While United States President Barack Obama used an address at West Point Military Academy this week to tout the impeding end to the Afghan War, his second in command had a much different message while giving remarks to Air Force Academy cadets.
Vice President Joe Biden is now getting attention over the phrasing he used during Wednesday’s graduation ceremony at the military college in Colorado Springs, Colorado that contrasted sharply with the message the commander-in-chief extended at an address that morning at West Point.
During Mr. Obama’s remarks, the president told new military grads that they were likely to be the first in over a decade to not worry about being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq. With combat operations there all but expired, American foreign policy should begin to rely on influencing the world not with the barrel of a gun, the president said, but by leading with examples of diplomacy.
Biden, however, had a different message to extend.
"I believe we and mainly you have an incredible opportunity to lead in shaping a new world order for the twenty-first century in a way consistent with American interests and common interests,” Vice Pres. Biden said to the 995 members of the class of 2014, the Colorado Springs Gazette reported this week.
"There was an overwhelming desire of our grandparents and my parent's generation to bring home every single one of the 12 million forces stationed in Europe and Asia," he said. "They knew they had to lay a foundation for a new world order, an order that brought the longest period of sustained and peace in Europe and Asia.”
The vice president’s remarks are expected to generate controversy among skeptics who associated the phrase “new world order” with the theory that a secret global power elite is plotting a system of international rule to take over the world.
Indeed, Biden made similar comments last year and quickly caught the attention of anti-globalists as a result.
“The affirmative task before us is to create a new world order because the global order is changing again,” Biden said at a conference in Washington, DC last June.
At the time, the website Infowars.com pounced upon the vice president’s remarks and said Biden was “adding yet another admission to an already long list of documented globalist bragging of plans for a centralized, one-world global government.”
According to The New American, Biden brought up the notion of a new world order long before that, though. The website reported last year that in 1992, Biden wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he called for a “permanent commitment of forces for use by the Security Council” of the United Nations.
“Why not breathe life into the UN Charter?” Biden asked then.