Trump and Obrador: Unlikely Partners for the People?

Alan Keyes

by Dr. Alan Keyes:  According to the report I read in the Washington Times, after speaking by phone with U.S. President Donald Trump, Mexican President Lopez Obrador tweeted, "In respectful and friendly terms, we spoke about the migration issue and the possibility of implementing a joint program of development and job creation in Central America and our country." If accurate, the new Mexican president's sense of their conversation may be a hopeful sign for both countries.

The elitist-faction minions likely to control the Democratic majority in the U.S. House, and any similarly enthralled GOP leaders in the U.S. Senate, should take note. Both presidents may understand that the sovereign people of the United States and the sovereign people of the United Mexican States have a stake in securing the republican form of government ordained in their respective political constitutions. They may therefore realize that both peoples have a common existential interest in standing against the forces of oligarchic globalism presently orchestrating the collapse of constitutional, democratic republicanism throughout the world.

They may also agree that both peoples have a common existential interest in defeating the assault against the hard-won and well-established territorial jurisdiction of our democratically self-governed constitutional republics. Under the manifestly imperialistic slogan "Nations Without Borders," this now well-advanced assault aims fatally to subvert the effective existence and federal character of the governments our peoples have ordained.

For, where boundaries have no meaning, a people's claim of jurisdiction may constantly be challenged. It must therefore constantly be defended, by active and continuous demonstrations of moral and material power, if the people are to remain sovereign. The effort this involves may require establishing and maintaining military forces and defensive structures liable to consume an inordinate share of a nation's wealth. The demands of securing their sovereignty as a people may thus radically impair their pursuit of happiness, for themselves and their posterity. But the sacrifice of the positive goal of their self-government, on the other hand, may breed miserable poverty and increasing discontent. These may, in turn, foment mutual fear, envy, loathing, and other vengeful passions.

A strong sense of injustice tinges such passions, lending the color of law, which favors righteous self-defense, to the violent actions such passions self-righteously excuse and abundantly fuel. By contrast, boundaries define a jurisdiction that lawfully accommodates each nation's sense of the common grounds of its identity. They limit forceful imposition of the assumptions and demands that identity entails.

Without established bounds, human society inevitably degenerates into a "war of all against all." In his political theory, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes gloomily assumed such war to be the natural state of humanity, except when people have a general rule of obedience powerfully imposed upon them.

In their different ways, the peoples of the United States and Mexico, respectively, have asserted that constitutional, democratic institutions of government, which respect the people's capacity to submit, peaceably, to a government they themselves choose to establish and maintain, can avert this gloomy condition of incipient war and its incessantly wasteful strife. Resisting the exclusionary claims of oligarchic tyranny, they have, at critical moments in their respective histories, successfully proven that the good people of their nations have the capacity and will to make and sustain this form of government.

It will be a tragedy if self-interested oligarchs, in league with their global counterparts in every nation, succeed in their present efforts to subvert the successful experiments in constitutional self-government still underway in both of our countries. It will be a blessing if the presidents of both nations can act on the common-sense maxim that "good fences make good neighbors." This implies renewed and close cooperation to assure the hard-won national boundaries that define the jurisdictional sovereignty of our respective peoples.

Thus assured, it makes sense to encourage and support positive measures that seed or reseed, throughout our hemisphere, the common sense of material hope that will embolden other peoples in our neighborhood to pursue and cherish the responsibility of self-government. With hearts uplifted with proofs of their capacity for material self-preservation and improvement, people will rediscover and cherish their capacity for self-rule. This renewed love of liberty will encourage them to see and oppose would-be global dictators of the elitist-faction oligarchy.

The elitist faction's wealthy oligarchs scheme to discredit and overthrow constitutional, democratic, and republican self-government. Adding insult to injury, they partly fund their strategy against democratic republicanism with profits made off the economic misery of those they now seek to use as a weapon in the attack against democratic republicanism. Following Hitler's infamous tactic for eliminating the Weimar republic, they use the people to destroy the key prerequisite for maintaining the sovereignty of the people.

Mexico's President Obrador is known for his commitment to an ideology whose tenets embrace Thomas Hobbes' vision of totalitarian dictatorship, imposed by a violently manipulative elitist faction, as the historically inevitable alternative to perpetual war. President Trump's background identifies him as one of the elitist faction's most visible oligarchs. One would think them a pair unlikely to co-operate in the strategy most likely to restore their nations' hope that constitutional, democratic self-government can subdue the ambition of global oligarchic despotism.

But what if they are indeed on the way to an entente on immigration? What if that entente combines securely enforced borders with a comprehensive plan to renew regional cooperation for economic development, reversing the scheme to supersede the constitutional, democratic republics both our peoples have time and again sustained with mortal sacrifice? Then the common and mutual defense of our borders would symbolize the mutual goodwill the good people of our respective countries have never ceased to feel toward one another.

The border between our countries would again become the ornament of that goodwill, a firm but permeable line of respect, not exclusion; a token of the common spirit in which we join in our commitment to the common cause of humanity. In that common cause, all nations may gleam – honed and yet undimmed, by our experiences. In that common cause, all peoples may live as facets of God's design – contributing to the light that makes humanity a special jewel – worthy, in the light of God's presence, to ornament the crown of His Creation.
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Alan Keyes was Asst Secretary of State for International Organizations and an Ambassador to the UN Economic and Social Council under President Reagan. Keyes ran for president in 1996, 2000 and 2008, and was a candidate for the U.S. Senate for Maryland in 1988 and 1992 and for Illinois in 2004 against Barack Obama. He writes for Renew America where he first shared this article and blogs at LoyaltoLiberty.com.

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