If July 4, 1776, is our Independence Day, March 11, 1941, is our Interdependence Day.
A revolutionary thing happened on the way to World War II. It was called "Lend Lease." This was the legislation, approved on March 11, 1941, by which the neutral USA began to supply aid to countries at war with Hitler. It was spun by President Roosevelt and Democrats in Congress as a means of keeping America out of World War II, although it was recognized by many Republicans at the time as a war bill.
But that's not all. Lend Lease granted extraordinary powers to the executive. Indeed, it transferred war-making power from the Congress, where the Constitution placed it, to the president, where it has pretty much remained ever since.
There was something else that was revolutionary about the bill -- something revolutionary in a deeply ideological way:
From American Betrayal, Chapter 5:
Lend-Lease did more than transform the power structure of the U.S. government. It also introduced a revolutionary principle into our foreign policy. I’ll just put it out there in the words of “Junior Stettinius,” the Hopkins protégé whom we just saw putting the heat on Kravchenko in 1944—or at least conducting it, since Stettinius was, by all accounts, the emptiest of well-tailored suits.94 As [Secretary of State] Stettinius wrote—or, perhaps better, in words attributed to Stettinius:
The principle was contained in the words defining eligibility for Lend-Lease aid—“any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.” The word “vital” was the heart of the matter. To favor limited aid to the allies as an expedient device for saving friendly nations from conquest was one thing. To declare that the defense of those nations was “vital” to our own national security was quite another. If we adopted the bill with those words, we would, in effect, declare the interdependence of the American people with the other freedom-loving nations of the world in the face of Axis aggression [emphasis added].95
We did indeed adopt the Lend-Lease bill with those words.96 This makes March 11, 1941, the day the Lend-Lease bill passed after three months of raucous congressional debate, America’s Interdependence Day. It was the first day of a new global order under which all manner of international intervention is automatically declared “vital”—i.e., essential to life—to U.S. interests. It no longer even draws comment when American presidents routinely declare the destinies of far-flung peoples “vital” to that of the United States, whether in Saudi Arabia (Roosevelt), Iraq (Bush), or Afghanistan (Obama).97
So how did Lend-Lease, this de facto American declaration of global interdependence—this de facto reversal of nonbelligerence if not also this de facto declaration of war—come about?
Therein lies a tale told in American Betrayal.
For now, suffice it to say that three of the most important people to lay hands on Lend Lease, from conception to crafting the bill to the administration of the massive industrial program, were three of the most pro-Hammer-and-Sickle Americans of the day, men with Soviet interests at heart, men whose once-secret dossiers reveal them to have acted as conduits, if not also agents of Stalin's influence: Armand Hammer, Harry Hopkins, and Harry Dexter White.
And why is that relevant? Through Lend Lease, the USSR received the aid that helped destroy Hitler but also made the Evil Empire possible. This is literally true when you realize that without the 500,000 trucks and jeeps that the US delivered to the Soviet Union, the Red Army could never have advanced across Eastern Europe to the heart of Europe, seizing and communizing the nations later known as the Eastern Bloc.
With American betrayal like that -- and there is so much more -- is it really so surprising that the global project is upon us?