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.
