It all sounds innocuous enough. President Trump and newly elevated European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen met for the first time on January 21 at the globalist World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where they announced their intention to conclude a limited U.S.-EU trade deal this spring and a full U.S.-EU trade deal in November. What could go wrong?

The problem is that there is a hidden agenda for world government lurking within the explosion of alphabet soup trading blocs/regional governments in recent years. In this article we’ll provide some historical context for this phenomenon, then segue into the present-day potential for the creation of a new regional government over North America and Europe that is often referred to as the “Atlantic Union.”

A First Try at World Government

In 1911, Colonel Edward Mandell House was a political kingmaker in Texas politics who was looking for a coachable progressive Democrat to support in the 1912 presidential campaign. He met Woodrow Wilson for the first time in 1911 in New York City. Five years later House remembered this meeting vividly: “The first hour we spent together proved to each of us that there was a sound basis for a fast friendship. We found ourselves in such complete sympathy, in so many ways, that we soon learned to know what each was thinking without either having expressed himself.” (The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, 1926.)

House went on to become Woodrow Wilson’s closest and most trusted advisor during the presidential campaign of 1912 and during Wilson’s presidency. In 1917 and 1918, House helped Wilson formulate and advocate for a League of Nations, which became part of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. Indeed, House was a bona fide leader of the American foreign-policy elites who had gathered in Paris in 1919 to negotiate the final treaty with delegations from other nations. 

On May 30, 1919, after it appeared likely that the U.S. Senate would not be ratifying the Treaty of Versailles and its League of Nations, Colonel House helped organize a meeting at the Hotel Majestic in Paris that eventually led to the establishment of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York City in 1921. The CFR quickly established itself as the leading organization of the American foreign-policy establishment, and has remained so for a century now. Not surprisingly, without America the League of Nations fizzled out by World War II. However, members of the globalist CFR have continued to pursue this dream of a world government ever since its founding in 1921.* 

Colonel House had a very revealing quote in The Intimate Papers of Colonel House: 

Had the Versailles Treaty gone through the United States Senate as written and without question, Woodrow Wilson would have been but one of many to share in the imperishable glory of the League of Nations.

When House wistfully stated that Wilson would have shared in the “imperishable glory of the League of Nations,” he was surely thinking of how he would also have shared in the “imperishable glory.” This is just another piece of evidence for just how much the CFR crowd desires to create a world government. 

The United Nations: a Top-down Approach to World Government

Not leaving anything to chance the second time around at creating a world government, the CFR proposed to the U.S. State Department in September 1939 (over two years before the United States entered the war) to conduct on behalf of the State Department “a program of independent analysis and study that would guide American foreign policy in the coming years of war and the challenging new world that would emerge.” This project became known as the War and Peace Studies, and involved almost 100 CFR members over a period of five years. Many of these CFR members were active in the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks conference on world economic planning and in organizing for the 1945 conference in San Francisco to establish the United Nations.*

In April 1945, the United Nations Conference on International Organization was convened in San Francisco to launch the second major attempt at world government of the 20th century. After two months the 50 nations in attendance signed the Charter of the United Nations. When the U.S. Senate ratified the UN Charter on July 28, 1945, the United States signed away its national sovereignty to the United Nations. For example, Article 25 of the UN Charter states:

The Members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.

There it is in black and white. The Declaration of Independence was already canceled way back in 1945. So why does it appear that our nation still retains its national sovereignty? The answer is that public opinion would not permit the federal government to begin playing the role of a nation completely subservient to the United Nations.

And how, you might ask, do we know that public opinion was contrary to allowing the United Nations to “rule the roost” internationally? The answer is that according to “Seventy Years of U.S. Public Opinion on the United Nations,” even in the first couple years after the UN was launched in 1945, only 54 percent of Americans thought “the UN should be strengthened to make it a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the US.”

 At the same time, 24 percent of Americans opposed this idea of making the UN into a world government. Only 10 years later, Americans had an even dimmer view of strengthening the UN into a world government. Polls taken in 1956 showed that the number of Americans supporting a UN world government had dropped to 40 percent, and the number who opposed a UN world government had increased to 42 percent.  

Gallup Poll data on a closely related measure of American public opinion regarding the UN is available from 1965 to 2016.

This poll asked the question: “Do you think the United Nations is doing a good job or a poor job in trying to solve the problems it has had to face?” This poll records a fairly rapid decline in the percent answering “yes” for the years from 1955 to 1975, with 55 percent answering “yes” in 1955 and only 32 percent answering “yes” in 1975. Although poll results fluctuated a little for the next 10 years, those answering “yes” continued to sink to only 28 percent. Then, from 1985 to 2019, the “yes” percent has remained in the upper 20s to the mid-30s, except for the two peaks of American support for the UN associated with the Desert Storm war in Kuwait and Iraq and the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center/Pentagon. 

Can we identify what led to the large declines in confidence in the UN after 1945? A major factor in Americans’ sinking confidence in the United Nations was the emergence of a grassroots conservative campaign in the early 1960s led by The John Birch Society (JBS) to warn Americans about the UN. At the two-day founding meeting of the JBS in December 1958, founder Robert Welch issued a very far-sighted warning about the UN: 

There are three possible methods by which the Communists might take us over….  [The] third method … is one which they are clearly relying on most heavily…. A part of that plan, of course, is to induce the gradual surrender of American sovereignty, piece by piece and step by step, to various international organizations — of which the United Nations is the outstanding but far from the only example.

The JBS grew rapidly during its early years. And by 1962, it had established its signature campaign, “Get US Out! of the United Nations.” The JBS campaign to Get US Out! was especially vigorous in the 1960s and 1970s, the very same years that Americans’ confidence in the UN was rapidly declining. Literally millions of pieces of Get US Out! flyers, reprints, books, bumper stickers, and envelope stickers were distributed. In addition, during these pre-Internet days, thousands of speeches, filmstrip showings, and film showings were held, not to mention the iconic Get US Out! billboards and roadside signs dotting the American countryside. 

In short, by the early 1970s, the CFR crowd’s top-down attempt at world government was noticeably losing traction. However, they had a plan B.

The Globalists’ Trade Agenda: a Bottom-up Approach to World Government

In light of the steady erosion of the American public’s confidence in the UN during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, a very significant article by longtime CFR member Richard N. Gardner, “The Hard Road to World Order,” was published in the CFR house organ, Foreign Affairs, in April 1974. In the first paragraph of his article, Gardner states: “The quest for a world structure that secures peace, advances human rights and provides the conditions for economic progress — for what is loosely called world order — has never seemed more frustrating.” Translation: The quest for a real, functioning world government has never seemed more frustrating.

After surveying the various problems facing the globalists’ world government initiative in 1974, Gardner provided an alternate route to world government:

In short, the “house of world order” will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great “booming, buzzing confusion,” to use William James’ famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.

Gardner is saying that a world government will have to be built from the “bottom up” rather than the top down, and that this will amount to an “end run around national sovereignty” that is more effective in building a world government than the traditional top-down approach.

In his article Gardner lists 10 examples of international issues that lend themselves to the bottom-up approach he is recommending. Among them are (1) reform of the international monetary system, (2) rewriting the ground rules for the conduct of international trade, (3) strengthening the new global and regional agencies charged with protecting the world’s environment, and (4) the Law of the Sea negotiations for a new international regime governing the world’s oceans.

For the purposes of this article, we’re interested, of course, in Gardner’s recommendation that negotiating trade agreements would be a fruitful way to pursue world government. By 1974, the free trade-agreement ploy was already being used to transform the six-nation European Coal and Steel Community into what eventually became the European Union, a regional government powerhouse that gradually took control of 28 formerly independent European nations. That same year North America was lagging well behind Europe in applying the free trade-agreement tool for establishing a regional government; however, by 1994 the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Canada, and Mexico amounted to a very large steppingstone toward a North American Union.

Fast forwarding to 2020, take a look at the world map on the next page showing the various regional governments being formed around the world that have resulted from the globalists’ bottom-up trade agenda for world government. In 1995, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, a longtime CFR member, revealed just how closely globalists were pursuing a bottom-up strategy for building a world government: “We cannot leap into world government in one quick step,” he said. “In brief, the precondition for eventual globalization — genuine globalization — is progressive regionalization, because thereby we move toward larger, more stable, more cooperative units.”

The North American Union (NAU) shown in the map below is, of course, not yet completed. The NAFTA agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Canada that went into force in 1994 represented a very important first step toward the establishment of the NAU as a regional government for North America. Next, the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), approved by Congress and signed into law by President Trump on January 29, 2020, represents a very big second step toward an EU-style North American Union. The details of these two steps have been provided in numerous articles in this magazine over the past couple decades.

Next on the Globalists’ Trade Agenda: Atlantic Union

In 2020, the Trump administration is expected to pursue new trade agreements with the EU and the U.K., and to continue its efforts to reform the WTO (World Trade Organization). However, in the rest of this article, we’ll focus solely on the upcoming U.S.-EU trade negotiations due to the great, long-range threat to the national sovereignty and personal freedoms of Americans posed by such negotiations.

These U.S.-EU trade negotiations will be between the United States, representing the North American trading bloc (the North American Union in formation) and the EU (a European trading bloc that has already transitioned to be a full-fledged supranational government over 28 formerly independent European nations). The formation of a U.S.-EU trading bloc would be a steppingstone toward a new U.S.-EU regional government, often referred to as an Atlantic Union.

Proposals for an Atlantic Union regional government were popularized by Clarence Streit, beginning with his 1939 book Union Now. Streit’s idea, which preceded Gardner’s 1974 bottom-up strategy for building world government by 35 years, was to create a union of the United States, Canada, and a dozen or so European nations. Streit explicitly declared that the purpose of creating an Atlantic Union was to lead to a world government. For many decades an Atlantic Union Resolution was introduced in every Congress, but never led to anything of substance.

Over the years many organizations have been created to promote the Atlantic Union concept. Many of them are still very much advocating for creating an Atlantic Union regional government as a path to world government. Two such organizations are the Atlantic Council and the Transatlantic Policy Network (TPN). The TPN’s behind-the-scenes role in support of the Obama administration’s now-defunct Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which would have served as a steppingstone toward an Atlantic Union, was exposed in “Transatlantic Two-Step” by Dennis Behreandt in the May 12, 2008 issue of The New American, and in “Trading Away Their Oaths” by William F. Jasper in the February 16, 2015 issue of The New American.

On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order removing the United States from another Obama-era trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Although Trump didn’t explicitly take the same type of action with regard to the TTIP, there were no further negotiations and the TTIP faded from public consciousness. Then, a little over a year later, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross surprised many administration watchers when he stated during an interview with Bloomberg Television, “[Trump] terminated the Trans-Pacific deal; he didn’t terminate TTIP. That was meant quite deliberately and quite overtly as a message that we’re open to discussions with the European Commission.” 

That meant that the Atlantic Union concept was still alive, but very much disguised as simply trade talks. Sure enough, trade representatives from the EU and the United States have met frequently over the past couple years, but in the shadow of the high-profile USMCA negotiations and subsequent political posturing. However, now that the USMCA is on the books, the time has come for a renewal in intensity of the U.S.-EU “trade talks.”

In late 2019, Ursula von der Leyen and Phil Hogan were elevated to the offices of president and trade commissioner of the European Commission (the executive branch of the European Union), respectively. They will be taking the lead in dealing with the United States on trade in 2020. In mid-January Hogan paid a three-day visit to Washington with the goal of “resetting” the U.S.-EU trade negotiations. Proclaiming his visit a good start, Hogan already had plans to visit Washington again in February and March. EU President von der Leyen and President Trump met for the first time on January 21 at the 50th World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The Financial Times reported that while attending this annual conclave of globalist elites, Trump and von der Leyen separately announced efforts to conclude an agreement between the United States and the EU this spring on “trade, technology, and energy,” and a full U.S.-EU trade deal in November.

Therefore, those of us who oppose the globalists’ “bottom-up” trade agenda for world government have much to be concerned about regarding the U.S.-EU trade negotiations this year and beyond. The reason why this concern is justified is that, as has been made abundantly clear by numerous articles in this magazine over the past few decades, the globalist elites of the United States worked closely with their counterparts in Europe following the end of World War II to submerge the sovereignty of the European nations in a new supranational, regional government that is now known as the European Union. 

This began with the Marshall Plan. Most Americans were led to believe that the Marshall Plan consisted of the United States giving financial aid to rebuild war-torn European nations as a means of preventing them from being subverted by the Soviet Union. In reality, the Marshall Plan funds were designed by globalists in the United States to help their European counterparts begin building what we now know as the EU from day one. And trade agreements were the main tool used by the American and European globalists to consolidate political and economic power under the European Union. 

So it’s only natural to suspect that something big, such as an Atlantic Union, is what the U.S. and EU “trade” negotiators will really be working on in 2020. They have the motive, opportunity, and expertise to create something like an Atlantic Union as their contribution to the world government project. Remember that “imperishable glory” that Colonel House sought. And remember also that the lead negotiator for the United States will be Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s U.S. Trade Representative and a longtime member of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations. 

However, we must remain realistic about the outcome of the 2020 U.S.-EU trade negotiations. It took decades for the American and European globalists to construct the EU. Granted that an Atlantic Union could be created on a much shorter timeline than was required for the EU, due to the already-established success of the EU, construction of an Atlantic Union would likely take several years at the least. 

Beyond the common-sense reasoning that something so big and complex as an Atlantic Union would take at least several years to create through negotiations, the most important factor preventing any overnight creation of an Atlantic Union is the practical one of public opinion. As we saw with the United Nations, the United States has already ratified a treaty in 1945 that in principle subordinates our nation to the UN. However, in practice American public opinion would not support any immediate, overt display of UN control over all aspects of American life. 

That’s where Gardner’s brilliant strategy of  “an end run around national sovereignty” comes into play. The American public would be presented with a new “free trade” agreement (or a series of such agreements) between the United States and the EU that would be sold to them as producing more jobs and more prosperity for Americans. This would be the deceptive “end run around national sovereignty” that would enable the gradual creation of an Atlantic Union regional government without causing undue alarm among Americans over losing national sovereignty. 

And why should we believe that this could happen? It could happen because it just did occur with the congressional approval and signing into law of the USMCA, a trade agreement that was sold as providing more jobs and prosperity, but was actually a major steppingstone toward a North American Union. The USMCA’s Free Trade Commission, which will administer the trade provisions between the three countries, is designed to fulfill the same key role that the European Commission did in a series of European trade agreements, instituting provisions that led to the loss of sovereignty for 28 formerly independent European nations.

What We Can Do

Although we can comfort ourselves that we won’t be pledging allegiance to an EU flag or even a U.S./EU flag anytime soon, we still need to be contacting President Trump, our U.S. representative, and our U.S. senators in opposition to the upcoming U.S.-EU trade talks (see the Atlantic Union legislative alert at www.jbs.org/federal-legislative-alerts/). The historical record clearly shows that the globalists on both sides who will be negotiating these trade deals have a track record of creating trade agreements that continually move our nation and the nations we negotiate with toward regional governments as steppingstones toward a world government under the UN.

If we are to preserve our rights and freedoms as Americans, we must maintain our national sovereignty and our Constitution. And, we must reject categorically all “end runs around national sovereignty” that serve to create regional or world governments.

This article originally appeared in the March 9, 2020 print edition of The New American.