Supranational control of U.S. military?

A professor at Texas A&M University says sometimes there is “an
ethical justification” for placing American troops under the command of
supranational organizations such as the United Nations.

In his study,
published on the United States Air Force Academy website, Dr. Manuel
Davenport said “two kinds of conditions are logically possible” in
considering subjecting U.S. forces to supranational authority.

“First, there could be conditions such that basic American values,
including survival, could not be maintained unless American forces
submitted to supranational control,” Davenport wrote. “Secondly, there
could be conditions such that basic human values could not be maintained
unless Americans were willing to submit to supranational control even at
the cost of sacrificing their own national interest.”

There are three primary schools of thought regarding the
consideration of placing U.S. forces under other than national
commanders, says Davenport. “Realists,” he said, “contend that there is
no ethical justification whatsoever for considering such human rights as
self-determination and religious freedom for non-Americans because
morality has no place in international relations.” By comparison, “at
the opposite ethical pole from the moral realists are those who believe
in a common morality,” which he deemed “ethical objectives.” In the
middle is a group he calls “Rule-utilitarians,” who seek to “occupy the
happy middle-ground between the extremes of Political Realism, with its
cynical view of human nature and morality, and Ethical Objectivism, with
its overly absolutistic and idealistic view.”

“Rule-Utilitarians would agree that in an ideal world all violations
of human rights should be punished, but in the actual world we may not
be able to do this,” said Dr. Davenport. “Our failure to do so,
however, should not prevent us from appreciating that our attempts to
establish international justice can lead to increased moral awareness
and an improvement in the actual rules of war.”

Davenport used a number of philosophical examples from Plato, St.
Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas Hobbes, as well as “contemporary realists,
including Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger,
Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Richard Holbrooke” to reach his findings.

“Because improvement in the quality of life for all humans is more
important than serving our selfish, national interests,” he concluded,
“we should not hesitate when necessary to place our forces under
supranational control, but we should realize also that doing so cannot
be an inflexible policy and that it will not always succeed.”

His findings come at a time when President Bill Clinton’s earlier
directives and
executive orders regarding command and control of U.S. troops are
coming under fire.
Some of the president’s orders allegedly have already provided the
impetus for placing U.S. troops under the control of foreign commanders,
and some U.S. lawmakers are uncomfortable about it.

“The American public has grown increasingly weary of the use of
executive orders, as presidents have used them to bypass Congress and
legislate from the Oval Office,” said Rep. Ron Paul, R-Tex., who has
drafted legislation that would curb presidential directives and
executive orders. His bill, HR 2655, is called “The Separation of Powers
Restoration Act,” and is being debated before two House committees this
week.

“Presidents must be able to direct their employees, but this power
must be closely confined by the laws which they are constitutionally and
legislatively empowered to execute,” Paul said.

Specifically, Paul, along with Reps. Bob Barr, R-Ga., George Gekas,
R-Pa., George Metcalf, R-Wash., and others, are opposed to PDD-25, which
allegedly “takes the matter of U.S. troops in U.N. operations completely
out of the hands of Congress.”

The issue of American sovereignty over military affairs also differs
among next year’s likely presidential candidates and nominees.

Though Vice President Al Gore, currently vying with former Sen. Bill
Bradley for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000, has
traditionally supported Clinton administration policies regarding
supranational control of U.S. forces, other presidential contenders are
less enthusiastic about it.

Sen. Bob Smith, an independent

who ended his presidential bid yesterday, emphatically opposes “placing
U.S. troops under UN command,” as well as all “international agreements
that threaten the sovereignty of the United States.”

Dr. Alan Keyes, vying for the Republican Party nomination in 2000,
believes that “the fundamental goal for an American statesman must be to
maintain an independent sense of sovereign American interests and
principles.” In the end, “the United States is responsible for its own
destiny — not the United Nations or anybody else. It is now clear that
some American politicians have been so corrupted by internationalism
that they will not resist the temptation to erect the United Nations
into a supranational entity that undermines our sovereignty,” Keyes said
in a published statement. He supports withdrawing the U.S. from the U.N.
“should it prove impossible to fight this tendency by other means.”

Patrick Buchanan, the likely Reform Party presidential nominee, has made his views
against the dominance of U.S. foreign policy by the United Nations and,
to a lesser extent, NATO, well known. Last month, Buchanan ignited a
firestorm of protest from mainstream Democratic and Republican officials
when he suggested in a new book that Nazi leader Adolph Hitler posed no
genuine threat to U.S. national security at the time America declared
war on Germany in 1941.

“Now that the extraordinary era of the Cold War is over,” Buchanan
said, “we need a more traditional American foreign policy for more
traditional times to keep us out of the kind of wars that have destroyed
every other great power in history.”