Foreign policy of Alaska

In The Executive Branch and an explanatory video, The Executive Power, I sketched the practical and intellectual dimensions of a free society, presented in the context of Alaskan nationhood under widely subscribed ratification of The Freeman's Constitution. For a fuller account of the historical, conceptual, logical, and personal elements that led me to a new constitution, there are lectures at Vimeo and paperbacks at Amazon and Lulu. My novels are just as important as my nonfiction books, all of which explore liberty and justice. It was my perceived duty to define those terms in plain language based on Anglo-American common law and equity. I did not re-invent law, but brought it into focus as an anarchist. I'll discuss anarchy a little later. I want to begin with the problem of foreign policy in a free society.

Let's assume that Alaska successfully secedes from the Lower 49, which is fictionalized in The Executive Branch saga and referenced elsewhere repeatedly. If any territory has a good shot at creating an independent and free society, it's Alaska, a naturally defined land mass loaded with natural resources, plenty of room for development and increased population, a magnet for freemen and aspirational women who want to see their values reflected in civil law and practical law enforcement, a realm I believe that women should govern. Men will be plenty busy providing national security and managing foreign policy.

I don't see Russia as a threat, but rather as a trading partner and strategic counterparty. It is necessary to arm Alaska with nuclear weapons as a deterrent to forcible "reunion" with the U.S. or aggression by other powers, including Russia. I believe it's possible to buy nuclear weapons from Russia in a comprehensive treaty accord that grants Russia fishing rights and commercial interests, provided that Russian fishing vessels, army, navy, aircraft, immigrants, and diplomats comport themselves in compliance with Alaska's constitutional order. This does not imply strategic alliance with Russia, more like a nonaggression pact with teeth, to accommodate a neighbor with few friends and much to gain from commercial trade with Alaska and its allies. I don't doubt that Canada, Japan, and Korea will find ample reason to reach tariff-free trade agreements with libertarian Alaska, to participate in its economic development. Japan and Korea are hungry for oil and gas. They have industrial products to trade. Cunucks are logical strategic and financial friends, privately and diplomatically.

Obviously, there will be bad blood with the former United States or its fractured remnant of contentious and militarily divided regions. It is a precondition of Alaskan independence that the Union will be shattered by civil strife, which seems likely, given the current tailspin into rival interests. California will be first to secede and divide itself in three or four mini-states, with a badly governed, violent No Man's Land in Southern California (El Norte), held by a socialist dictator in Washington who controls the East Coast from Maine to Florida and parts of the Rust Belt. He'll make a deal with Texas and its militarily weak oil patch dependents in Oklahoma and Louisiana to supply oil and gas, and reach accommodation on Gulf Coast and border security. New Mexico depises Texas passionately, will probably form an alliance with eastern Arizona, rural Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and the Ozarks, as weak as a litter of kittens economically, but gritty and proud of their frontier heritage. The South will rise again to its peril. The Mountain States and Dakotas have a good shot at unified and unchallenged success, trading with Canada, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and rural Illinois. Chicago is doomed. Seattle has a long deep history as a vassal of the military, a strategic home port. Puget Sound will be Alaska's strategic foe, separated by a 500-mile DMZ patrolled by neutral Cananda. An Alaskan navy and air force are the only hope of effective national defense. How U.S. forces based in pre-revolutionary Alaska conceive their future as champions of independence will determine how quickly or how painfully Alaska wins its freedom as a new nation.

Impossible? Hah. All too likely. The Union was held by force and fraud and flag-waving ritual beyond its viability as a cohesive society. The United States of America is bankrupt. Our 2020 election will crack us into regional and racial tribes. Trump may be the last U.S. President, destined to preside over violent insurrections and economic collapse. Demobilized veterans of Afghanistan and the Gulf will return to families and neighbors armed with pitchforks and torches, colleges and universities shut by rock-throwing militants, burning cities, fistfights in the House of Representatives, and hysterical fusion of fear and fake news.

Earlier I promised to say something about anarchy. It has nothing to do with social disorder. Civil liberty, however you conceive it, however narrow or broad in a free society, is a degree of absolute anarchy, doing as you please, deciding who to marry, which job to take, etc. In a fully free society, social order evolves in the multiplicity of individual decisions, a defacto anarchy exhibited in the Gilded Age of Andrew Carnegie and Jay Gould, two of many paupers who rose to become fabulously rich in a free market that also lifted millions of paupers into miraculous prosperity. It really does matter, to study history. We were a free people at the dawn of the American Experiment, freed again by a long era of incompetent, easily bribed government bankrupted by a Civil War that cost fives times the GNP of 1860. Freedom from regulation bestowed astonishing industrial capital growth, skyscrapers, steel mills, power plants, railroads and threshers to gather harvests and feed millions of city dwellers.

That's what Alaska needs, a free society. To grasp what that implies, please read my portrait of an anarcho-capitalist Alaska, ably defended by a private Executive Branch. It's not hard to understand that banks, insurance companies, and wealthy private citizens would organize themselves voluntarily to fund Alaskan defense. There was a patriotic precedent in 1776, a conspiracy of bankers, merchants, and planters to launch the American Revolutionary War of Independence by privately contributing millions in gold to supply a Continental Army. Most of the patriots were immigrants and self-made men. There was a notable exception among the immigrants, however. Thomas Paine was a dirt poor writer, recruited and published by Benjamin Franklin. I feel drawn to visit Alaska while I'm healthy enough to travel.

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