“Trade for Peace” by Dr. Patrick Mendis
May 20, 2009 — America’s founding mission has always been to promote trade to integrate the global community for peaceful living and unity as it was the case for the original 13 colonies in the Union. A combination of interstate commerce (not the religion) and freedom as depicted in the American Constitution paradoxically bound and expanded the United States together as one nation. Sri Lankan-born American scholar and diplomat Dr. Patrick Mendis has recently argued that the World Trade Organization (WTO) is the final frontier of the American Experiment to bind the community of nations together.
In his new book, titled TRADE for PEACE: How the DNA of America, Freemasonry, and Providence Created a New World Order with Nobody in Charge, Professor Mendis looks back to America’s origin to see its future. His interdisciplinary exploration – the production of a quarter century of teaching, research and global travel – has earned much praise in academic, diplomatic and development circles.
Lincoln Bloomfield, MIT professor of political science emeritus and National Security Council director during President Jimmy Carter, describes the book as “a tour de force.” He adds, “Americans from other cultures sometimes show the keenest sense of this nation’s values. In this insightful work, Patrick Mendis approaches the American narrative with a sharp scholarly edge, drawing richly on America’s classical roots, including a near-mystical appreciation of Freemasonry in the political architecture of the new American order.”
Professor Mendis says America has been a nation of rivals ever since the arrival of Columbus. The colonists and the Pilgrims embodied a “plantation of Trade” and a “plantation of Religion” through which traditions the rivalry between the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians has emerged to build the most dynamic Union. Even with their distinctive impulses for economic interests and moral sentiments, they favored freedom; hence, they were united for a common cause: peace.
Fascinated by American ideas, Professor Mendis – with his Buddhist and Christian upbringings in Sri Lanka and Minnesota, and working in Washington, D.C. – reveals the founding vision. The author does not pause there; he employs the Constitution’s “commerce clause” to explore the global mission of the United States as the Founding Fathers envisioned – and manifested once more by President Barack Obama, the Mercury of America’s global revolution.
Professor Mendis is being compared with the famous French author Alex de Tocqueville, who wrote Democracy in America, which appeared in two volumes in 1835 and 1840. Robert Kudrle, professor of international trade and investment policy at the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and the Law School of the University of Minnesota, says Dr. Mendis is “Like de Tocqueville,” who “sees cultural connections that those born in the U.S. often overlook”.
Former U.S. ambassador to Tanzania Michael Retzer writes: “Patrick Mendis, a perceptive world traveler whom I first met in South Africa, is a scholar and diplomat. Above all, he is a great American, who has visited all the 50 states. A Sri Lankan by origin and a Minnesotan by nature, he has seen them all. Like Alex de Tocqueville, Dr. Mendis writes about the promise of America and the wisdom of our Founding Fathers. In this book, he observes that America’s inspiring history is still in the future.”
Walter Isaacson, a former managing editor of TIME magazine and president of CNN, says, “Patrick Mendis, in this carefully researched book, seeks to explain how trade is encoded in the DNA of the United States and expressed in its Constitution. He provides an interesting approach for analyzing the nation’s commercial roots.”
For over two decades, Dr. Mendis was a protégé of the late Professor Harlan Cleveland, a highly regarded U.S. ambassador to NATO and assistant secretary of state under President John F. Kennedy. It was Ambassador Cleveland who inspired Dr. Mendis to become interested in American foreign policy and international relations at the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, where Cleveland was the founding dean in the 1980s. Dr. Mendis was one of the three recipients of the first Humphrey Leadership Award in 1986 along with Ambassador Max Kampelman and former Vice President Walter Mondale.
“We need to develop an integrative knowledge,” Professor Mendis said, attributing it to his mentor Ambassador Cleveland. His book is a 624-page tome that combined history, politics, economics, architecture, esoteric knowledge, foreign policy strategies, and global trade relations.
While growing up in Sri Lanka with Buddhist monks and Catholic priests, Professor Mendis has evidently mastered the basics of astrology and early Christian esoteric knowledge. A Catholic by birth, he was exposed to a variety of religious experiences and diverse disciplines – and traveling to more than 75 countries. Most recently, he studied the “secret” knowledge of Freemasonry that had clearly influenced America’s founders. After receiving the Benjamin Franklin Award from the U.S. State Department as a diplomat, he learned more about Franklin – America’s famous astrologer and the first diplomat.
Professor Mendis currently serves as the vice president of the Osgood Center for International Studies and a visiting scholar in foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins University’s Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C. An Adjunct Professor of Diplomacy at Norwich University and a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, Mendis is an alumnus of the Harvard Executive Leadership Program at the Kennedy School of Government and the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. He and his family live in the Washington, D.C. area. He has authored more than 100 books, journal articles, newspaper columns, seminar papers, and government reports.
All proceeds from sales of this book will be given to post-tsunami scholarships and micro-loan projects in his native Sri Lanka.
For more information, visit Dr. Patrick Mendis’ website.
