Globalism's police force
worldnetdaily.com
Last weekend's NATO summit in Washington was a watershed in the long struggle to preserve our precious national sovereignty and our constitutional order.
To begin with, in the NATO war on Yugoslavia, the important constitutional check that the American people are supposed to have on the power of the chief executive to lead us into war is being utterly disregarded. We are waging a war against Yugoslavia that has not been declared by the Congress.
But beyond President Clinton's failure to respect his constitutional duty to seek a declaration of war if he is to fight one, the NATO summit raises another concern about the erosion of our system of self-government.
NATO attacked Yugoslavia, although unprovoked by any attack or military threat from Yugoslavia. This means that there was no rationale in a formal sense under the NATO treaty for the action that was taken, because NATO's treaty is a defensive arrangement, and in fact explicitly excludes offensive action by the members.
What does this have to do with American sovereignty and constitutional self-government? Well, in America, treaties are supposed to be ratified by the Senate of the United States. And when the Senate ratifies a treaty, it does so, I presume, according to its terms. That is to say, the Senate doesn't ratify a treaty and then hand it to the president as a blank check, saying "we have now ratified this treaty, and any time that you want to make any changes in it, even going beyond anything that is in the original treaty, we give you a blank check to do so without coming to us again." If they did this, of course, the president could use any treaty as a blank piece of paper on which to write and rewrite any terms he liked -- turning it from a specific treaty with specific terms into an unlimited blank check to become whatever treaty he feels it should be, without again consulting Congress.
If that is what ratifying a treaty means, then the Senate's power to ratify treaties is useless, and the ratification of any treaty simply hands to the executive the power to do in foreign policy anything he pleases without again consulting the people. This would be an extremely dangerous concentration of unchecked power in the hands of the executive. Bill Clinton is acting as if he has such power.
The discussions at the NATO summit were about rewriting the purpose of the organization. NATO is an alliance that came into being for defensive purposes, in order to bring together a set of countries that were faced with the threat from the Soviet Union and the communist ideology, and the possibility of the overrunning of Europe by that ideology. The NATO countries came together on that basis, and wrote a treaty that was defensive in nature.
The treaty specifically did not commit the United States to join with these countries in offensive action. This was because, at the time, a number of the European countries still had colonial empires, and they were still wont to engage in wars that arose from their efforts to maintain them. So one of the reasons that the NATO alliance was explicitly defensive, and did not commit us to join in offensive wars with our partners in the alliance, is that Americans at that time did not want us to become involved in wars that were necessary to enforce and maintain European colonial power in various parts of the world. We had better sense than that.
Now, however, President Clinton and his socialist soul-mate, Tony Blair, are rewriting the NATO mandate in order to turn the alliance into an instrument for offensive police action on various grounds, having to do with terrorism, and drugs, and ethnic cleansing, and human rights violations -- and pretty much anything else they want to throw in. Any issue they can make plausible -- or, by showing our people the right video clips, emotionally evocative -- will now be a pretext for mobilizing the military forces of NATO (read: "the military forces of the United States") in pursuit of their agenda, implicating us in whatever scheme of European ambition they might want to concoct.
Imagine what would happen if Bill Clinton put such a treaty before the Senate of the United States -- and thus the people of this country -- for ratification. He would be proposing that we turn over control of our involvement in war and peace internationally to an assemblage of folks who could be driven by ambitions that have never been a part of the American agenda, such as colonial domination and now, perhaps, the imposition of globalist, bureaucratic, socialist government. If he put that treaty before us and said, "Are you willing to turn over to this body the power to send your sons and daughters to war, so that we may find ourselves involved, on all these various pretexts, in offensive wars aimed at imposing NATO's domination on various countries in the world?" what do you think the people, through their representatives, would say?
They would say, "Mr. President, Americans don't go to war for the kinds of reasons that the clique you want to turn us over to does." And this verdict would be correct. We have been a people, by and large, who confined our appetite for war to occasions of necessity. If it is necessary to defend ourselves, our interest, our basic beliefs and principles, against assaults that are determined and organized, and threatening to our survival, then we do so. And that makes perfect sense.
But does it make sense to involve us in an obligation that will be determined by the ill-defined agendas and ambitions of a gaggle of countries that have been unhappily notorious for the use of force in pursuit of domination and schemes of imperialism and colonialism? Should this now be the American agenda? I don't think so.
The process that took place over the last several weeks substantively rewrites the terms of the NATO alliance. It turns it from an alliance for defensive purposes into an ad hoc cooperative that could easily lead the United States into war on a whole range of pretexts that have nothing to do with a clear understanding of our vital interests, our safety, our security. It is a major watershed. When the NATO leaders say that it is a change, they are right. It is a major change. It is such a profound change in the nature of this alliance that it is constitutionally impossible for the president to justify it without again consulting the Senate of the United States. And yet this change is being made by fiat of the president without ever again having consulted the representatives of the people.
What are the implications of the NATO re-founding and the manner in which it is being accomplished? Apart from the wars the new arrangement will likely lead us into, the dictatorial action of President Clinton in spurning the role of the Senate is itself deeply damaging to our constitutional balance. So many people seem blind to the fact that the chief danger America faces is not the war against Yugoslavia itself. The chief threat to us is the war against the very idea of nationhood and the nation state, being waged on behalf of a vague notion of international sovereignty which involves, first and foremost, surrender of their national sovereignty by the people of the United States. That surrender is what Americans are chiefly doing in this war. I believe it is why we have been led into the war.
It is not Yugoslavian sovereignty alone that is being attacked. Our own sovereignty is being surrendered utterly in this matter. And proving it is as simple as listening to the words of our leaders. Senator Lott said the following last Sunday:
"There is concern about how we got into this situation, but now we are in it. And we are Americans, and we are part of NATO. The NATO meeting that has been going on in Washington has been a very positive event. I have met with a lot of the leaders from around the world. I spent almost two hours with Prime Minister Tony Blair. We need to be a part of that effort. But it is interesting to note that while all the NATO countries agree, it is the United States that is doing the job."
Trent Lott acknowledges that it is our resources, troops and money -- American blood and treasure -- that are on the line. He acknowledges that there is in fact some question about how we got involved in the war. But he concludes that we have to do what NATO tells us, even though our troops and resources are being used, and however we got involved. He in effect points to our abdication of sovereignty and control, says we must accept it simply because we are already involved, and seems utterly and purposefully oblivious to the terms of the Constitution, which make clear that the executive can commit us to any war he likes, but we don't have to approve it or prosecute it. The Congress, which has the exclusive prerogative to declare war, can say "no."
So here we have a Republican leader sitting by while the Constitution is destroyed, and while our sovereignty is handed off to some conglomerate of countries in NATO to serve God knows what ambition on the part of these globalists. (We can't call them "internationalists," because there is no international arena if there aren't nations any more.) These are people aiming to establish a global sovereignty, and to destroy the nation state. And what we should see above all in that is that they intend, therefore, to destroy our Constitution.
Much like Hitler laying out his strategy in Mein Kampf and then having none of the people who might have stopped him pay any attention, Bill Clinton declared himself in his first inaugural address to be a globalist who intended to establish global sovereignty through his abuse of the office of the president, and nobody paid attention.
NATO seems to be the preferred instrument for the establishment of this global sovereignty, because if the United Nations were explicitly identified as the new global sovereign, the American people would rise up in arms. Clinton and his allies think they will slip the change past us by using NATO instead. But the ultimate objective is the establishment of U.N. sovereignty. Even regarding Kosovo, the only plan that NATO political leaders have said might be acceptable involves the establishment of direct United Nations administration in Kosovo. They are using the NATO label as cover for this ultimate globalist objective. Kosovo is to be the beachhead of United Nations sovereignty -- the first territory under its official sovereign control.
Conservatives and Republicans should be asking themselves why so many who seek to represent them are supporting a globalist war, with a globalist objective, the ultimate result of which will be the destruction of the United States Constitution. Why are Elizabeth Dole and George W. Bush and Senator McCain, and all the rest of them, supporting this agenda? They wear the label of Republican, but the label lies. They are not Republicans, and they are not conservative. They are globalists of the same stripe as Bill Clinton.
Right now they are strongly supporting a policy that involves the direct abdication of our sovereign control of our means of defense -- and what could be more vital to us than that?
I hope we will be able to awaken those Americans particularly who are in the Republican Party and conservative ranks to the true nature of this war. Clinton, Blair and the rest have put a false humanitarian face on it, but under the phony mask of humanitarianism is the reality of a globalist objective -- the establishment of global sovereignty in derogation of our national sovereignty and to the destruction of the Constitution.
If we want to live under the system of self-government the Constitution provides, then we have to defend against this assault -- the abdication of our national sovereignty involved in this undeclared and illegitimate war.
Former Reagan administration official Alan Keyes, was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Social and Economic Council and 2000 Republican presidential candidate. |
