Will 1998 Be The ‘Year Of Surrendered Sovereignty’?

(Washington, D.C.): The New Year is shaping up to be one whose hallmark may, all other things
being equal, be the international distress signal “S.O.S.” In this case, cause for such distress is
likely to be the Surrender of Our Sovereignty — the bitter fruit of a systematic Clinton
Administration effort to multilateralize U.S. foreign and defense policy. No other aspect of
President Clinton’s legacy stands to prove more insidious and more resistant to corrective action.

Evidence of this Clinton campaign abounds. Consider an illustrative sampling:

Ceding U.S. Dominance of Space

President Clinton is reportedly poised to impinge on U.S. sovereignty in a way that could have
incalculably adverse consequences for national security. According to the Washington Times‘
esteemed National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz, the Administration is actively considering
sharing information about “the vulnerabilities of U.S. communications and intelligence satellites”
with “Russia and other nations with anti-satellite programs.” Robert Bell, President Clinton’s
point man on arms control at the National Security Council, is said to have described this idea as
one that would to multilateralize a “forum now run by the U.S. Space Command in
Colorado…[that] coordinates all U.S. military or civilian scientific tests involving lasers aimed
above the horizon that could reach satellites.”

The impetus for this hare-brained initiative appears to be Mr. Clinton’s effort to respond to a
proposal by Russian President Boris Yeltsin to ban anti-satellite weapons. Not only is it
impossible to make such a ban effective or verifiable. It would be manifestly contrary to U.S.
interests even to try since those interests dictate that the American military be able to control
space as a theater of operations in any future conflict. Increasing the vulnerability of
American spacecraft and denying us the means to neutralize others’ space assets — two
facets of the current Clinton policy — are invitations to disaster.

Jeopardizing American Rights — Without U.S. Senate Advice and Consent

It fell to a federal magistrate in Texas last month to observe that the United States had no
extradition treaty with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. This decision was less
noteworthy for its immediate result — namely, the release of a Rwandan cleric accused of abetting
genocide, rather than requiring his deportation to stand trial — than for its principal rationale.

The magistrate’s decision called attention to the Clinton Administration’s predilection for
setting up and making commitments to new international bureaucracies — including
commitments that could impinge upon the rights of American citizens — without obtaining
the U.S. Senate’s advice and consent.⁽¹⁾

The Administration has made clear that it intends to follow this same practice of foregoing
constitutionally required Senate action for at least the next year in connection with the various
mechanisms and obligations arising from the Global Climate Change Treaty. This accord,
signed in December in Kyoto, Japan would require the United States to make massive reductions
in its emissions of greenhouse gases. To do so, American citizens and companies will have to be
subjected to unprecedentedly intrusive international regulation of energy supplies and
consumption.

Subordinating U.S. Military Operations to UN Approval

Yet another appalling affront to U.S. sovereignty is the fact that the Kyoto treaty exempts from
its mandatory emissions reductions only those American military activities that are conducted on
or over international waters or that are part of “multilateral operations” approved by the United
Nations. According to a report in the Washington Post on 1 January, the Administration
abandoned a blanket exemption adopted last October at the insistence of the Pentagon
because “the United States might have a much tougher time meeting its obligations for
reducing emissions” if the armed forces are not factored in. Translation: The Clintonites
see the military — which produces some 73% of all federal greenhouse gas emissions — as a
bill-payer for cuts they are unwilling or unable to make elsewhere.

Playing Fast and Loose with U.S. Financial Equities

American sovereignty is also among the losers from the use being made by the Clinton
Administration of the International Monetary Fund to bail-out South Korea and other Asian
nations. In lieu of the accountability and transparency that would be required in a direct U.S.
intervention whose de facto (if not stated) purpose is to save the bacon of private sector bankers
and investors that made unwise financial decisions, the Administration is relying upon the
multilateral IMF to do this dirty work.

To be sure, Congress will have to approve the U.S. portion of the roughly $35 billion now being
sought to “replenish” the IMF’s kitty and underwrite such emergency lending. As a practical
matter, however, use of this international mechanism complicates congressional oversight
and makes the Congress’ rejection of this lending more problematic — outcomes that suit
Robert Rubin and his friends on Wall Street just fine.

The Bottom Line

Many of those critical of the Clinton presidency comfort themselves with the notion that this too
will pass and the damage can be undone by his successors. The scary thing about the steps now
being taken to institutionalize multilateral arrangements that compromise, if not eviscerate, key
elements of this Nation’s sovereignty, however, is that they will prove very difficult to undo. If
Mr. Clinton is allowed to proceed unchecked, the 21^st Century will see an America whose values,
liberties, power and freedom of action are substantially circumscribed by the international
bureaucracies, tribunals, treaties, trade organizations and arms control mechanisms that will be
this President’s most odious legacy.

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1. A still greater infringement upon U.S. liberties and sovereignty may be in the offing if
proponents of a new, permanent UN Criminal Court have their way. For example, it is
predictable that virtually any action to which America’s enemies object will become the subject of
“war crimes” and other prosecutorial campaigns before such a court.