State of the Union: Senator Helms Does Speak for More Americans on U.S. Sovereignty than Clinton, Albright or the UN

(Washington, D.C.): Every one in a while, some good comes from even the most
shameless acts
of self-promotion. Last week, UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke sought to endear himself to
the powerful Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC)
by inviting the latter to make an unprecedented address to the Security Council. (Holbrooke has
made no secret of his ambition to become President Gore’s Secretary of State and clearly hopes
to avoid the kind of embarrassing delays in consideration of his nomination that held up his
present appointment for a year.)

Senator Helms used the occasion to provide the most eloquent and authoritative
description in
recent memory of traditional American principles and popular sentiments concerning U.S.
sovereignty. He explained to the various national permanent representatives present that the
United Nations has a useful, although limited, role to play in such areas as “peacekeeping,
weapons inspections, and humanitarian relief.” The Senator warned, however, that
the UN
disregarded, trampled or otherwise encroached upon this nation’s constitutional checks and
balances and other sovereign processes at grave peril to its support from the American public —
and the financial underwriting and possibly even the participation of their government.

So forceful were Senator Helms words (highlights of which are excerpted below), that
Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright felt obliged on 24 January to repudiate his remarks and challenge
his characterization of the attitudes of the American people. She intoned that “the Clinton
Administration…believes that most Americans see our role in the world and our relationship to
this organization quite differently than does Senator Helms.”

Mrs. Albright then underscored the disdain this Administration has repeatedly
exhibited toward
the legislative branch, notably last year when — after a majority of the U.S. Senate rejected the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty — she and other spokesmen declared the vote made no
difference, the U.S. remained bound by the CTBT’s prohibitions on nuclear testing. On Monday,
the Secretary of State averred: “Only the President and the executive branch speak for the
United States.”

Tonight, when the President speaks for and to the United States about the State of the
Union, it
will be interesting to hear with precisely which of the following of Senator Helm’s points he
disagrees.

19 January 2000

Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC)

Speech to the United Nations Security Council

It’s my hope that there can begin today a pattern of understanding and
friendship between you
who serve your respective countries in the United Nations, and those of us who serve not only in
the United States government, but also the millions of Americans whom we represent.

* * *

…It may very well be that some of the things that I feel obliged to say will not meet with
your
immediate approval, if ever.

* * *

…I’m not a diplomat, and as such, I’m not fully conversant with the elegant and rarefied
language of the diplomatic trade. I’m an elected official with something of a reputation for
saying what I mean and meaning what I say. So I trust you will forgive me if I come across a
little bit more blunt than you are accustomed to hearing in this chamber.

* * *

Let me share with you what the American people tell me. Since I became chairman of the
Foreign Relations Committee, I have received literally thousands of communications from
Americans all across the country expressing their deep frustration with this institution.

They know instinctively that the U.N. lives and breathes on the hard-earned money of the
American taxpayers, among others, yet they have heard comments here in New York constantly
calling the United States a “deadbeat nation.” I dissent from that, and so do the American people.

They have heard U.N. officials declaring, absurdly, that countries like Fiji and Bangladesh
are
carrying America’s burden in peacekeeping.

They see the majority of the U.N. members routinely voting against America in the General
Assembly.

They have read the reports of the raucous cheering of the U.N. delegates in Rome when U.S.
efforts to amend the International Criminal Court Treaty to protect American soldiers were
defeated.

They read in the newspapers that despite all the human rights abuses taking place in
dictatorships
around the globe, a U.N. special rapporteur deciding that his most pressing task was to
investigate human rights violations in the United States of America, and he found our human
rights record wanting, of course.

The American people hear all of this and they resent it. And I think they have grown
increasingly
frustrated with what they feel is a lack of gratitude.

The U.S. as ‘Deadbeat’

And I won’t delve into every port of frustration, but let’s touch for just a moment on one —
the
deadbeat charge. Before coming here, I asked the United States General Accounting Office to
assess just how much the American taxpayers contributed to the United Nations in the last year —
1999.

And here is what the G.A.O. reported to me: Last year, the American people
contributed a
total of more than $1.4 billion to the United Nations system in assessments and voluntary
contributions. That’s pretty generous, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

The American taxpayers also spent an additional $8,779,000,000 from the United
States
military budget to support various U.N resolutions and peacekeeping operations around
the world.

Now, let me repeat that figure just for the purpose of emphasis: $8,779,000,000.

Now, this means that last year, 1999 alone, that 12-month period, the American
people have
furnished precisely $10,179,000,000 to support the work of the United Nations and no other
nation on Earth comes even close to matching that investment.

So you can see, perhaps, why many Americans reject the suggestion that their country is a
deadbeat nation. And frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I resent it, too.

* * *

A Legitimate Role for the UN

The American people want the United Nations to serve the purpose for which it was
designed.
They want it to help sovereign nations coordinate collective action by coalitions of the willing,
where the political for such action exists, and they want it to provide a forum where diplomats
can meet and keep open channels of communications in times of crisis, and they want it to
provide to the peoples of the world important services, such as peacekeeping, weapons
inspections, and humanitarian relief….This is important work and work that must be done.

It is the core of what the United Nations can offer to the United States and to the rest of the
world, and if, in the coming century, the U.N. focuses on doing these core tasks well, it can
thrive and will earn and deserve the support and respect of the American people, along with
peoples of other countries of the world.

A Threat to U.S. Sovereignty?

But — and candor compels me to say this — if the United Nations seeks to move
beyond these
core tasks, if it seeks to impose the United Nations’ power and authority over nation states,
I guarantee that the United Nations will meet stiff resistance from the American people.

As matters now stand, many Americans sense that the United Nations has greater ambitions
than
simply being an efficient deliverer of humanitarian aid, a more effective peacekeeper, a better
weapons inspector, and a more effective tool of great power diplomacy.

The American people see the United Nations aspiring to establish itself the central
authority of a new international order of global laws and global governance.

This is an international order the American people, I guarantee you, do not and will
not
countenance.

The United Nations must respect national sovereignty in the United States and
everywhere
else. The United Nations serves nation states, not the other way around. This principle
is central
to the legitimacy and the ultimate survival of the United Nations, and it is a principle that must
be protected.

* * *

The sovereignty of nations must be respected, but nations derive their sovereignty,
their
legitimacy, from the consent of the governed. Thus it follows that nations lose their
legitimacy when they rule without the consent of the governed.

They deservedly discard their sovereignty by brutally oppressing their people. Mr. Milosevic
cannot claim sovereignty over Kosovo when he murdered Kosovar people and piled their bodies
into mass graves. And neither can Fidel Castro claim that it is his sovereign right to oppress his
people. Nor can Saddam Hussein defend his oppression of the Iraqi people by hiding behind
phony claims of sovereignty.

And when the oppressed peoples of the world cry out for help, the free peoples of the world
have
a fundamental right to respond.

As we watch the United Nations struggle with this question at the turn of the millennium,
many
Americans are left exceedingly puzzled. Intervening in cases of widespread oppression and
massive human rights abuses is not a new concept for the United States. The American people
have a long history of coming to the aid of those struggling for freedom.

In the United States during the 1980’s, we called this the Reagan Doctrine.

In some cases, America has assisted freedom-fighters around the world who are seeking to
overthrow corrupt regimes.

We have provided weaponry, training and intelligence. And in other cases, the United States
has
intervened directly.

And in other cases, such as in Central and Eastern Europe, we supported peaceful opposition
movements with moral, financial and covert forms of support.

But in each case, it was America’s clear intention to help bring down communist regimes that
were oppressing their peoples, and thereby, replace the dictators with democratic governments.

The democratic expansion of freedom in the last decade of the 20th century is a direct result
of
those policies.

In none of those cases, however, did the United States ask for or receive, the
approval of the
United Nations to legitimize its actions. And it’s a fanciful notion that free peoples need to
seek approval of an international body, some of whose members are totalitarian
dictatorships, to lend support to nations struggling to break the chains of tyranny and
claim their inalienable God- given rights.

The United Nations, my friends, has no power to grant or decline legitimacy to such actions.
They are inherently legitimate.

* * *

….But candor compels that I reiterate this warning: The American people will never
accept the
claims of the United Nations to be the sole source of legitimacy on the use of force in this
world.

* * *

The American people do not want the United Nations to become an entangling alliance, and
that
is why Americans look with alarm at U.N. claims to a monopoly on international moral
legitimacy.

Americans see this as a threat to the God-given freedoms of the American people, a claim of
political authority over America and its elected leaders without — without — their consent.

Now, the effort to establish a United Nations International Criminal Court is a case in point,
which I am obliged to mention. Consider the Rome Treaty purports to hold American citizens
under its jurisdiction even when the United States has neither signed nor ratified that treaty.

Nonsense. In other words, Rome claims sovereign authority over American citizens without
their
consent.

How can the nations of the world imagine for one instant that America’s going to stand by
and
allow such a power grab to take place? I can guarantee you it’s not going to happen.

Now the court’s supporters argue that Americans should be willing to sacrifice some of their
sovereignty for the noble cause of international justice.

Well, then, international law did not defeat Hitler, nor did it win the Cold War.

What stopped the Nazi march across Europe and the communist march across the
world
was the principled projection of power by the world’s greatest democracies.
And that
principled projection of force is the only thing that will ensure the peace and the security of
the world in the future.

More often than not, “international law,” quote, unquote, has been used as a make-believe
justification for hindering the march of freedom.

When Ronald Reagan sent American servicemen into harm’s way to liberate Grenada from
the
hands of a communist dictatorship, the U.N. General Assembly responded by voting to condemn
the action of the elected president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, as a, quote, “violation of
international law,” end of quote, and, I am obliged to add, they did so by a larger majority than
when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was condemned by the same General Assembly.

Similarly, the U.S. effort to overthrow Nicaragua’s communist dictatorship by supporting
Nicaragua’s freedom fighters and mining Nicaragua’s harbors was declared by the World Court
as a violation of international law.

And most recently, we learned that the chief prosecutor of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal
has
compiled a report on possible NATO war crimes during the Kosovo campaign. At first the
prosecutor declared that it is fully within the scope of her authority to indict NATO pilots and
commanders, and when news of her report leaked, she looked at herself and her decision a little
bit, and then she started backpedaling.

She realized, I’m confident, that any attempt to indict NATO commanders would be the
death
knell of the International Criminal Court, but the very fact that she explored this possibility at all
brings to light that it is wrong.

With this brave new world of global justice which proposes a system in which independent
prosecutors and judges, answerable to no state or institution, have somehow unfettered power to
sit in judgment of the foreign policy decisions of Western democracies, no U.N.
institution —
not the Security Council, not the Yugoslav tribunal, not the future ICC — is competent to
judge the foreign policy and national security decisions of the United States of America.

* * *

Forty years later, the U.N. seeks to impose its Utopian vision of an international law on
Americans.

* * *

And that is why Americans reject the idea of a sovereign United Nations that presumes to be
the
source of legitimacy for the United States government’s policies, foreign or domestic.

There is only one source of legitimacy of the American government’s policies, and
that is
the consent of the American people.

And if the United Nations, my friends, is to survive into the 21st century, it must
recognize
its limitations.

The demand of the United States have not changed very much since Henry Cabot Lodge laid
out
his conditions for joining the League of Nations 80 years ago. And Americans want to
ensure
that the United States of America remains the sole judge of its own internal affairs, that the
United Nations is not allowed to restrict the individual rights of U.S. citizens, and that the
United States retains sole authority over the deployment of United States forces around the
world.

And that is what Americans ask of the United Nations. It is what Americans expect of the
United
Nations.

A United Nations that focuses on helping sovereign states work together is worth keeping. A
United Nations that insists on trying to impose a utopian vision on America, and the world, will
collapse under its own weight.

If the United Nations respects the sovereign rights of the American people and serves them
as an
effective instrument, it will earn and deserve their respect and support.

But a United Nations that seeks to impose its presumed authority on the American people,
without their consent, begs for confrontation and — I want to be candid with you — eventual U.S.
withdrawal.