If Congress and the President had a basic understanding of what powers the constitution’s commerce clause does and does not give them, this whole Iran fiasco could have been avoided.
For several
months now, the Americans and their allies have been trading threats with Iran.
What began with attacks on oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz – which the
United States blamed on Iran – has escalated into the downing of drones by both
sides, and then in July the Iranian Revolutionary Guard seized a British ship
in the Straits, in retaliation for Britain’s seizure of an Iranian vessel near
the Straits of Gibraltar earlier in the month.
News
sites are blaring with headlines about ‘War Drums,’ though the public should view
this through a lens of scepticism. Rumours of war have always kept newsmen in
business, and so they tend to get deployed whether there’s actually going to be
a war or not. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility of war out of
hand.
All of
this raises the question of how we got to the brink of war, and to answer that
question, we need to go all the way back of the Constitution of 1787, in which
Congress was given power ‘To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and
among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.’
Debate
over the commerce clause usually centers on how broadly to read the phrase ‘among
the several states.’ Occasionally, the political and legal debate will turn
to the subject of regulating ‘commerce with foreign nations.’ Some
people might naively think, as I once did, that imposing sanctions is an
exercise of this power – and they would be right, if they were talking about
the sorts of trade embargoes that were used in the early Republic, when, for
instance, Jefferson signed the Embargo Acts to retaliate for Britain’s
impressment of American sailors to fight in the Napoleonic War.
But that
isn’t what modern sanctions – like the sanctions that lie at the heart of the
Iran debacle – are doing. The Trump administration hasn’t simply decided that Americans
must not trade with Iran, what it has done is imposed punishments for any firm,
in any nation, which does business with Iran. What the government has now
claimed is the power to regulate commerce between foreign nations.
Here is
how this plays out in practice: Most countries still want to have normal trade
relations with Iran, which, unlike the United States, did keep its end of the deal
with respect to uranium enrichment. However, these countries’ merchant classes
have generally refused to go along with the pro-Iranian policies of their
governments, for fear of ending up like Meng Wanzhou.
Meng, you
may recall, was the Chinese woman who was arrested in Canada last December, at
the request of US authorities, on account of dealings she had carried on with
Iran in her capacity as CFO of Huawei. She has been held in Canada ever since,
as the authorities there dither about whether to extradite her to the United
States to be tried for breaking American laws.
Keep in
mind that Meng wasn’t actually in the United States when she committed any of
her alleged crimes. She was just a Chinese businesswoman doing business with
Iran. And one can only imagine how America would react if the roles were
reversed – if, for example, an American travelling in Russia was arrested at
the request of Chinese authorities for defying Chinese sanctions against
Taiwan. Needless to say, the United States would not take well to such
treatment.
And yet
when the American authorities deal with China’s citizens this way, seemingly
level-headed publications like The Federalist defend their modus operandi, with
articles like this one accusing China of “bullying” Canada by making (unsuccessful)
demands for Meng’s release, and defending Canada’s role with such hackneyed
prose as the following:
“The
Canadian government has tried very hard to explain to Beijing that Meng’s
arrest was not politically driven.... The [U.S.] Justice Department launched a
criminal probe into Huawei’s dealings in Iran in April 2017. The arrest warrant
for Meng was issued in August by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern
District of New York, and Meng was charged with “conspiracy to defraud multiple
international institutions.” To U.S. authorities, arresting Meng in Canada was
a natural choice, because Meng stopped traveling to the United States in 2017.”
This
would all make a bit more sense if the U.S. District Court for the Eastern
District of New York somehow had jurisdiction over alleged frauds committed in
China and Iran. Under the Constitution of 1787, it doesn’t, but as that constitution
wasn’t written with global imperialism in mind, the people who presently run
this country have seen fit to abandon it.
China’s
leaders, being as commercialist as they are, ultimately decided to let the
matter slide rather than jeopardize Sino-American trade by responding in kind.
Needless to say, it won’t always be this way; the Chinese know that, a few
years hence, America won’t be the largest economy any more, and it will be
their turn to make the demands.
In the
meantime, the biggest losers are the Iranians. Although most countries do not
share America’s antipathy toward Iran, few international corporations are
willing to risk the wrath of the global hegemon. When a company must choose
between severing ties with Iran, and ceasing to do business in the United
States, raw economics determines that the ‘indispensable nation’ will come out
on top.
This is
why Ron Paul has been saying for so long that sanctions are ‘an act of war.’
For one country to be cut off from the rest of the world by the threat of
violence against anybody of any nationality, anywhere on Earth, who dares to
treat it like a normal country, is an attack on the sovereignty of not just one
foreign nation, but all of them.
But America’s days of acting this way are numbered. The Americans have long
depended on the rest of the world’s demand for paper dollars to keep them in
the number one economic spot even though they manufacture few tangible goods.
But with their liberal use of sanctions, the Americans are sawing through their
own perch.
More and
more countries are dedollarizing in order to make it harder for the United
States to claim jurisdiction over their commerce – and this process will sooner
or later result in a disastrous shock to the American economy, with severe
inflation as dollars lose their appeal abroad and come flooding back home. And
all of it, perhaps, would have been avoidable, if only America’s rulers had
taken their constitutional limits more seriously, rather than trying to regulate
commerce between foreign nations.
America’s founders fought
the War of Independence in order to gain for their new country a “separate and
equal status” with other nations. Hegemony was never part of the plan. A return
to constitution government requires that America recognize that it is a nation
among nations, not an overlord among vassals, and act accordingly.
