Most thoughtful observers of the contemporary American polity are astonished that the highly partisan fight over the future of Iraq has almost entirely obscured the larger problem of which the Iraqi theater is but one front: the truly global conflict against Islamofascist ideologues and their enablers that is best described as the War for the Free World.

If the ominous nature of this wider struggle to the death – and the potentially grave implications for our society should we fail to wage it successfully – are being lost on too many Americans, practically none of them is paying attention to yet another, in some ways even more insidious, threat to our country: the assault on our sovereignty by the "transnational progressives."

This term was coined by one of the most thoughtful defenders of American sovereignty – that somewhat intangible, yet indispensable ingredient in a nation of the people, by the people and for the people – Hudson Institute scholar John Fonte. In October 2002, he wrote a seminal essay in Orbis entitled, "Liberal Democracy vs. Transnational Progressivism: The Future of the Ideological Civil War within the West." In it, he warned of the emergence of "a new challenge to liberal democracy and its traditional home, the liberal democratic nation-state."

Fonte depicts the latter as a form of government Americans take for granted: "self-governing representative systems comprised of individual citizens who enjoy freedom and equality under law and together form a people within a democratic nation-state." In our case, constitutional arrangements provide inherent "individual rights, democratic representation (with some form of majority rule) and national citizenship."

As Fonte trenchantly observed, the challenge is coming "in the form of a new transnational hybrid regime that is post-liberal democratic, and in the context of the American republic, post-Constitutional and post-American." He notes that "this alternative ideology [of] 'transnational progressivism'…constitutes a universal and modern worldview that challenges in theory and practice both the liberal democratic nation-state in general and the American regime in particular."

Three examples of the agenda being pursued at the moment by what John O’Sullivan deprecatingly calls the "Transies" illustrate the progress of their assault on American sovereignty:

O The Bush Administration has launched some two-dozen "working groups" to develop a Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) with Canada and Mexico. Loosely modeled after the Transies' favorite supranational organization – the European Union – and evolving in much the same way (namely, under the rubric of an economic common market agreement, in this case NAFTA), the SPP's architects are busily crafting sweeping new rules to develop a North American Union (NAU). Continued...