Where's the Plan?

Where’s the Plan? By Spyridon Andrews

Refugees have been with us throughout history and they were never particularly welcome. Until the age of global capitalism, nearly 80% of the world lived below the poverty line. So, when refugees appeared, they were usually coming into already desperate communities struggling for scant resources.

Today, in 2025, there are tens of millions of people across the globe—men, women, and children—desperate to flee the lands of their birth. These are not just seekers of economic opportunity. Some are victims of failed states, lawless warzones, and kleptocratic regimes that crush hope by design. While some have less than honest motives, many come because their homes have become uninhabitable.

In fact, as President Reagan used to point out, many are coming from socialist countries, which is a bitter indictment of those apologists who still, amazingly, desire global socialism. Those same people often claim that they trust data and “science”, but apparently not when it comes to economics. Even a cursory understanding of global economics over the last 200 years, makes it obvious that it is global capitalism that has lifted billions and billions out of poverty. In 2025, the vast majority of those on the planet have lifestyles that could hardly have ever been imagined, even by the standards of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. We live in unimaginable comfort compared to 100 years ago, and all of this has been made possible through the deposing of kings, despots, tyrants, and centralized planned economies.

Given the opulence of the West, the opulence which the West so often brags about, what we offer for those seeking a better life is pathetic and shameful. We can put forward excuses—which may or may not be true—that those seeking to bring migrants from the third world into the West are seeking to ignite a replacement population as a way to solidify their hegemony. That may or may not be true—and in some cases it probably is. Joe Biden’s border policy certainly seemed to fit that hypothesis.

But that is really beside the point. In this time of affluence in the West, we need to offer more than crippling bureaucracy, human trafficking and a border wall. This is no longer 1820 or even 1920. This is the world of $20 smoothies and $8 lattes. This is the era of three-car garages and $75,000 a year tuition at our pathetic universities who claim to be woke, but whose behavior would turn Forrest Gump into a hardcore cynic.

Let’s be clear: it is legitimate and important to control your borders. A nation is not a hotel and a nation must live by the rule of law. But it is not legitimate to claim the moral high ground while presiding over a global order that lets despots, cartels, and fake revolutionaries destroy entire regions without consequence. This is not just geopolitical indifference, it is moral dereliction.

We send aid that winds up in the hands of the corrupt dictators that preside over these hot zones. We send diplomats who talk much and do nothing. And we host summits and think tanks at the very same Ivy League and West Coast institutions that we simultaneously claim are out of touch.

We pay for and boast vast institutions of power and influence—the UN, the IMF, NATO, the World Bank, the EU, thousands of NGOs. Yet few of them are capable of doing the one thing they were meant to do: offer real solutions where despair reigns. If they cannot do that, why do they still exist? We should talk frankly: if they don’t work, disband them, defund them, seize their budgets, scrap the junkets, identify and punish the money launderers and redirect the wealth toward something that actually builds rather than postures. We need vision and hard work, not a guilt management strategy.

To put it even more bluntly, Where is the plan?

Where is the strategy to dethrone the kleptocrats of West Africa? Where is the effort to stabilize Syria, end the child slave trades in the Congo, stop Chinese neocolonialism masked as infrastructure? Where is the vision to train young men in Guatemala, Pakistan, Ethiopia—to become protectors, not traffickers? Where is the moral will to rebuild families—without which no civilization survives?

The truth is this: the West cannot open its gates to all. But we also cannot retreat behind walls of indifference and claim righteousness. If we can create a global internet, if we can surveil every calorie in our overpriced lattes, we can develop a better model than this. If not, we should stop calling ourselves leaders of the Free World.

The Failure of the Left and Right

The Left offers moralistic hashtags and open border slogans that dissolve the very idea of a cohesive society. They post inane infographics, hold rallies, and virtue signal while living in gentrified zip codes far, far, very far from the human consequences of their false ideology. Its performative compassion based on lawn signs and nose rings. This kind of theater costs nothing, fixes nothing, and mostly serves as self-congratulation. To the conservatives it seems repulsive, because it is.

The Right, on the other hand, clings to border control as if it’s a policy in itself. Walls are necessary, but walls without vision become tombs. It is not enough to say “no” to the desperate without offering an alternative. The right parades around with its pre-packaged Christianity, one that Christ himself would have condemned. It is Christianity without sacrifice, without suffering, one with megachurches and marshmallows. The Left finds it repulsive, because it is.

We were correct in our desire to build our Western Nations here in the west on the model of the Graeco-Roman Judeo-Christian model. The Christian ethic has served our world much better than the savage chaos that preceded it. Contrary to Marx’s dim-witted explanations, warring Germanic tribes and savage Bulgars embraced Christianity not for political expediency, but because they were convinced of its moral superiority. But now, we need to walk the walk.

In the Congo there is trillions in mineral wealth, yet it is home to modern child slavery, ongoing armed conflict and international disinterest. NGOs have flooded the region for decades and yet the basic dignity of life—education, clean water, law and order, is nowhere to be found.

Syria is ravaged by dictatorship and proxy wars, and civilians suffer while we play international chess. Progressives call for “reparations” for people who are not slaves while real slavery exists in China and Africa. Progressives ignore it so they can pay lower prices for their smart phones and laptops—which gives them the ability to tweet and post their concerns about the plight of the unfortunate.

China is quietly colonizing African infrastructure, roads, dams, ports, in exchange for loyalty and resources. It is empire building and we are letting it happen due to our negligence and navel-gazing.

Where is the West? Where is the United Nations? What are these thousands of overpaid bureaucrats actually doing?

Where is the plan?

American Renewal

The West still possesses one untapped resource: its youth. Millions of young people long for meaning—yet we offer them nothing but anxiety, nihilism, and gender studies.

Let’s stop complaining about them. Let’s enlist them. We don’t need to invent problems or try to solve the problems that came from the demented mind of Michel Foucault. We have plenty already. Rather than sit in classrooms with untethered professors who offer as little as they did when they rejected Ludwig Boltzmann’s atomic theory of matter, conservatives are correct when they say that our kids need to get out in “the real world.” And RFK one of the last great true liberals, was correct when he called for “national service” for the youth. We don’t need a nation of eggheads with soft hands, we need people who know how to fit a pipe, build an engine, design a bridge, grow crops, write code and yes, put in a full day’s work. One of the great travesties in this new American century is our young person waxing about “work-life balance,” at an age when American earlier generation young people were designing the automobile, building the Brooklyn Bridge and inventing the personal computer.

There is hope. American children are just being American when they talk about re-making the world. The should be doing that. But our job as adults is to show them how.

National Service should be a prerequisite for voting. Teach them the best of our western traditions—Aristotle, Aquinas, Solzhenitsyn—not to control their minds, but to strengthen them. Build not only their resumes, but their souls.

Americans spurn convention. We did not used to like being told no. And even if we didn’t do the right thing all the time, we knew right from wrong. If we do not intervene and teach them right from wrong, virtue from falsehood, they will live on lies and chaos. And believe me, it shows.

To the Left: Lay down the lawn signs. Stop pretending compassion requires no cost.

To the Right: Stop confusing comfort with conviction. Christianity without sacrifice is just branding.

In short, we need a plan.

And if either side of the political spectrum has nothing meaningful to contribute, they should step aside and let those who are not politically compromised engage the problem.