Refreshing Our Role in International Affairs

Refreshing Our Role in International Affairs

US history teaches us our founders relucted to engage international affairs. While isolation is impossible and impractical, we should not lose the wisdom and, perhaps, refresh our role.

Mr. Obama has already demonstrated a refreshing approach to what the founders considered to be "their" problems. Immediately suggesting the two-state solution is to recognize a much needed pluralism that will allow a process of improvement to occur that just needs diplomatic tweeking. It allows for a peacefully legitimate process of self-determination to occur that a command and control can only simulate, and not at all well.

It was not long that the founders realized that a global marketplace engaged the wealth of nations. It is too seductive. Isolation limits your wealth, so it is necessary to cultivate a peaceful environment for commerce to take place. Has our economy become so mature with deliberately elitist tendencies that we MUST apply dangerous foreign entanglements?

It is entirely reasonable for small businesses worldwide to ensure a peaceful environment for commerce to take place. The bigger a business becomes, the more it is able to manage the risk of instability, if not by causing it. Risk is minimized if you can know when and where it will happen making small business bear all the risk. That would be a good reason for our founders to not engage big sovereigns to do business.

In the US, every individual is constitutionally sovereign. The power structure is legally pluralistic. Engaging foreign powers compromises that pluralism. International terrorism has led to the Patriot Act, for example.

Pluralism is something that needs to be cultivated internationally for the wealth of nations. The reason big corporates become international conglomerates is to unilaterally control a natural tendency for pluralism. These large coporates are in fact considered to be the large sovereigns that our founders largely considered to be incompatible with the more sophisticated means of a legal pluralistic legitimacy.

Transnational corporates consider themselves beyond the status of sovereignty, and a global elite has evolved a self-concept of the ruling class. Sovereigns are considered objects to be controlled and managed, not cultivated, just like when the bourgeoise began its ascension to power. This elitist model of power and ploitical economy, this global Hamiltonianism, is conceptually operationalized into a false legitimacy of the general welfare that is argued superior to the chaos of pluralism. It is really a recipe for disaster contained within the conceptual model, the false legitimacy, operationalized into the practical model of power.

The time has come to replace the practical model for instability with the proven model of equitable stability. A peaceful and prosperous process for continuous improvement will not just be possible, but probable.

It is up to the voters to build a broad based coalition that the leadership can join to redifine the legitimacy of power as the natural right to self-determination, the right of the sovereign to actualize, to choose, a peaceful and prosperous existence together.

Allow Mr. Obamam the choice of leading a broad based coalition for real, much needed change.

Very best wishes.

tags:
international affairs,Hamiltonianism,practical models,commercial pluralism,coalition politics,organization theory