PITTSBURGH, Aug. 14 (UPI) -- Aug. 14 1941: That famed and historic special relationship between the United States and Britain begins.
Atlanticism means different things to different people.
To the fascists against whom it was fashioned, it meant the last gasp of a decadent West led by a coalition between a naive upstart America and a decrepit British Empire.
To communists, it was capitalism's last stand.
To Winston Churchill's enemies among the British old guard, it was the terms of surrender that the Empire offered to America.
To radical left black academics, it is an imperialistic culture that threatens to undermine the Afro-centric hustle.
To most people, unfortunately, "Atlanticism" means absolutely nothing -- even this computer's spell check utility continues to insist the word doesn't even exist. What a pity!
The power alignment that this word represents arguably saved all their lives, from British aristocrats to Microsoft programmers.
It started Aug. 9, 1941. While many ships had been passing one another on their way back and forth between America and Britain, two ships were carrying something other than commercial cargoes.
The new British battleship Prince of Wales and the U.S. Navy cruiser Augusta were bearing British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, respectively.
Although the United States, officially, was still neutral, it was clear to FDR by this point that neutrality was untenable in the long run, and the United States needed to show its support for its battle-weary ally.
The partnership begun that day at sea is what Churchill would eventually call "the Grand Alliance," and what we now call "that Special Relationship."
The two statesmen discussed the status of the Soviet Union struggling to survive the Nazi onslaught and debated the growing aggressiveness of the Japanese Empire in East Asia.
It was agreed that Britain and the United States should produce a statement, not of promises to one another, but of shared principles that alone became a sort of promise for the world -- a declaration, if you will, of mutual dependence.
Churchill went below deck to write it and presented it later to FDR, who, after a few revisions, joined Churchill in signing it. On the next morning the crews of the two ships celebrated their common purpose, culture and faith in a joint worship service.
Churchill later wrote about the moving scene in which these men joined their voices and mingled their British and American accents singing "Onward Christian Soldiers," as dawn was breaking upon the waters.
It was released to the world Aug. 14. The substance of the charter reads as follows:
-- First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other;
-- Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned;
-- Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them;
-- Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity;
-- Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security;
-- Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want;
-- Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance;
-- Eighth, they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force.
Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential.
They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measures that will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.
The most striking thing about this document is that it represents the latest in a string of such declarations, which posits security, not as an end in itself, but as an extension of freedom.
The English-speaking world represents a sort of idealism as opposed to the tired and complex intrigues of what those in Old Europe called realpolitik.
In the continental tradition, realpolitik means that eventually we have to get rid of words like "freedom" and "justice" and all the rest of that sentimentalism, and get down to what really counts: namely, power.
Although the English-speaking world is also not entirely immune to this thinking -- for instance, President Richard Nixon was an avid advocate of such views -- to most of us it is an alien way of looking at the world that never entirely took root.
To us, eventually you need to stop talking about power and began to get at what really counts -- freedom, justice, and faith. For the Atlanticist, right, eventually, makes might.
This document is remarkably free, with a few exceptions, of cant and what we now call political correctness. Contrary to the current haranguing by Western elites against globalization, it correctly assumes the desirability of free trade, especially for poor nations, and promises its extension.
It doesn't flinch at the prospect of grounding the desire for peace in "spiritual" considerations. And it seems to imply what has now become almost a cliché, that democracies do not make war against one another.
A decade ago, President George H. W. Bush defended Operation Desert Storm, the liberation of Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War, on the basis of a "New World Order."
Right cause, wrong language; he should have defended it on the basis of an Old World Order.
This Old World Order was expressed by the English through the 13th century Magna Carta and in the United States by the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
With the Atlantic Charter, these two very important texts met in the middle of the ocean.
What then is Atlanticism? It is the correct belief that as the West leads the world toward universal democratization, freedom and security, so it is the Atlantic Alliance, that cluster of English-speaking nations that brackets the Atlantic Ocean, that leads the West.
-- Jerry Bowyer is the host of a daily radio program on leadership, which can be heard weekday mornings on www.1360wptt.com.
-- "Outside view" commentaries are written for UPI by outside writers who specialize in a variety of important global issues.
