Ukraine exposes false faith of globalism

We are coming up on the one-year anniversary of the crisis in Ukraine. This bloody spectacle has done more than expose weaknesses in European security arrangements. It has exposed the false foundation of the secular faith known as globalization.

George Ball, liberal State Department and Wall Street apparatchik, stated the first axiom of globalism in his infamous 1967 testimony to a congressional Joint Economic Committee when he declared nation states "obsolete." This has been unquestioningly accepted as an article of faith by the smart set.

Western elites have come to believe nations will wither away in a brave new economically integrated world. Flags are simply vestiges of a bygone era, not touchstones of pride. Individuals will identity less with their country of birth than with their brand of smartphone, whose parts have crossed more borders than five generations of migrant workers. "iPhone or Android" will mean more to homo modernicus than American or Brazilian.

We were promised that deracination would lead inevitably to world peace. The Cobdenites tell us nations that trade with each other don't go to war with each other. Free-trade apologists have been peddling this utopian claptrap ever since, facts notwithstanding. (Germany and France were major trading partners before World War I.) No rational head of state would upset the harmonious workings of the global economy; nationalist passions would be tempered by "market realities," so sayeth the globalist dogma.

What's clear is that they didn't get the memo in Russia and Ukraine. Though these two countries have been No. 1 trading partners, economics did not trump nationalism.

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It is a secularist Western conceit to view human aspirations strictly through a materialistic lens. Alexander Solzhenitsyn decried Western society's tendency to focus on the accumulation of material goods to the exclusion of all other human characteristics.

This stubborn insistence on seeing the world in purely economic terms blinded us to anticipating that Vladimir Putin could do exactly what he did. Putin wasn't supposed to risk upsetting "the market" – but he did. He was supposed to fear sanctions and economic backlash – but he didn't.

Economism informs the administration's solutions to all manner of foreign policy problems. Economic sanctions will promote good behavior in Eastern Europe, while economic engagement will promote human rights and religious tolerance in Asia. Even terrorism can be thwarted with education and economic development, as though a community college diploma and a Kwik Chek job will fill the need to serve a larger, noble cause that draws recruits to ISIS. (Never mind that Osama bin Laden nor the 9/11 bombers were lacking in neither education nor money.)

Events in the Ukraine show us nationalism is not a spent force and expose the limits of global technocracy.

We are to believe that raising everyone to the Western standard of living will spread our values, that having the same material goods makes everyone the same – the software comes with the hardware. President Clinton and Mitch McConnell both use this nostrum to sell economic engagement with China: Democracy will flourish in China in tandem with a growing middle class. We've seen how that worked out.

Despite developments in Ukraine, the Obama administration and globalist fellow travelers on K Street and in Congress continue to pursue their post-nationalist agenda. McConnell, Paul Ryan and Orrin Hatch are eager to give Obama the power to enact the TransPacific Partnership, which would erase our borders and merge the U.S. economy with countries around the world.

This latest deal is part of the globalist project envisioned by George Ball and David Rockefeller 50 years ago. It's based on the assumption that nationalism is a thing of the past and that people around the world think, conduct business and share the same values as the Western elites.

Those who have the courage to look will see those cherished notions died on the steppes of Ukraine.