New AUKUS pact again pits Europe against the ‘Anglo Saxons’

Gordon L. Weil

It was about midnight when the lights went out in Brussels.  It happened during a 1965 meeting of the foreign ministers of the six member countries of the European Community, the forerunner of the EU.

I was the only American present, serving as an “official spokesman” for the international staff.  That night, I could not realize that I was witnessing a piece of history that would play out in 2021.

Soon after the lights went, so did the French foreign minister.  Refusing to be outvoted on a policy that France opposed, he walked out. He stayed out six months until the others caved in.

After World War II, France, Germany, Britain and the U.S. promoted the idea that by integrating the economies of Western Europe, a third world conflict could be prevented.  That would remove a major threat to Britain and offer the U.S. a strong ally rather than yet another world war.

General Charles De Gaulle, the leader of France’s comeback against Nazi Germany, was the French president.  While he favored ties with Germany, he disliked the British and worried about American influence on Europe through its English-speaking ally. He believed France could lead Europe.

De Gaulle openly sneered at the “Anglo-Saxons” – Britain and America.  He wanted a European defense force independent of the U.S. and would quit NATO military cooperation.   In 1963, France vetoed Britain’s application to join the European Community. I joined the international staff that year, and the French were not pleased.

In 1967, Britain tried again. This time it was led by British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and most Brits favored the application. By then I was a journalist and one evening joined three British colleagues in Brussels to have a beer with Wilson, who laid out his strong case for membership.

Through its walkout, France had made sure it dominated European affairs, so it was no problem for De Gaulle to dash Wilson’s hopes.

After the French tired of De Gaulle and he left the presidency, Britain was at last able to join the European Union in 1973.  In succeeding years, the Brits proved some of what De Gaulle had said was correct.  The U.K. demanded special treatment to protect its own historic ways of governing.

As Europe continued economic integration, Britain increasingly found itself forced to follow rules made by the EU, including admitting workers from Eastern Europe. Putting their seal on De Gaulle’s objections, in 2016 the British people voted to leave the EU. Painfully, by 2020 Brexit had happened.

De Gaulle’s forecast lived on.  It has just cropped up again last month, and this time the U.S. played the central role.

The U.S., U.K, and Australia have just agreed to the AUKUS pact, giving the Land Down Under its own nuclear submarines.  The Aussies and Brits could help the U.S. discourage China from deploying its growing fleet to back its false maritime claims in Asian waters. The U.K. already has its warships there.

But Australia had previously agreed to buy from France diesel-powered subs, vessels not really up to the task.  It suddenly reneged, though no AUKUS participant gave the French much advance notice. Not only had France seen Britain quit Europe, but it also saw the U.K. throw itself into an “Anglo-Saxon” alliance.  Echoes of De Gaulle.

The split could encourage French President Emmanuel Macron in his efforts to promote a European political-military operation independent of the Americans and British.  Since Donald Trump, who favored Brexit and spurned NATO, European trust of the U.S. has fallen.

The result might yield an independent Europe rather than a dependent U.S ally.  That could force the U.S. to take account of differing and sometimes opposed European strategies even if developed by countries that share many of America’s views of the world. 

But there’s also a broader lesson from this story. 

Every day, news reports arrive accompanied by instant analyses of what events mean.  Heated and hasty opinion drowns out the news. 

When Trump or Biden have made controversial moves, the pundits have wasted little time drawing conclusions and pontificating about dire long-term effects.  What seems to be a major mistake often fades in importance, hardly derailing the presidency. The analysts’ views mostly reflect their biases, which they want us to swallow.

When De Gaulle vetoed the British, my instant analysis, based on my biases and wishful thinking, was that he would be proved wrong. It looked that way for a while.  Now, Brexit and AUKUS show “the General” nailed the Brits.  It only took 58 years. What goes around, comes around, sometimes awfully slowly.

The lesson? We should pay more attention to knowing and understanding what’s happening, not let our biases overwhelm our thinking, and skip snap judgments on current events. 

Despite rush to unity after 9/11, U.S. remains historically divided

 

Gordon L. Weil

As the U.S. marked the 20^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the pundits came out in full force. 

Many lamented that the sense of national unity in 2001 had been so quickly replaced by deep divisiveness.

The Al Qaeda attacks gave all Americans, regardless of their political views, a common enemy.  The country immediately united, and Congress granted the federal government unusually strong powers to fight terrorism.  A token of that common commitment was the Patriot Act, giving the government the power to violate privacy.

At two earlier major turning points in American history, people had also displayed national unity. At those times, most Americans understood they faced a common adversary.  Yet, beneath that unity, a deep split existed.

The first event was the war against Britain to win American independence.  The Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776 is mostly a long list of bitter complaints against the British king for failing to give the colonists, most having British origins, the same rights as their fellow Brits. Instead, he treated them as second-class underlings.

The opposition to arbitrary British rule was strong enough to yield independence even among people that could not agree on treating their African underlings as they wanted to be treated by the British.  On slavery, Americans were deeply divided.

Southern colonies threatened not to join in declaring their independence if the northern colonies insisted on condemning slavery in line with the theory that “all men are created equal.”  For them, slavery might be more important than independence. 

The North wanted independence above all and dropped a reference to slavery from the draft Declaration.  That decision, papering over a deep split, may be the basis of the centuries of divisiveness that have followed.

Another wave of national unity came after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941 that brought the United States into World War II.  Divided just the day before, the country unified to fight the Nazis and Japan. Once again, deep differences, this time over the huge economic and social changes brought by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, were set aside.

In these two cases and the reaction to 9/11, Americans showed they would unite against a common foe.  But divisiveness, so much deplored today, was always present. Unity in favor of a common goal, other than winning a war, has always been elusive.

The common theme of divisiveness goes back to the Revolution and continues uninterrupted today.  The conflict over race could have been settled by the Civil War, but it wasn’t. The North won its cause of preserving the Union.  But the South won its cause of preserving racism.

Just as the colonies had rebelled against Britain, the Confederacy rebelled against the United States.  The American flag became a worldwide symbol against tyrannical rule, and the rebel flag became a national symbol of resistance to government limits on a person’s rights. 

The Confederacy’s Stars-and-Bars came to represent the assertion of individual rights against government.  That sentiment extended to opposition to official authority on many issues, and the Confederate flag could be seen all across the country.

In recent decades, it was finally recognized as a symbol of racism, which became increasing difficult to profess publicly.  Only with the arrival on the national scene of Donald Trump was the stigma of harboring racial prejudice somewhat relieved through attacks on “political correctness.” 

Trump flags fly as Confederate banners once did. Like the Confederate flag, they may mean less about Trump as a political figure than serving as an expression of personal defiance of governments, seen as limiting personal rights.

Today, a conflict exists between governments that require vaccinations and wearing masks to control Covid 19 and opponents who believe that such demands violate their personal rights.  At its core, this conflict is political and regional.

Eleven states in the South joined the Confederacy, trying to break away from the United States to preserve slavery.  Now, nine of those states are among those with the worst vaccination records and nine, duplicates except for one, are among the states with the highest case rates.  Only Virginia is absent from both lists.

Nine of the formerly Confederate states voted for Trump in 2020. Most are trying to change their voting rules to undermine expanded voting by African-Americans and Hispanics to ensure that traditionally conservative GOP control can continue.

While Americans may unite against a common threat, history shows more evidence of division that it may have its roots in the compromise that brought 13 colonies together to declare their independence. It has deepened as the two sides reach almost equal political strength.

Divisiveness is American, and the battle between public health and individual rights amounts to another Civil War.  The depth of division may, as before, threaten the American system of government.

Supreme Court rules on abortion as Congress defaults; becomes real federal legislature

Gordon L. Weil

The U.S. Supreme Court just sent a strong signal that it could soon change its collective mind and rule that a woman has no constitutionally protected right to have an abortion.

By taking no action on an appeal to suspend a new Texas law, it took a giant step toward acting as the national legislature.  It took charge, because of a vacuum left by Congress.  Forget about three equal branches of government and their checks and balances. 

The Court allowed into effect a Texas law that limits access to abortions to the point of eliminating it.   Texas tried to dodge responsibility for its own law by only allowing private parties to enforce its extreme terms.

Congress has passed no abortion rights law, leaving the Supreme Court to create such rights. That makes it the federal lawmaker, despite claims by justices that they only apply the law but do not make it.

All nine justices recognized that Texas wants to outlaw abortions. What the Court has legislated as a right, it looks about ready to repeal.

Justices understood that, by allowing the law to go into effect, abortions in Texas would stop.  Providers lack the resources to withstand a possible flood of cases, even if many have no factual basis.  The law raises major political and constitutional issues.

The five-member majority quietly let the law go into effect, leaving abortion providers to find some way to bring an acceptable legal action against it.  It is possible, they noted, that a Court decision more than a century ago could block it from second-guessing state courts.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the law should be suspended until the federal court system ruled on it using normal legal filings and hearing procedures.

Roberts was supported by the three justices considered to be liberals.  But they also noted that, in their view, the Texas law violated the Court’s own earlier decisions allowing abortions.  

The Court long ago adopted the principle that it would usually stick to earlier constitutional decisions on which people relied.  Sen. Susan Collins said that, before voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as a justice, he agreed that abortion rights were such “settled law.”

The Court chose one earlier decision, limiting its ability to overturn a state’s action, over another, a woman’s right to an abortion in the first three months of pregnancy with no state allowed to stop it.  Before ruling on the constitutional conflict between its decisions, it effectively decided – for the state.

Its refusal on procedural grounds to delay the Texas law permitted a result that it had previously found illegal.  That way of thinking could ripple across the states on other issues, and that’s why Roberts wanted first to follow usual judicial procedures.

Whatever the effect of the Court’s failure to act, it deployed a method it increasingly uses to avoid taking clear responsibility.  It has reduced the number of its formal decisions, substituting the so-called “shadow docket” to make major rulings.  Under it, without hearings or legal briefs, key decisions are hidden by making them seem only procedural.

The Trump administration sought such quick action 41 times in four years and won 28 times.  In the 16 years of the G.W. Bush and Obama administrations, it was used only eight times. It seems conservative justices prefer fast answers and little transparency.

The Democrats may have worried about losing a vote to establish a federal right to an abortion, which would put the Roe v. Wade decision into law.  But public opinion now seems to encourage such a bill, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says one will be offered.

While such a bill might pass in the House, its success in the Senate is less likely.  Still, the Democrats see the Court’s shadowy feint at repeal of Roe v. Wade as a winning political cause for them.

Congress has the constitutional authority to shape the Supreme Court’s powers. It could control the use of the shadow docket and even limit the Court’s ability to determine if laws are constitutional.  That power is itself derived from a Court decision in 1803, not from the Constitution.

President Biden has created a commission to look into the Supreme Court.  Should the Court be enlarged to reduce conservative control?  Court packing is not politically popular, but there’s a way to appoint temporary federal judges. They could redress the political balance and then gradually be phased out as vacancies occur.

Whatever comes from the Texas matter, action to reverse the unelected Court’s growing legislative power seems overdue.  For Congress to regain the elected branch’s control of legislation requires the Senate to end the filibuster so that both houses can make decisions by majority vote.