Biden’s assault on American sovereignty emulates worst flaws of European Union

As described by Christopher Caldwell in “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe,” the European Union (EU) from its inception had as a central purpose of “getting rid of inefficient economic nationalism,” but over time it evolved into a project for “getting rid of nationalism altogether.” Nationalism, however, proved too vague a concept for the Brussels bureaucrats to root out — but what they could root out was national sovereignty, and this they have done incrementally over the past 30 years.

This is relevant to the United States because the Biden administration, in its brief tenure, has launched an unparalleled assault on American sovereignty that is breathtaking in its scope and potential consequences. A partial list of the initiatives aggressively promoted by the Democratic Party’s left wing would include the proposed global minimum corporate tax; the waiving of intellectual property rights of U.S. COVID-19 vaccine producers; the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline; the banning of offshore drilling, which torpedoes American’s hard-won energy independence; and, most egregiously, the abandonment of serious border control and tacit encouragement of the waves of migrants now engulfing our southern border.

To understand the genesis of these policies and how they relate to the EU, we need look not to President Obama, nor as far back as President Carter, but most specifically to the widely misrepresented but retrospectively transformational trade policies that became law during the Clinton administration: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and normalization of trade with China.

The impact of these laws is skillfully illuminated and given context in a recent book that explores 20th century economic history and is a biography of one of the most influential economists of modern times: “The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes,” by Zachary D. Carter.  

Carter asserts that the Clinton administration pursued a unified economic vision on every policy front that relentlessly “transferred power from the government to financial markets,” believing the latter to be much more efficient agents of change than the cumbersome processes of democracy, particularly the awkward requirement of often risky elections. Furthermore, it was well understood that the Clinton trade project amounted to “a specific form of international political organization — a rearrangement of the rights and powers between global elites and national democracies.”

Ironically, this project involved a total rejection of Keynes, who consistently held that governments with all their imperfections were better instruments of the common good than financial markets, which always entailed the potential for dangerous instability unchecked by any trustworthy system of accountability.

At the same time the Clinton administration was building its new world economic order and supercharging the growing forces of globalization, people of a similar mindset across the Atlantic were creating the European Union, which they portrayed as a natural evolution of the successful European Economic Community but now aspiring to be a supra-national political entity built around the guiding principle of “ever closer union” proclaimed in the founding Maastricht Treaty of 1993.

In order to transform the EU into a true union and legitimize the European Parliament sitting in Strasbourg, a vote of the peoples of the member states would be required. But this ended disastrously in 2005, when the French people decisively rejected the new constitution, as shortly after did the Dutch by a 2-to-1 margin, leading to cancellation of the other scheduled elections.

Then, and subsequently, the peoples of Europe made clear that they were open to economic cooperation but not to forfeiting their national identities. The final death knell for EU grandiosity came with Brexit, when the sovereign British people chose the maintenance of their centuries-old democratic traditions over what world elites said was good for them. 

Soon after the EU’s 2005 electoral disaster, President Clinton’s project of swapping the wisdom of democracy for that of financial markets came to grief on an even grander scale with the economic crisis and Great Recession of 2007-2008. Fortunately for Clinton, he was out of office when these worldwide economic miseries occurred. Thus it would be Republicans, not Democrats, who would pay the political price for his deeply flawed economic vision. 

Sadly, however, that “vision” has found new life in the Biden administration, where the ascendent progressives still see great virtue and political benefit in the dismantling of national sovereignty. Left unchecked, it is hard to see how this direction bodes well for the American people, or for the future of American democracy itself. 

William Moloney is a Fellow in Conservative Thought at Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute who studied at Oxford and the University of London and received his doctorate from Harvard University. He is a former Colorado commissioner of education.