Under the terms of the recently negotiated Rio+20 Treaty, the United Nations Environment Programme, a UN body, will be granted increased power to act as a worldwide Environmental Protection Agency, promulgating global regulations.
The United States will be obliged to contribute to a fund to help third world nations cope with environmental change. At the Rio Conference in June 2012, Secretary of State Clinton pledged $2 billion for this fund, which is expected to reach $100 billion when fully implemented. The US would have only one vote out of 193 in deciding to which regimes these funds will be paid.
This treaty, signed by Clinton and then renounced by President George W. Bush, may be signed again by President Obama during his second term or before he leaves office following an election defeat.
It supersedes the US Supreme Court and makes our entire judicial system subject to the rulings of an international court. The court would have the power to establish the extent of its own jurisdiction and would have the power to adjudicate disputes between Americans on US soil even after the Supreme Court has ruled. Double jeopardy would not attach to its review of American court rulings. The court would not have trial by jury or any of the constitutional protections Americans now enjoy.
Dangerously, it establishes the new global crime of “aggression,” which it defines as going to war without UN Security Council approval. US presidents could be prosecuted criminally after they leave office for violating this new law. In practice, of course, this provision would give Russia and China jurisdiction over the use of the US military.
Under the guise of a “code of conduct” to limit debris in outer space, the Obama administration is negotiating an agreement to limit what satellites or missiles can be put into orbit around the earth. This code is widely seen as a backdoor attempt to reimpose the constraints on defensive anti-missiles embodied in the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) and renounced by President George W. Bush.
Each of these treaties creates a new global entity charged with its enforcement. Whether it is a gun control agency or a Seabed Authority or an International Criminal Court, these treaties empower such agencies. Long after the treaties have been signed and ratified and after the various disclaimers have been inserted by our diplomats protecting our rights and sovereignty, these agencies will remain, able to expand their jurisdiction, legislate new provisions, impose additional taxes and penalties, and require obedience by the signatories to the treaties that set them up—all without any input from us and all without any accountability to us.
These enforcement agencies will inevitably acquire a life of their own, expanding their powers and eroding our sovereignty at every turn. This trend will not be an unintended consequence of these treaties—the systematic erosion of America’s sovereignty and subjecting her wealth and power to global control is quite specifically the intention of these treaties and the people who wrote them.
Each one strips us of control over our own destiny and places our sovereignty under the political control of the United Nations, and not, it must be noted, the Security Council of the UN on which we have a veto. These powers would largely be vested in newly created global bodies in which all of the world’s nations—corrupt or not, democratic or not, free or not, tiny and large—would have an equal say.
And then there is the question of who would obey these treaties. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and other outlaw nations have shown no regard for their treaty obligations. They each routinely disregard the provisions of the treaties they have signed and feel in no respect bound by them.
By contrast, law-abiding nations like the United States take their treaty obligations very seriously and are scrupulous in carrying them out to the legalistic letter. Indeed, American courts would be obliged—under the Supremacy Clause—to enforce these treaties, honoring them all even as the other nations who sign them take them lightly.
AMERICA’S TREATY ADDICTION
What is it with our diplomats? Why do they constantly seek to ensnare us in treaties to regulate each aspect of our existence? Can’t our diplomats ever say no?
Our foreign policy is largely conducted by globalists who work within our State Department, and the National Security Council. Deeply committed to the one-world agenda, they have dedicated their lives and public service to bringing the UStates into the global fold. The goals of the Club of Rome have no greater allies than many of the men and women of our foreign service.
Our nation’s foreign affairs experts live in the shadow of the trauma of the United States’ rejection of the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I and establishing the League of Nations. Because of the United States’ refusal to enter the global body and the perpetuation of American isolationism, historians assign to the United States much of the blame for the failed peace that followed the First World War and led directly to the second.
These experts fear the resurgence of isolationism and are determined to ensure that the United States is a full participant in every global treaty that comes down the pike.
When President Woodrow Wilson led the United States into the war in 1917—until then a conflict of Britain, France, and Russia against Germany and Austro-Hungary—he promised that it would be “a war to end all wars.” When the American military began to weigh heavily into the scales of the conflict, eventually forcing a German surrender in 1918, the president amplified his idealistic motivation for fighting by issuing his “Fourteen Points,” which would be the basis for what he described as “a peace without victory.”
The document that set forth Wilson’s Fourteen Points was one of the most idealistic in diplomatic history. It pledged the nations of the world to postwar boundaries based on self-determination by each country’s people. Every ethnic or national group would be able to determine, democratically, to which country they wished to belong. Freedom of the seas, the rights of neutral nations, and free flow of commerce were guaranteed. And, to enforce and implement this program, a League of Nations was to be established.
When the Armistice ending the war was signed—largely based on German acceptance of the Fourteen Points—Wilson sailed to Europe to attend a peace conference at the French palace of Versailles, where the nations of the world gathered. While all the Allied powers, who dictated the peace to Germany and its defeated allies, paid lip service to the Fourteen Points, they disregarded it when it came to thrashing out the details of the peace settlement.
When the final document emerged, nobody was happy. The ideal of self-determination was breached more than it was honored. The treaty reflected the same mad scramble for territory and reparations that had always accompanied the end of wars. This was far from a war to end all wars. In fact, it was the beginning of the onset of World War II!
Of all Wilson’s Fourteen Points only the provision for a League of Nations emerged in the final draft of the Treaty of Versailles. But when the document came up for ratification in the Republican-dominated US Senate, it was harshly criticized and ultimately rejected. So Wilson’s League began operations without the United States in attendance. The US never joined and played almost no role in trying to keep the peace between the world wars. With isolationists firmly in control of our foreign policy throughout the twenties, the United States turned inward and let the world hurdle toward another ghastly war.