Immigration: What no one wants to say.

Dear Editor, (Washington Post)

Anne Applebaum’s claim (The Security crisis on Europe’s shores, 9-6-15) that “no one wants to say: This is, in essence a security crisis” is inaccurate and historically short sighted.  This tragic association between distant nation state chaos and other nation’s security has been offered repeatedly since the end of World War II. 

The fact is, no one seeking political approval in our failing political system wants to acknowledge it or repeat it if they hope to keep their job.  To accept it they would have to abandon the great American political illusion that we are an ‘independent’ nation capable of functioning with ‘independent agencies’ in an interdependent world.   This would logically require new global institutions capable of preventing the horrific and lethal lawlessness perpetuated by our current sovereign state dominated world -- where the protection of fundamental, inalienable human rights is always an afterthought. 

A February 24, 2011 Washington Post column “A broader approach to national security”, Conor Williams (The Post's 2010 America's Next Great Pundit contest) quoted Congressman Charlie Wilson’s in a 2008 Washington Post article  "If we had done the right thing in Afghanistan then -- following up our military support with the necessary investments in diplomacy and development assistance -- we would have better secured our own country's future, as well as peace and stability in the region."   A Post editorial Feb. 7, 2002  “Lessons for Nation Builders” offers the same context.    Such insights have been repeated since the Marshall Plan and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the horrors of World War II.   Repeated acknowledgments that security crisis ‘over there’ become ‘security issues here’ is immediately forgotten.

The “foreign policy crisis” Ms. Applebaum refers to is only the continuation of independent policies aimed at addressing entirely interdependent global problems.   She blames “European states – Britain, France, Italy, Germany” in blocking “attempts to create a common foreign and defense policy”.  But the EU’s integration did more to increase security between those nations than the US has done to end war as a legitimate nation state tool. A tool, that by its very nature, perpetuates the global chaotic lawlessness.

When more pundits like Ms. Applebaum acknowledge the need for effective global institutions empowered to protect human rights above the rights of nation states as the UN currently does, humanity will finally be on the path to the greatest reduction of human suffering and the most increase in national security history has ever known.  In the real world there is no such thing as independence.  If we want to maximize everyone’s freedom and security in the future, we must abandon this dangerous national political illusion.

Chuck Woolery, Former Chair, United Nations Association Council of Organizations

Home address: 315 Dean Dr., Rockville, MD 20851

240-997-2209  chuck@igc.org

(the views expressed above are mine and not the views of the UNACO)