Obama’s Ode to Globalization

President Obama warned against seeking “comfort in nationalism, or tribe, or ethnicity or sect” during a speech in Athens on Wednesday.

The entirety of Obama’s nearly hour-long speech could be distilled into “I hear you, but I don’t care.”

The entirety of Obama’s nearly hour-long speech could be distilled into “I hear you, but I don’t care.”

“This impulse to pull back from a globalized world is understandable. If people feel they are losing control of their future they will push back,” Obama acknowledged. “But given the nature of technology, it is my assertion it’s not possible to cut ourselves off from each other,” Obama added.

“We now are living in a global supply chain. Our growth comes from innovation and ideas that are crossing borders all the time. The jobs of the future will inevitably be different from the jobs of the past. We can’t look backwards for answers — we have to look forward,” the president continued.

A global supply chain is not a new phenomenon — Islamic coins have been found in the tombs of ancient Nordic princesses and American cotton fueled the British textile industry during the Industrial Revolution — nor does it necessitate supranational integration at either the political or the economic level.

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A global supply chain does not guarantee that sort of integration — but that integration does guarantee that the economic suffering felt by so many working Americans is not likely to abate.

Given Obama’s refusal to even consider the fact that it is possible to retreat from a world of free trade deals and supranational corporations, it is little surprise that the only remedy he offered for those suffering from globalization was a massive increase in wealth redistribution.

“In the years and decades ahead, our countries have to make sure that the benefits of an integrated global economy are more broadly shared by more people,” Obama said. “And we know the path to building inclusive economies — it’s just we too often don’t have the political will or desire to get it done,” he continued.

Rather than to create the conditions for more people to earn more money, Obama would rather take money from the few who still earn it in considerable quantities and give it to the ever-growing underclass of Americans who, thanks to technological advances and unfair labor competition from developing countries, can’t get jobs.

It is not just the economic realities of globalization that Obama is unwilling to face fully. “We have to have an inclusive political and cultural strategy,” Obama said. “How do we ensure that our diverse multicultural, multiracial, multireligious world, and our diverse nations uphold both the rights of individuals and a fundamental civic adherence to a common creed that binds us together?” he asked.

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The short answer: We can’t. This is part of what is driving Western-wide opposition to the unchecked mass migration that comes hand in hand with economic globalization and supranational integration. Radical Muslims who believe that women should be fully covered and that rape victims are guilty of adultery simply cannot integrate successfully in a modern, Western liberal society. Vice versa, the radical feminists who haunt the halls of college campuses across the U.S. would be hard-pressed to find themselves welcome in Saudi Arabia.

The simple fact is that integration is impossible without assimilation, and there has never been a single society in human history that has seen two conflicting cultures coexist without descending into civil war.

Obama’s ode to globalization revealed two very important things. Western globalists consider themselves to be first and foremost citizens of a nonexistent global society, and they have absolutely no intention of reversing their course — no matter how strong the popular opposition to their schemes may be.