Up in Canada this summer, President Bush met with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon in what should have been a standard, wholly positive “meeting of the minds” between the leaders of the three leading nations in our hemisphere.
But many are rightfully concerned that this meeting and other developments of recent years are setting the stage for a government-like North American Union.
At its fullest completed vision, the North American Union (NAU), which has also gone by a few other names as well, would essentially replace the United States, Mexico and Canada as a governing level above the three once-independent nations.
Styled nearly identically to the current European Union, there would be one currency, open borders, and many subtler features that would overwhelm the U.S. Constitution.
Back in 1973, U.S. banking leader David Rockefeller met with American geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski and along with other business and political leaders formed the Trilateral Commission.
Conspiracy theories aside, the commission was formed in order to foster closer working relationships among the leaders of the three leading economic spheres of influence: North America, Europe, and Pacific Asia.
A year later, one of the commission members, Richard Gardner of Columbia University, wrote an influential article for Foreign Affairs magazine titled “The Hard Road to World Order” in which he called for “an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece”.
It is from this line of thinking that covert attacks on the United States of America as an independent, sovereign nation began to take place.
In 1979, while running for President, Ronald Reagan called for a “North American Agreement” to produce “a North American continent where the goods and people of the three countries will cross boundaries more freely.” Upon taking office in January of 1981, Reagan called for a North American common market.
In October of 1984, the Congress passed the Trade and Tariff Act, a part of which extended the powers of the president to concede trade benefits and enter into bilateral free trade agreements.
In October of 1987, the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement was finalized, and signed into law by President Reagan and the Canadian Prime Minster in January 1988.
This led U.S. trade representative Clayton Yeutter to utter the statement “We’ve signed a stunning new trade pact with Canada, the Canadians don’t understand what they’ve signed. In twenty years they will be sucked into the U.S. economy.” Well, those twenty years have now passed, and Yeutter is proving to be a visionary.
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush began negotiations with the Mexican president to foster the same type of relationship as had been forged with Canada. A year later, Canadian PM Brian Mulroney asked that the negotiations become trilateral among the three nations.
Over the next couple of years the framework was laid for what has become known simply as NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which formally went into effect in January 1994.
NAFTA basically eliminated tariffs on products traded between the three nations while protecting intellectual property rights and removing many investment restrictions. Over the ensuing half dozen years, negotiations take place aimed at enlarging the scope of NAFTA to include the Caribbean region nations and Chile.
Mexico elected Vicente Fox as President in 2000, and Fox quickly proposed what became known as his “20/20” vision: the U.S. and Mexico would have a common market within 20-30 years.
