The Brexit aftermath

All the advocates of central planning and global governance are crying out against the threat Britain’s exit from the European Union supposedly poses to global order. It’s not order that is threatened, however, but control.

The corporate cronies of the world and their political stooges have hit a bump in the road on their way to consolidating global power. The common men and women of Britain have stood up against the most powerful corporate and political interests in the world and prevailed.

The so-called Brexit gives the American people and our brothers and sisters in Britain a chance to show the value of genuine economic freedom as well as what sovereign, friendly democracies can accomplish together. Now that Britain is freeing itself from the EU, she can set her own course and write her own rules.

We need places like Britain and the United States — and, indeed, all of America’s 50 states — to be diverse and to compete with each other. Friendly, voluntary competition and cooperation under the law makes us all stronger. Together, the United States and the United Kingdom and other nations around the globe can negotiate true free trade areas — not to impose more regulations, but to promote the kind of competition that the crony capitalists hate.

Like the British frustration with Brussels, Americans continue to nurse a growing frustration with the cronyism and oppressive centralized power in Washington. We believe in opportunity for all, not bailouts and handouts for the favored few. We are increasingly alarmed about socialized health care, costly and paralyzing regulations, obscene debt and spending, and continuing false promises from the political class.

The citizens of the United Kingdom stood up and said, “Enough is enough.” It was a welcome response to the tonedeaf political and corporate establishment that increasingly controls the levers of power in the world. Americans should applaud the courage of the British and join them by rejecting federal encroachment in every aspect of our lives and the cronyism it nurtures.

Take, for example, the recent disclosure about the Boeing spending millions lobbying Congress in favor of the Iran deal (no one in Congress seemed to know the company had a huge financial interest in the lifting of sanctions). This deal compromised American, Israeli and world security by giving Iran a path to develop nuclear weapons while removing the economic sanctions that otherwise put pressure on Iran to negotiate.

We now know one of the reasons why Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., was the only vote against the procedure that allowed the Iran deal to move forward: Boeing and other monied corporate interests were flashing dollar bills and promising new American jobs if the Iran deal was approved. Unsurprisingly, it went through. Shortly thereafter, Boeing announced a $25 billion deal to sell intercontinental jets to the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, for a state-owned airline frequently commandeered for military purposes.

And then the real kicker: At the same time Boeing was lobbying hard for the Iran deal so it could sell billions of dollars worth of airplanes, it was also lobbying hard for Congress to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank to enable the financing. Sweet deals for Boeing, and as usual, Americans got shafted by their own government.

Thankfully, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., is heroically blocking President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Ex-Im Bank board, preventing the bank from making its usual massive export subsidies to Boeing and other multinational conglomerates. But it will take freedom fighters in the Senate, House and statehouses across the country to really push back on centralized government and the cronyism it engenders, just as it will take more EU member nations to fight for their own destinies to bring down the bureaucratic machine.

Global companies such as Boeing, Wall Street banks, labor unions, central banks, and lovers of big government are hell-bent on amalgamating sovereign nations into big, impersonal, political bureaucracies that will lead to globalized centralized control of values, economics and defense. The Brits stood up and said, “No.” God bless the United Kingdom, and long live the Queen!

The Nobel Prize-winning Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, who died earlier this month, was remarkable in so many ways. But one such way hasn’t received as much attention as it should: his ability to win high-level access and respect on both sides of the polarized partisan political divide.

Wiesel was a longtime friend and associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton and a regular guest at the White House during the Clinton years. His endorsement of Mrs. Clinton in the 2000 U.S. Senate race in New York helped her win over Jewish voters who had been wary after her high-profile kiss of PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s wife, Suha, who had falsely accused Israel of poisoning Palestinian Arab children.

Yet it emerged that Wiesel also recently had a three-hour lunch with Donald Trump. Trump met the news of Wiesel’s death with a tweet describing him as a “great man” who made the world a better place.

Now that Wiesel is gone, who else is there in his category?

One name that comes to mind is Henry Kissinger, secretary of state to presidents Nixon and Ford. Kissinger met with Trump in May. And Kissinger’s relationship with Mrs. Clinton is sufficiently warm and close that it was the subject of repeated attacks by Bernie Sanders. Kissinger’s credibility isn’t just bipartisan, it’s tri-partisan; he’s also old pals with William Weld, the former Massachusetts governor running for vice president on the Libertarian ticket.

On one level, the parallel between Wiesel and Kissinger might appear paradoxical. Wiesel was an advocate for humanitarian intervention, consistently and passionately urging America to do more to alleviate genocide and suffering around the world. Kissinger is the archetypical realist, weighing foreign policy choices analytically and calculating how they might advance, or not advance, America’s national security interests.

But realism and humanitarianism interventionism, while often in tension, aren’t inalterably opposed. Realists sometimes make the pragmatic humanitarian argument that if America overcommits itself, it won’t be able to help when it’s really needed. Interventionists sometimes argue on realist grounds that if America fails to help in humanitarian crises, the resulting power vacuums may mushroom into national security threats.

Even as non-interventionist a president as Barack Obama, who basically shrugged at the use of chemical weapons on Syrian civilians and whose premature withdrawal from Iraq led to the rise of the Islamic State, this week delayed his plans to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. There’s a broad bipartisan consensus that at least some minimal level of American leadership, strength and engagement is good for both America and the world; that’s the consensus within which both Wiesel and Kissinger operated, whatever differences arise over tactics or particular cases.

Kissinger and Wiesel both worked as college professors; Kissinger at Harvard, Wiesel at the City University of New York and at Boston University. They both were immigrants who came to America young, poor and unknown and who became famous and financially secure. Both men were brilliant and prolific authors, proud Americans and proud Jews, friends of Israel. Their English-language voices carried traces, in their accents, of their foreign pasts. Refugees from the fascism that rose in Europe in the middle of the past century, they were conscious of the gift of freedom and of its fragility.

Kissinger, thankfully, remains with us at age 93; Wiesel, alas, is now gone. Who will be the Kissinger or the Wiesel of the next generation? There’s no way to tell. All we can do is hope that America’s border and spirit will be open wide enough to allow them in.