth"? If moral truth is the same "in every culture, in every time, and every place," why do men yet disagree on the morality of what we did to Hamburg, Hiroshima, Dresden, and Nagasaki?
With a growth rate of 8 percent, a capable and energetic population of 1.3 billion, the silent allegiance of millions of "overseas Chinese" from Singapore to San Francisco, a history of having been the world's foremost civilization and Middle Kingdom between heaven and earth, China is determined to become again the first power on earth.
What America and China must avoid is the fate of Wilhelmine Germany and the Britain of George V, when the world's rising power and receding power stumbled into a thirty-year war that destroyed both.
How can all our meddling not fail to spark some horrible retribution.... Have we not suffered enough--from Pan Am 103, to the World Trade Center, to the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam--not to know that interventionism is the incubator of terrorism? Or will it take some cataclysmic atrocity on US soil to awaken our global gamesmen to the going price of empire?America today faces a choice of destinies. We can choose to be a peacemaker of the world, or its policeman who goes about night-sticking troublemakers until we, too, find ourselves in some bloody brawl we cannot handle.
A: There should be no American ground troops there. I do believe the Australians should go in, the Portuguese and some Asian nations. That’s a regional problem there. What’s happening there is atrocious, of course. It’s the responsibility of the Indonesian government, which basically overran that area, killed some 200,000 people at the very time the US was funneling aid and support in there. So I think we have a measure of moral responsibility, but I don’t believe American troops ought to be on the ground. We’ve got too many American troops all over the world right now doing peacekeeping functions when their job is to defend the US. I think you should help with logistics, intelligence support, getting those people in there. But this is a job for the Australians and the Asians in the neighborhood.
"The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China & that Taiwan is part of China."
Jimmy Carter severed diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and recognized the People's Republic as the sole legitimate government of China. A firestorm ensued. Reagan reaffirmed the Shanghai Communique--that Taiwan was a part of China--and agreed to cut back arms sales to the island.
While this writer, among others, opposed the Shanghai Communique and the more far-reaching Carter and Reagan concessions, the day when Taiwan might have declared independence with US support is gone.
Looking back over the half century since Chiang's army fled the mainland, two realities emerge. America has been Taiwan's only true friend, and the US commitment to the island grows weaker each decade.
If China's hawks see in America a superpower resolved to encircle, contain, and deny her her rightful place in the sun, are they wrong? Is this not declared US policy in the National Strategy Statement?
A prominent Chinese scholar has charged that "the US uses the fight against terrorism as an opportunity to pursue its hegemonic strategy, carried out under the cover of antiterrorism." Considering how we launched a preemptive war on Iraq to disarm it of weapons it did not have, does that scholar not have an argument?
If Beijing believes America intends the replacement of its regime with a democracy, is regime change in China not an end goal of President Bush's "world democratic revolution"?
The party now justifies itself as the vessel of Chinese nationalism that will recover China's lost territories and make her again the first nation on earth. The regime must deliver or the regime is at risk.
China is not only preoccupied with consolidating control over the Tibetans and Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, who detest their Han Chinese overlords, and suppressing Christians and the Falun Gong, she has suspicious and even hostile neighbors in Russia, in the Muslim lands to the west (and on all other borders).
Anywhere China shifts her weight, she rubs up against a nation or people with reason to fear her. China is contained in the Taiwan Strait by U.S. naval power. Elsewhere on her frontiers, she is contained by Asian and Islamic nationalists who are her nervous neighbors.
However, first, last, and always, the US must consider its own vital interests. We cannot give any nation a blank check to drag us into war.
If Taiwan agrees to reunite peacefully with the mainland, to accept the status of Hong Kong, a "One China, Two Systems" policy, the US could not object. Indeed, Taiwan looking out for her own interests first, is deeply engaged in China. Some 50,000 Taiwanese companies have $60 billion in investments on the mainland. A million Taiwanese visit there each year. Hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese live in Shanghai.
Our mutual security treaty has been dead for a quarter century. It cannot be revived. Yet, our national interest and honor dictate that we do not permit an old friend to be brutalized & bound off into captivity.
When I saw this redeployment, I said, ‘It is time the US stopped building up this--what could be this Frankenstein monster and took a hard look at what they’re doing.’ They persecute Christians. They persecute dissidents. They threaten our country. What in heaven’s name are we doing giving them a $ 70 billion trade surplus every single year when they’re using it to buy weapons to threaten our men and women?
It is time we begin looking out for our country and our people first for a change. Look at foreign aid. Each year we send $12 billion abroad in foreign aid. $50 billion goes to Mexico. World Bank loans go to communist China. If we cannot balance our own budget, what are we doing sending American dollars abroad to balance the budgets of foreign countries? We cut our budget for the elderly & veterans & farmers-then our government ships $12 billion abroad. When I get to the White House, foreign aid will come to an end and we will start looking out for the forgotten Americans right here.
Patriotism is the soul of a nation. It is what keeps a nation alive. When patriotism dies, when a nation loses the love and loyalty of its people, the nation dies and begins to decompose.
Patriotism is not nation-worship. It is not that spirit of nationalism that must denigrate or dominate other nations. It is a passionate attachment to one's own country--its land, its people, its past, its heroes, literature, language, traditions, cultures, and customs.
For a nation to endure, its people must form a moral and social community and share higher values than economic interests. To be a nation, a people must BELIEVE they are a nation. We Americans must see ourselves as of a unique and common nationality--in order to remain a nation.
For love of country--patriotism--is the soul of a country; and when the soul departs, the body dies.
This sense of grievances is embedded in the Mexican consciousness. And in America, there is a reciprocal sense of guilt over what our fathers did, that has been bred into schoolchildren since the 1960s.
What we did to Mexico, Mexico is doing to us. People of Mexican ancestry living here by 2050, most of them in CA, TX, NM, and AZ, lands Mexico regards as stolen. Paralyzed by guilt, we are inviting La Reconquista, the reconquest of the Southwest by Mexico, even as Ferdinand and Isabella effected La Reconquista in 1492 from the Moors who had invaded 800 years before.
While world population had doubled to 6 billion in 40 years, the European people had stopped reproducing. Their populations had begun to stagnate and, in many countries, had already begun to fall. Of Europe's 47 nations, only one, Muslim Albania, was, by 2000, maintaining a birthrate sufficient to keep it alive indefinitely. Europe had begun to die.
The day of Europe is over. The coming mass migration from the Islamic world will so change the ethnic composition of the Old Country that Europeans will be too paralyzed by a threat of terrorism to intervene in North Africa, the Middle East, or the Persian Gulf. Europeans already ignore US sanctions on Iran, Iraq, and Libya. As their populations become more Arabic and Islamic, paralysis will set in. We should know. From the 1850s until WwWI, US policy toward the British Empire was held hostage by the Irish, whose votes were decisive in states like NY.
With populations declining and children vanishing, Europe has no vital interest to justify tens of thousands of their young to war if they are not attacked. At present birthrates, Europe's population in 2100 will be less than 1/3 what it is today. Europe has voted for "la dolce vita."
A: I did not say that was a good thing at all. What I said was that if you go back in all these massacres and genocides of peoples, you will find that despite the fact that statesmen say this is awful and it can’t happen again, it does every single time and there has never been a real intervention to stop it.
The British issue was with the Bulgarian massacres by the Turks. Disraeli said we ought to stay with the Turks even though they did it, and Gladstone said we ought to throw the Turks out of Europe even though they’re our allies. What I’m saying was this shows you when national interest come into collision, even with horrific human rights atrocities, every time virtually, national interest wins. I don’t say it’s morally right. I was writing history.