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    • E. Christian Brugger, D.Phil. – E. Christian Brugger is a Senior Fellow of Ethics and Director of the Fellows Program at the Culture of Life Foundation in Washington, D.C. and the J. Francis Cardinal Stafford Professor of Moral Theology at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado. He has Master degrees in moral theology and moral philosophy from Seton Hall, Harvard and Oxford Universities and received his D.Phil. (Ph.D.) in Christian ethics from Oxford in 2000.  Christian has published over 200 articles in scholarly and popular periodicals on topics in bioethics, sexual ethics, natural law theory, as well as the interdisciplinary field of psychology and Christian anthropology.  He lives on a farm in Evergreen, Colorado, with his wife Melissa and five children.
    • Helen Alvaré, J.D. – Helen Alvaré, J.D. is Honorary Fellow in Law at the Culture of Life Foundation.   Helen is an Associate Professor of Law at the George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Virginia where she teaches and publishes in the areas of property law, family law, and Catholic social thought. Professor Alvaré serves as Consultor for the Pontifical Council for the Laity, Senior Fellow at the Witherspoon Institute where she chairs the Conscience Protection Task Force, is President of the Chiaroscuro Foundation and most recently Editor and Co-Author of Breaking Through: Catholic Women Speak for Themselves.From 2000 to Spring 2008, Professor Alvare taught at the Catholic University Columbus School of Law. Professor Alvare also lectures widely in the United States and Europe on matters concerning marriage, family and respect for human life. She is a consultant to ABC News and to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Marriage and Pro-Life Committees. In 2008, Pope Benedict XVI named Professor Alvare a Consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Laity.From 1987-2000, Professor Alvare was an attorney with the USCCB’s General Counsel Office and director of information and planning for the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities. In these positions, she testified before the…
    • Jennifer Kimball Watson, Be.L. – Jennifer Kimball Watson joined Culture of Life Foundation as Executive Director in November of 2007. She is an Adjunct Professor of Bioethics at the Ave Maria School of Law in Naples, F.L.. Previous to her work with the Culture of Life Foundation Jennifer was a Wilbur Fellow of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal located in Michigan. Jennifer earned a Licentiate in Bioethics from the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum School of Bioethics in Rome.  Her prior undergraduate studies were in International Administration and Government Policy at the Evergreen State College in Washington State.Jennifer’s areas of specialization include Eugenics in Artificial Reproductive Technologies, Heterologous Adoption and Transfer of Embryos, The Womb in Reproductive Technologies, and the Role and Significance of The Medical Act. She interviews with National Conservative and Christian Radio Syndicates as well as several foreign and secular reporters. Jennifer has spoken on the dignity of women and women’s social issues to various audiences since 1999 and has spent several years in advocacy work with various international organizations in the field of life sciences. From 2000 to 2006 she recruited and coordinated grass-roots social policy efforts that consisted of a public and private sector network of professionals and academics…
    • Margaret Datiles Watts, J.D. – Margaret Datiles Watts, J.D., is Culture of Life Foundation’s Associate Fellow in Law. Maggie is member of Washington, D.C. and Maryland bar associations.  She holds a B.A. in Philosophy (Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude) and a Certificate in Classical Philosophy from the University Honors Program at The Catholic University of America. She earned a Juris Doctorate from Columbus School of Law at The Catholic University of America, where she served as a Research Fellow at CUA Law’s Marriage Law Project. She also studied Roman Law and EU Law at Magdalene College, University of Oxford, England.A former Fellow and Staff Counsel for Americans United for Life, Datiles co-authored an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court of the United States in the landmark partial birth abortion case, Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, et al., companion case to Gonzales v. Carhart (2007). She also advised legislators, policy groups and the media (radio and newspapers) on abortion and bioethics laws and drafted pro-life model legislation.Her areas of research and/or publication include legal issues surrounding abortion, government funding restrictions for abortion, contraception, healthcare rights of conscience, stem cell research, artificial reproductive technology, population decline, physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage.She currently publishes articles…
    • William E. May – William E. May is Senior Research Fellow of the Culture of Life Foundation and emeritus Michael J. McGivney Professor of Moral Theology at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he taught the academic years from 1991 through 2008 after teaching for 20 years at The Catholic University of America. He is the author of more than a dozen books. The 2nd edition of his Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human Life was published by Our Sunday Visitor (2008), and a substantively revised 3rd edition is scheduled for publication in 2013. In 2003 Our Sunday Visitor published a revised and expanded edition of his Introduction to Moral Theology. Among his other books are: Marriage: The Rock on Which the Family Is Built (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995; 2nd revised edition, 2009)); and, with Ronald Lawler OFM Cap and Joseph Boyle, Catholic Sexual Ethics (rev. and enlarged ed. Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 1998; 2nd rev. edition, 1998; a 3rd edition, substantively revised by May alone, was published in 2011); Theology of the Body: Genesis and Growth (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2010) He has published more…
    • Frank J. Moncher, Ph.D. – Dr. Frank Moncher received his Ph.D. in Clinical-Community Psychology from the University of South Carolina in 1992, following which he spent several years on faculty of the Medical College of Georgia, with a focus on Adolescent Intensive Services. In 2000 he moved to the Washington, DC area to teach at a graduate school of psychology which had a mission of integrating the science of psychology in the context of the Catholic Christian view of the human person. Concurrent with this, over the past 12 years he has consulted with 11 different religious orders and 4 dioceses to provide psychological evaluations of aspirants and candidates, as well as consulting with different diocesan marriage tribunals.His research interests include the integration of Catholic thought into psychotherapy, child and family development issues, and integrated models of assessment of candidates for the priesthood and religious life. Frank is published in Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Human Services, Adolescence, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Edification, and the Journal of Psychology and Christianity, as well as contributing to several book chapters on children, families, and religious issues.Since 2010, Dr. Moncher has worked for the Diocese of Arlington and Catholic Charities as a psychologist and consultant.  His…
    • Steve Soukup – Fellow in Culture and Economy Steve Soukup is the Vice President and Publisher of The Political Forum, an “independent research provider” that delivers research and consulting services to the institutional investment community, with an emphasis on economic, social, political, and geopolitical events that are likely to have an impact on the financial markets in the United States and abroad. Mr. Soukup has followed politics and federal regulatory policy for the financial community since coming to Washington in 1996, when he joined Mark Melcher at the award-winning Washington-research office of Prudential Securities. While at Prudential, he was part of the Washington team that placed first in Institutional Investor magazine’s annual analyst survey for eight years in a row. Mr. Soukup left Prudential with Mr. Melcher to join Lehman Brothers in the fall of 2000 and stayed there for two years, before leaving early in 2003 to become a partner at The Political Forum. While at Lehman, Mr. Soukup authored macro-political commentary and followed policy developments in the Natural Resources sector group, focusing on agriculture and energy policy. He also headed Lehman’s industry-leading analysis of asbestos litigation reform efforts. At The Political Forum, Mr. Soukup was initially the editor and junior partner,…
    • Dr. Pilar Calva, M.D. – Dr. Calva is a medical doctor specializing in Human Genetics with a Cytogenetics subspecialty from The University of Paris, France. In Paris, she was the under-study to the world-renowned Professor Jerome Lejeune, who is considered by some to be the father of modern genetics. In 1958, Lejeune discovered that an extra 21st chromosome is responsible for Down syndrome, or Trisomy 21. Lejeune dedicated his life tirelessly and unfailingly to defend the unborn, especially those with Down syndrome, testifying before scientific conferences and lawmakers. He was appointed by Pope John Paul II as the first President of the Pontifical Academy for Life. In Dr. Calva’s own words: When I arrived in France, I lived a life divided between faith and reason. I thought that from Monday to Saturday, I put on my white coat for my scientific tasks, and Sunday was the day I took off the white coat, put on my crucifix and dedicated myself to my religious duties. Professor Lejeune truly converted me, making me see that one can wear the white coat and the cross, at the same time. That is, one can fly with the wing of faith and the wing of reason. Inspired by the life…
    • Elyse M. Smith – Elyse M. Smith is an associate attorney with a northern Virginia law firm working in nonprofit and church law, estate planning, and civil litigation. Ms. Smith graduated magna cum laude from Ave Maria School of Law in Naples, Florida, where she served on Law Review and was published in the Ave Maria International Law Journal. She was named “Most Dedicated Editor” for her work on Law Review. Ms. Smith earned her bachelor’s degree in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia.  
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  >  Issue Briefs  >  Blog  >  American Retreat And Global Chaos

American Retreat And Global Chaos

Posted: August 5, 2014
By: Steve Soukup
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As you may have noticed, the world appears, at present, to be falling apart, quickly and violently.  The global order is failing, and violence and turmoil are on the rise.  The daily headlines paint a dispiriting picture to say the least:  civil war in Iraq; civil war in Syria; civil war in Libya; near-civil-war in Egypt; Russian aggression in Ukraine; Chinese aggression in southeast Asia; Iranian adventurism throughout the Middle East; and, of course, war between Israel and Hamas.

It might seem easy – and tempting – to blame Barack Obama for much of this chaos.  After all, he has presided over the global collapse, and his policy of American withdrawal has likely complicated global affairs over the last several years.

At the same time, it’s worth remembering that evil is ever extant in the world, and temporal peace is, unfortunately, an illusion.  More to the point, it’s not as if Obama inherited a world overflowing with goodwill or an electorate willing to tolerate ongoing American interventionism.  Indeed, the basic direction of Obama’s foreign policy is one which the American voters demanded.  After seven-plus years of war, almost five of which were on two fronts, the American people were tired of sending their young men and women, not to mention billions and billions of their dollars, off to fix problems in foreign lands and then being called “invaders,” “occupiers,” and “war mongers” for their efforts.  And when they elected Barack Obama – twice – the implicit agreement was that the wars would end and America would finally “come home.”

The problem with this plan, reasonable though it might seem, is that the American military had been the world’s de facto peace force for the nearly seven decades following the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and the concomitant collapse of the European global order.  Nobody wanted America to be the “world’s policeman,” as so many detractors put it, but the fact of the matter is that the post-war world needed policing, and only the Americans were both able and willing to do so.

Until now.

In the absence of an assertive American global presence, the world and its most heinous actors have been left to their own devices.  Most Americans probably figured that someone else could handle the job of fighting the good fight on behalf of the world’s downtrodden.  But then, most Americans likely didn’t figure that their nation’s global role was as much self-interested as it was altruistic, and that America’s withdrawal from global affairs would lead to a drastically-reduced ability to direct events to its own benefit or to the benefit of the “global community,” whose interests nearly mirrored American interests.

More to the point, most Americans were also likely unaware that the void left by their departure would be filled by . . . well . . . no one.  For decades now, American’s have been told that the “global community” can police itself; that it has the institutions and the moral authority both to articulate its own interests and to demand compliance with those interests.  As we are learning – or relearning, as the case may be – this is a bald-faced lie.  Indeed, the so-called “global community” has never been anything more than an ambitious but highly-ideological conglomeration of interest groups put together by a handful of hard-core leftist one-worlders who never intended to confront active tyranny nor expected that such tyranny would persist.  They created an organizational structure that lacked any authority, moral or otherwise, from the very start, and which has grown more and more corrupt and ineffectual with each passing decade.  All of which is to say that when the Americans withdrew from the world, they left nothing but a vacuum.  And as any schoolboy knows, nature abhors a vacuum.

It is worth noting, that the organization that was founded in order to assure the safety and well-being of the global community, the United Nations, was founded under somewhat dubious circumstances.  President Franklin Roosevelt, in his waning days and in search of a neo-Wilsonian, globalist legacy, entrusted the creation of the post-war world order to a handful of his most trusted and most valued advisors.  It just so happens that many of those advisors were men whom Josef Stalin considered truly “useful idiots” and at least two of whom – Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss – were outright Soviet spies.  Hiss, likely the most infamous Soviet agent unmasked during the Cold War, was not only the Secretary General of the San Francisco United Nations Charter Conference, but was largely responsible for the drafting of that Charter, which remains one of the key governing documents of the global community today.

It is also worth noting that the UN’s history of peacekeeping has been spotty at best.  More worryingly, the UN has often caused much more trouble in the places it visits than it actually solves.  As the inimitable Mark Steyn noted over a decade ago, the UN’s peacekeepers are perhaps the last people you would want put in charge of anyone or anything one actually cares about.  To wit:

Is the UN good?  Well, I’m not sure I’d even say that.  But if you object to what’s going on in those Abu Ghraib pictures – the sexual humiliation of prisoners and their conscription as a vast army of extras in their guards’ porno fantasies – then you might want to think twice about handing over Iraq to the UN.

In Eritrea, the government recently accused the UN mission of, among other offences, pedophilia.  In Cambodia, UN troops fueled an explosion of child prostitutes and AIDS. Amnesty International reports that the UN mission in Kosovo has presided over a massive expansion of the sex trade, with girls as young as 11 being lured from Moldova and Bulgaria to service international peacekeepers.

In Bosnia, where the sex-slave trade barely existed before the UN showed up in 1995, there are now hundreds of brothels with underage girls living as captives.  The 2002 Save the Children report on the UN’s cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa provides grim details of peacekeepers’ demanding sexual favors from children as young as four in exchange for biscuits and cake powder.  “What is particularly shocking and appalling is that those people who ought to be there protecting the local population have actually become perpetrators,” said Steve Crawshaw, the director of Human Rights Watch.

Today, of course, the UN’s highest-profile mission is in the Palestinian territories, where it is ostensibly seeking to ease the suffering of the Palestinian people and offering to serve as an honest broker in the facilitation of peaceful relations between the Palestinians and Israelis.  It is hard to imagine, however, that any organization could be more poorly equipped to administer these tasks than the United Nations.
 
It doesn’t really matter on which side of the Israeli-Palestinian issue you fall, whether you support Israel wholeheartedly or, conversely, think that Israel is an aggressor, depriving the Palestinian people of the right to self-determination.  The notion that the United Nations could serve as a force for the peaceful resolution of this crisis is absurd.  Even if one ignores the UN’s history of bias against Israel and its historical collaboration with Palestinian radicals, the most recent news from the Middle East is enough to suggest that peace cannot be brokered by this organization, which has actually become a facilitator and advocate of violence in this already violent part of the world.  Even as the UN Security Council has been busy working away on ceasefire proposal after ceasefire proposal, the UNRWA (United Nations Relief Works Agency) has admitted that at least three of its schools have been used to store Hamas missile caches.  The UN, of course, has decried this violation of its “neutrality,” but the historical record is fairly clear that the UNRWA has been anything but neutral in this conflict.

Americans may not like it, and the rest of the world may complain about it, but the world needs a policeman.  And that policeman cannot be a manifestly-corrupt and biased organization whose own origins are of a dubious nature.  The world needs an honest broker and a power player who can not only facilitate amenable solutions to global problems but who can enforce those solutions if need be.  The humiliation of Secretary of State John Kerry this past week, as he tried and tried, unsuccessfully, to get anyone in the Middle East to pay even the slightest attention to him, serves as a warning to the United States and the global community.  American retreat from global affairs may have seemed a welcome relief after years of nation-building, but American isolation serves no good end.  America suffers a loss of prestige while the global community suffers in loss of lives.  As trite and tiresome as it might sound, the world needs its policeman.  Now, more than ever.

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