America's Future Engagement with the Alliance of Civilizations

A participant of the Alliance of Civilizations Madrid Conference described the lack of engagement of U.S. policy makers as a gaping hole. What kind of response can the AoC expect from a future president?

Generally, one hopes, that along with power change comes necessary political corrections. The United States has had 20 years of the same two families setting policy and Hillary Clinton hopes to add another four to the tally. Early in Hillary’s campaign she unsuccessfully attempted to entice Americans with the "get two for the price of one” slogan. She has said that when she becomes president that Bill will have a prominent position within the United Nations. Having already served as President of the United States, it appears Bill has his eye on the position of “president of the world”. I wonder what Javier Solana thinks of that as it would put the Clintons in a competing rather than co-operative role. One thing is for certain, the Clintons share the goal of creating a common civilization.

In a 2002 speech delivered to Compuware, Bill Clinton said that we must move from a world of interdependence to integration, one in which the common civilization will combat the enemies from “within”.

• “On the other hand, the greatest threat to our security comes out of our interdependence, our vulnerability everywhere to enemies from within. To people who use sophisticated weapons in an open society to advance exclusive claims rooted in ancient hatreds, the most ancient difficulties of people based on our racial, ethnic, tribal and religious differences…in addition to a security strategy, a more partners and fewer terrorist strategy, we need to overtly support the idea that there can and must be a global community…our differences are important and they make life more interesting, but our common humanity matters more…All these things that you may think are bad actually reflect how people have behaved for most of human history. There’s our crowd and their crowd. We have the truth and they don’t…But we live in an interdependent world and we literally cannot make of it what it ought to be unless we make it a home for all the children of the world. Nobody has to give up anything except the claim to exclusive truth...We really like our differences and they’re really important, but our common humanity matters more.”

This sounds exactly like the Club of Madrid’s global counter-terrorism strategy—one which calls for the establishment of a police state. I'm not surprised as Bill Clinton was the Club of Madrid’s Honorary Co-Chairman at the time the strategy was formed.

Rivaling the Clintons is Barack Obama. One might suspect that Solana would prefer to see Obama become president as he intends to work within the already existing Alliance of Civilizations framework. Obama’s blog site recently featured a post entitled Friends Waiting to Be Made in an Alliance of Civilizations in which Obama is called upon to support the initiative. Yet more troublesome is Obama’s plans to implement Shared Security, a Solana-architected doctrine which places the military in the position of policing civilians. Additional details of Shared Security can be found in blog post Enemy of the Civilization. According to Obama, in the interest of the common civilization:

• “As president, Barack Obama will create a Shared Security Partnership Program to forge an international intelligence and law enforcement infrastructure to take down terrorist networks from the remote islands of Indonesia to the sprawling cities of Africa. This program will provide $5 billion over three years for counter-terrorism cooperation with countries around the world, including information sharing, funding for training, operations, border security, anticorruption programs, technology, and targeting terrorist financing.”

As we have learned from the Alliance of Civilizations materials, terrorists have been identified as the religious faithful who derive “exclusivist” interpretations from their religious texts. In other words, if you believe your religious texts to be true and reject another’s as being equally valid, consider yourself a terrorist.

Over the years I have been disillusioned with John McCain. I have yet to learn of how he views the creation of a common civilization. One positive for him is that he recognized Solana as a Marxist and opposed his appointment as NATO’s secretary-general. How does McCain view Solana now? I will be watching very closely.