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.
When finally war came, first to Asia in 1934, to Europe in 1939 and to the US in 1941, it was a global catastrophe. More than fifty million lay dead by its end.
Determined to avoid the isolationism that had engulfed the United States at the end of World War I, Presidents Roosevelt and Truman firmly steered the US into the UN and raised great hopes for its effectiveness. Our diplomats, chastened by our former isolationism, determined that they would never again sit on the sidelines. Having “a seat at the table” became a mantra on Capitol Hill and in the State and Defense departments. Never again would we shut ourselves out.
The legacy of this harsh lesson still carries over. American diplomats instinctively rally to the negotiating table wherever it is, whatever it is about. The rest of the world understands that without American participation, no agreement is worth the paper on which it is written. And the other nations use the treaty-making process primarily as a way to cut the United States down to size. But the addiction of our foreign policy establishment to international conventions, forums, negotiations, and debates ensures our presence at the table and, most likely, our ascension to the global consensus.
But now the time has come for us to be left out; more precisely, to opt out of negotiations that can only lead to a loss of our sovereignty and to the undermining of our democratic system of government. From all sides, we face the pressures of a global community terrified by our power, humbled by our success, and determined to rein us in by ensnaring us in treaties and limitations of all sorts and sizes. What they could never hope to accomplish by military force or by economic power, these nations hope to accomplish by negotiation and treaty. Bluntly, they want to inveigle our gullible diplomats into signing away our country’s rights. As the old saying goes: Uncle Sam has never lost a war nor won a conference.
Now let’s look at each of these treaties in depth. Let’s see how they chip, chip, chip away at our national sovereignty and our democratic self-government.
PART TWO
UN Forces Gun Control on America
The Second Amendment to the US Constitution, granting our citizens the right to bear arms, may be facing de facto repeal in the Arms Trade Treaty now being pushed by the UN.
Have you noticed that President Obama has used his term in office to push every item on the liberal agenda except for gun control? During the 2008 campaign, he spoke of embittered Americans who “cling to their guns,”1 but hasn’t spoken of the issue much since.
Now it’s clear why he hasn’t. He plans to accomplish the liberal agenda of registering, banning, and ultimately confiscating guns through an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT).
At this writing, the treaty’s precise terms have not been unveiled, but its intent is crystal clear: to repeal our Second Amendment and limit or eliminate the right to bear arms in the United States.
(Remember what we said earlier. All international treaties, under the Supremacy Clause of our Constitution, have the force of constitutional law and may not be contradicted by state or federal legislation. The ATT would effectively repeal the Second Amendment as clearly as the Twenty-First Amendment repealed the Prohibition amendment—the Eighteenth.)
As with so many of the UN treaties, it advances under false pretenses. The nominal purpose of the ATT is to regulate the international arms trade, limiting the flow of deadly weapons across national borders to drug cartels, criminal gangs, guerillas, and organized crime (just the crowd US Attorney General Eric Holder ran guns to in the Fast and Furious operation). But the catch is that the treaty establishes an international body to promote gun control. It requires that each nation adopt regulations to limit and control export of small arms. It is easy to see how this provision would require registration and inventory of all guns in the United States and could lead to confiscation.
The
