The hemispheric security puzzle: invoking the fear of terrorism, the Power Elite is moving to build a "security perimeter" encompassing the entire Western Hemisphere.

Children have always been fascinated by puzzles, especially intricate picture puzzles containing thousands of pieces that must be assembled with care and patience. More than a few eager children, frustrated by the difficulty of putting such detailed puzzles together, have learned to simplify the task by breaking them up into a few manageable chunks and putting those parts together.

The architects of an emerging global order are much more experienced--and, of course, infinitely more powerful--than a youngster trying to assemble a picture puzzle. Yet their task is, in some respects, quite similar: they must fit together a vast and complicated world into a single system, ruled from above by an all-powerful clique. To achieve their ends they emulate the method used by puzzle-solving children: break up the task of globalizing the world into a collection of smaller, manageable regional blocs.

In recent decades, this approach has resulted in a welter of confusing acronyms, such as NAFTA, CAFTA, SAU, and FTAA. All of these terms relate to the movement to break the world up into manageable chunks. The North American Free Trade Agreement unites Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. The proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement, supported by the Bush administration, would expand on that union by bringing in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, E1 Salvador, and Nicaragua. The SAU, or South American Union, includes all but three of the nations of South America. All of those blocs, in turn, would be absorbed by the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which would include all but one of the 35 Western Hemisphere nations (the sole, temporary exception being Cuba).

Similar efforts are underway around the globe to amalgamate nation-states into regional blocs, the most prominent and advanced example being the European Union. From these various pieces, the puzzle of global governance will eventually be assembled--or so the architects hope. Nations aren't passive puzzle pieces. Their citizens generally retain their national loyalties and resist assimilation by alien, unaccountable elites.

The Power Elite has used a two-track approach in its efforts to overcome that resistance. First, they have touted the supposed economic benefits that come from "free trade"--a code word for opening and eventually eradicating national borders. That approach was used to sell both the EU and NAFTA. The second track is to insist that the "war on terrorism" requires the creation of regional "security perimeters."

Bush administration efforts to promote the FTAA, an EU-style pact for the Western Hemisphere, have focused on economic arguments. But recently the administration has begun to emphasize the latter approach, openly promoting the idea of a hemispheric "security perimeter."

The "New Map"

Last November 17, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attended a hemispheric summit of defense ministers at Quito, Ecuador. Secretary Rumsfeld used that meeting to promote the Bush administration's "Global Peace Operations Initiative," which would create a standing 70,000man UN military force.

It was in the context of creating a globalized security system that Rumsfeld addressed ongoing efforts to forge a common security policy for the Western Hemisphere. New threats of the 21st century, Rumsfeld declared, "recognize no borders." He described terrorists, drug traffickers, hostage takers, and criminal gangs as "an anti-social combination that increasingly seeks to destabilize civil societies." "They watch, they probe, looking for areas of vulnerability, for weaknesses and for seams in our collective security arrangements that they can try to exploit," he said (emphasis added), adding that it "is simply not possible" for any one nation to deal with these threats.

Rumsfeld's pointed use of the term "seams" to describe security threats reveals the influence of Professor Thomas P.M. Barnett of the U.S. Naval War College, a key strategic "futurist" who recently published a critical book entitled The Pentagon's New Map. Barnett's book proposes an "operating theory of the world" in which the globe is divided between the "functioning core" and the "non-integrating gap." "Core" nations, he writes, are part of an emerging system of "collective security" through membership in globalist bodies such as the UN and the World Trade Organization and regional pacts such as NATO, the EU, and NAFTA.

Those found in the "non-integrating gap" must be forcibly assimilated into the collective security system, Barnett maintains, because "disconnectedness defines danger." Actually, just the opposite is the case: it's much more reasonable to conclude that integration, rather than isolation, facilitates terrorist threats to our nation. Barnett's approach represents a reversal of the Founding Fathers' wisdom, in which our nation would engage in honorable commerce with all peoples of good will, while remaining politically independent and aloof from foreign entanglements.

Not only should the U.S. entirely abandon our founding vision, Barnett insists, but we should be prepared to rein in any nation threatening to withdraw from this global system.

Barnett notes that "it is always possible to fall off this bandwagon called globalization. And when you do, bloodshed will follow. If you're lucky, so will American troops."

Between the "Core" and the "Gap," Barnett continues, are found "seams" through which terrorism and other international threats can flow. Significantly, among the "seam states" Barnett mentions are Mexico and Brazil--our two largest and most important neighbors to the south.

According to Barnett, the U.S. must follow a three-fold strategy: "1) Increase the Core's immune system capabilities for responding to September 11-type perturbations; 2) Work the seam states to firewall the Core from the Gap's worst exports, such as terror, drugs, and pandemics; 3) Shrink the Gap."

Clearly, Secretary Rumsfeld was following Barnett's "New Map" in his remarks in Ecuador. But he and Barnett are hardly alone in promoting the idea of consolidating the Western Hemisphere and closing up the "seams."

A very similar vision was laid out in a 1999 study entitled "A New United States Strategy for Mexico" by Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Nunez of the U.S. Army War College. According to Nunez, "Moving from bilateral arrangements to a [military] organization that reflects regional security concerns is a better strategy, particularly considering our burgeoning trade through NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] and the growing threat of terrorism that can penetrate our borders."

A July 7, 1999 report by the Toronto Star noted that "Nunez, a 22-year army veteran, said a joint North American command would expand as free trade involved more countries in the hemisphere. If, for example, the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas becomes a reality, the military command would stretch from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego."

When asked whether he foresaw the joint North American command leading to an integrated armed force, with everyone marching under one flag, Nunez said: "I see it growing, with all of the change and integration of new ideas.... [W]hat it achieves depends on the types of missions it is assigned."

Another very similar proposal was presented by Robert A. Pastor in the January/ February 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs, the flagship journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. Referring to NAFTA as "merely the first draft of an economic constitution for North America," Pastor (a veteran Marxist radical associated with the hard-left Institute for Policy Studies) cited the September 11 attacks as an example of the need for deeper integration of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico--not only in political and economic terms, but for security purposes, as well.

"If a true [NAFTA] partnership had existed" on 9/11, writes Pastor, "the leaders of the United States, Mexico, and Canada would have met in Washington ... to declare that the attack was aimed at all of North America and that they would respond as one." Post-9/11 security fears, he continues, should "serve as a catalyst for deeper integration. That would require new structures to assure mutual security [and] a redefinition of security that puts the United States, Mexico, and Canada inside a continental perimeter, working together as partners." This "trilateral approach" should lead to the establishment of "a 'North American Customs and Immigration Force,' composed of officials trained together in a single professional school," he elaborates. "Most important, the Department of Homeland Security should expand its mission to include continental security--a shift best achieved by incorporating Mexican and Canadian perspectives into its design and operation."

It's not difficult to predict how quickly the "shift" described by Pastor could occur were the U.S. to suffer an attack carried out by terrorist infiltrators from the south. Time magazine recently raised the possibility that al-Qaeda operatives could smuggle a nuclear device into the U.S. from Mexico. And the proliferation of trans-national Latino criminal gangs--called "Gangs Without Borders" by the New York Times--offers another avenue through which terrorist networks could carry out operations in this country.

Nonetheless, the same Bush administration that seeks to build a hemispheric "perimeter" is working to tear down our national borders, not only through the proposed FTAA but through its proposed "temporary worker program" that would grant legal status to millions of illegal aliens. And of course, as crime and terrorism increase as a result of border eradication, these growing problems will be used to further "justify" more police and surveillance powers. After all, without borders, subversives, already well entrenched throughout Latin America, would easily be able to "migrate" to the U.S. along with many ordinary people who simply seek a better life.

A Hemispheric Garrison State?

Secretary Rumsfeld's November 17 address in Ecuador offered a brief but very significant reference to the idea of building a hemispheric "Homeland Security" system. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Rumsfeld said, "the United States has had to re-examine the relationship between its military and law-enforcement responsibilities.... The complex challenges of this new era and the asymmetric threats we face require that all elements of state and society work together."

Of course, under the U.S. Constitution, the functions of the military and domestic law enforcement are to be kept strictly separate--and law enforcement falls almost entirely within the jurisdiction of states and local governments. What the Founders made separate, no administration should join. Yet the Bush administration--building on a string of terrible precedents--is energetically working to nationalize law enforcement, and to meld it with the military, creating the conditions for a centrally directed police state. It is interesting to note that of the foreign officials present during Rumsfeld's speech, the only one who expressed a favorable opinion of the secretary's call for co-mingling law enforcement and the military was Jesse Chacon, the Interior Minister for the Marxist government of Venezuela.

Slowly but persistently, the puzzle pieces are being assembled--and the picture that can already be seen is not a welcome one to those who cherish prosperity, individual liberty, and national independence.