Day: December 6, 2018

French President Emmanuel Macron is learning the perils of
defying the will of his own people to serve a globalist agenda. The
French president has made it his mission to lead the globalist assault
on fossil fuels to stem further increases in man-made greenhouse
emissions. He vowed to “make our planet great again,” after sharply
criticizing President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States
from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. After convening the first
One Planet Summit in Paris in late 2017 and continuing to lecture the
world about the need for drastic actions to combat climate change,
President Macron showed he was willing to use his own people as
sacrificial lambs. He proposed steep fuel-tax increases to take effect
this January, with more to come in subsequent years. The purpose was to
raise the price of carbon use in France. The French people rose up in
protest at a level not seen since the 1960’s. The yellow vest became the
symbol of what began as protests by French drivers against higher
diesel fuel prices. The protests, at times accompanied by violence,
expanded to vent the grievances of ordinary people feeling squeezed by
President Macron’s economic agenda. At first, President Macron would not
budge. However, as the street protests in Paris and other parts of
France showed no signs of abating, the Macron administration decided
Tuesday to suspend the planned fuel tax increases for at least 6 months.
France’s Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, not the aloof President
Macron, announced the suspension decision. “No tax is worth jeopardizing
the unity of the nation,” Prime Minister Philippe said in explaining
the government’s decision.
President Trump had acted on the
belief that the Paris Agreement on Climate Change represented a windfall
to many other countries to the detriment of American workers. President
Macron, on the other hand, remained oblivious to the economic plight of
his own people, who have been plagued by an overall jobless rate of
8.9%. The unemployment rate for French youth (ages 15–24) has been
reported to be as high 24.6 percent.
It is worth noting that
Prime Minister Philippe, not President Macron, used the phrase “the
unity of the nation” in announcing the suspension decision. That’s
likely because Mr. Macron sees himself more as a global citizen than as a
citizen of the country he was elected to lead. Unity of the world to
address climate change is more important to him than preserving the
unity of the French nation by focusing primarily on the economic needs
of the French people.
The French president showed his disdain
for nationalism in remarks he delivered during a gathering in Paris of
world leaders, including President Trump, to observe 100 years since the
end of World War I. In a line that only a globalist could mouth,
President Macron exclaimed, “Patriotism is the exact opposite of
nationalism. Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism.” Mr. Macron
thought he was being clever with his veiled attack on President Trump’s
“America First” policies. However, President Trump is having the last
laugh. President Trump’s approval rating stands at approximately 46 percent currently. President Macron’s approval rating has fallen to 23 percent.
The French people, who are suffering under President Macron’s globalist
stewardship, presumably prefer a “France First” president.
Mr. Macron repeats the same globalist tripe that we heard for eight
years from former President Barack Obama and one that we hear all the
time at the United Nations. It is based on the false premise of
multilateralism for its own sake. Globalists make the red herring
argument that the only alternative to multilateralism as they define it
is what Mr. Macron in his speech to the UN General Assembly last September described
as a unilateralist “survival-of-the-fittest approach.” The real choice,
however, is between manic multilateralism that globalists believe in,
versus rational multilateralism that respects national sovereignty.
Manic multilateralism is an uncritical deference to global norms and consensus, irrespective of the consequences. The late Charles Krauthammer described
its ultimate purpose:  to “reduce American freedom of action by making
it subservient to, dependent on, constricted by the will–and
interests–of other nations. To tie down Gulliver with a thousand
strings… the slavish pursuit of ‘international legitimacy’ – and
opposition to any American action undertaken without universal foreign
blessing.”
Rational multilateralism, on the other hand,
strives for cooperation among sovereign nations to address issues of
common concern. It seeks to promote possible practical solutions to
manageable problems transcending national boundaries that are fair to
all concerned. The United States remains among the most dedicated
multilateralist countries in the world. Americans generally support
international cooperation when effective in fighting a common threat
such as global terrorism. The United States has contributed more than
any other member state to the United Nations (including its specialized
agencies and peacekeeping operations) to keep it in business. We work
through NATO in Europe, the Organization of American States in Latin
America, and U.S. alliances with Asian countries. We actively support
the work of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and legions
of multilateral relief agencies. None of that has fundamentally changed
under President Trump. What has changed, however, is that President
Trump will not tolerate funding arrangements that unfairly burden
American taxpayers. He also refuses to go along with UN-endorsed
agreements not ratified by the U.S. Senate that he deems to be contrary
to the best interests and security of the American people. As President
Trump explained in his speech to the UN General Assembly on September 25, 2018, “America will always choose independence and cooperation over global governance, control, and domination.”
Globalists reject the primacy of national sovereignty. They believe,
for example, that by reflecting some sort of international “consensus”
in resolutions and other “official” documents the United Nations has
conferred special moral, political and even legal legitimacy on the Iran
nuclear deal and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. They argue that
the Trump administration cannot disavow these agreements without
threatening to destroy the whole so-called “rules-based international
order.”  Nonsense. President Trump saw through the fundamental flaws in
both agreements, neither of which are legally binding treaties ratified
by the U.S. Senate. He properly decided to act in the interests of the
people who elected him.
The Iran nuclear deal provided a cash
windfall to the dictatorial Iranian regime, which its leaders are using
to fund their ballistic missile program and to fund terrorism. Obama’s
deal kicked the Iran nuclear can down the road by not stopping
altogether the regime’s ability to develop nuclear weapons and the
capability to deliver them. The Paris climate agreement allowed China,
the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, to do virtually nothing of
consequence to reverse the growth of its emissions until 2030. At the
same time, Obama pledged further rapid cuts in U.S. emissions with
job-destroying new regulations. He also agreed to a redistributionist
funding scheme that would have picked American taxpayers’ pockets to the
tune of billions of dollars a year starting in 2020. The fact that
other nations’ leaders are either too stupid to heed President Trump’s
warnings, or have too much a stake in selfishly reaping economic gains
for their own countries, does not mean that President Trump must accede
to their wishes.
President Trump by word and deed has laid out
a vision that lauds international cooperation where warranted but under
which he “will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected,
unaccountable, global bureaucracy.”  President Macron, in his own speech
to the UN General Assembly last September, claimed that he does not
believe “in one great globalized people.” He believes deeply, he said,
“in the sovereignty of peoples.” Note that he uses the expression
“sovereignty of peoples” rather than “national sovereignty.” He said in
the same speech that “in no way will I yield the principle of the
sovereignty of peoples to nationalists.” The French people rioting in
the streets of France against President Macron’s proposed globalist fuel
tax increases want a more nationalist president who shows true concern
for their well-being as French nationals. Mr. Macron should start taking
a lesson from Mr. Trump’s playbook if he wants to remain president of
the sovereign French nation.
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