Global risks, national solutions: internationalists argue that global risks require global governance. In reality, global risks are best managed by independent nations.(SPECIAL REPORT: USA v. NAU)

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The world has always had its idealists. Frequently enough, they have dreamt of erecting a paradise on Earth where the squabbles of nations, the ravings of dictators, and the recurring banes of famine and disease would be made relics of the past in a unified world ruled by a single globe-spanning government. Such was the vision and the hope of John Lennon when he sang the lyrics to the song "Imagine." Such was the hope of the World Federalist Association which, as late as the 1980s, blithely called for a world government on the basis that humanity was one large family.

That kind of idealism perished on 9/11. There are still some who believe that regional and world schemes for government make more sense than national governments. But instead of pointing to various utopian fantasies of peace and prosperity, today's internationalists point to threats and risks they say can't be managed by independent nations.

In 2004, writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, the most influential foreign-policy think tank in the United States, Robert Pastor argued that progress toward a more secure future "can only occur with true leadership, new cooperative institutions, and a redefinition of security that puts the United States inside a continental security perimeter, working together as partners." In other words, security demands that we build a North American Union. Pastor, though, doesn't call it that. He calls it a North American Community.

The new world of global risk, according to theoreticians like Pastor, requires the formation of supra-national organs of governance in order to mitigate threats that the individual nation-state alone supposedly cannot manage. This, however, is a dangerous misconception, a delusion that if allowed to be put into concrete practice would not only mean the end of liberty as Americans have long understood it, but would also open up new and particularly virulent dangers the likes of which the world has not seen before. Indeed, contrary to the beliefs of internationalists like Pastor, both liberty and security require the maintenance of sovereign and free nations.

Metaphor of a Sinking Ship

To understand why it is the nation state that is the best solution to a world society filled with risk, you need to think like a naval architect. A ship functions in an environment that is inherently unsafe. Subject to the unpredictable and sometimes violent vagaries of wind and water, a vessel can stay afloat only so long as it maintains its watertight integrity. In the event that the hull is breached, the ship will sink, if proper countermeasures have not been incorporated in its design.