Global Goals of the Clinton Administration — October 1997

President Bill Clinton appointed his Rhodes scholar roommate and fellow draft dodger, Strobe Talbott, as his personal foreign policy adviser and later to the number-two post in the State Department. Talbott had spent 22 years as a writer for Time Magazine (July 20, 1992), where he enthusiastically predicted that “nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority.” He wrote that “national sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea,” and he rejoiced in the coming “birth of the Global Nation.”(1)

The Talbott types in the Clinton Administration know that Americans will never willingly replace sovereignty with “a single global authority,” so they instead talk about global governance, a global village, a global neighborhood, a global commons, a global economy, a reinvigorated United Nations, and an expanded NATO. Instead of advocating a “single” global authority, the globalists are moving us incrementally into a variety of global entities with interlacing tentacles of control. They use two principal techniques to increase the power of global organizations at the expense of American freedom to run our own affairs: treaties and international conferences.

Three types of treaties endanger our individual rights and national sovereignty.

Treaties to Regulate Human Behavior

No human behavior is beyond the scope of these impudent treaties and the UN committees they would authorize to monitor our personal actions and our schools. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child(2) would set up a broad array of children’s rights against their parents. This treaty is a major goal of the Children’s Defense Fund, the chief lobby group for those who want the government “village” to take over the raising of children. This U.N. Treaty prescribes that the education of the child shall include global education, multiculturalism, feminism, and radical environmentalism, and would probably require us to set up a national system of daycare.

Article 43 sets up a Committee on the Rights of the Child consisting of ten “experts” to monitor “the realization of the [treaty’s] obligations.” In 1995, the Committee released its report on the United Kingdom and gave us a preview of the international busybodyism in store for us if we ever make the mistake of ratifying the treaty. This UN Committee expressed its concern that Britain isn’t spending enough taxpayer funds for social programs, that British parents are allowed to withdraw their children from sex education in school, and that spanking is allowed.(3)

The United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women(4) would be a massive interference with U.S. laws and with our federal-state balance of powers, as well as have an unlimited capacity for legal mischief. It purports to abolish discrimination against women “in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field,” which means that the UN would govern private relationships, “customs and practices.”

This treaty would require us “to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women” and to give assurances that we are following UN dictates about “family education.” It would require us to ensure “the elimination of any stereotyped concept of the roles of men and women at all levels and in all forms of education . . . by the revision of textbooks . . . and teaching methods.” Those are longtime feminist goals.

The treaty would obligate the federal government to take over all family law, including marriage, divorce, child custody, and property. And, of course, a UN committee of 23 “experts” would be created to monitor our compliance with the treaty.

Both of these treaties were rejected by Presidents Reagan and Bush, but have become pet projects of Bill and Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright.

A third treaty to regulate human behavior is now being prepared at the Hague and will be presented next year. It would set up a new world court with power to conduct criminal trials of individuals.

Treaties to Regulate Our Economic Life

The World Trade Organization was rammed through Congress in 1994 as part of the lengthy treaty called GATT.(5) The World Trade Organization functions in Geneva as a sort of United Nations of Trade, with a legislature (where we have one out of 117 votes — the same vote as Cuba or Haiti), a multinational bureaucracy accountable to no one, and a supreme court of trade that ruled against the United States in its first case.

Another treaty designed to control our economic life, the Law of the Sea Treaty,(6) was emphatically rejected by President Reagan in the 1980s. However, old treaties don’t die, they don’t even fade away, and Clinton is trying to revive it. It is a scheme to force American businesses to sink billions of investment dollars down on the ocean floor, and then turn the seabed’s riches over to a global commission.

This treaty would create an International Seabed Authority with sovereignty over three-fourths of the earth’s surface. The one-nation-one-vote procedure would assure that decisions would always be dominated by the Third World which has contributed nothing to the tremendous technology and financial investment necessary to bring those riches to the surface.

Unfortunately, Clinton persuaded the Republican Senate to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention(7) in 1997. This treaty purports to ban chemical weapons, but the dangerous countries most likely to use chemical weapons (Libya, Syria, Iraq, North Korea, China, Iran and Russia) either won’t sign the treaty or have indicated they will not be bound by it. This unverifiable and unenforceable treaty will increase, not eliminate, the risk of chemical weapons use.

Of course, this treaty creates a new international bureaucracy. Headquartered in the Hague, it is now planning its regulatory and reporting burden to impose on every U.S. company that produces, processes, or consumes a scheduled chemical.

Treaties to Regulate Energy and Property

These treaties usually masquerade under the pretense of protecting the environment. The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (Biodiversity), an 18-page treaty with 1,140 pages of explanation attached, planned to set aside buffer zones and corridors connecting habitat areas where human use by Americans would be severely restricted. It would subject U.S. property owners to international review and regulation.

President Bush refused to sign the Biodiversity Treaty. However, Al Gore (see his book Earth in the Balance(8)) persuaded Bill Clinton to sign it, and the Clinton Administration tried to ratify it in 1994. The good news is that, due to the action of alert patriots, the Senate rejected it. The bad news is that the Clinton Administration is implementing it anyway through the President’s Council on Sustainable Development, claiming that we must “fulfill existing international obligations.” Unknown to most Americans, the Clinton Administration has already put 47 large areas of land, called “Biosphere Reserves,” under control of the UN and prohibited development in these areas. The area involved is larger than the state of Colorado.

In 1993, our Senate ratified another treaty that came out of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio called the Framework Convention on Global Climate Change. It called for the economically developed countries to take “voluntary actions” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (principally carbon dioxide) to their 1990 levels. The Climate Control Treaty that Clinton is planning on signing in Kyoto, Japan later this year would turn the voluntary goals into “legally binding commitments.”(9)

This treaty would bind the United States to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 10 to 20 percent below our 1990 levels, while Western Europe would be able to evade reductions by averaging among the EU countries and because most of their energy is produced by nuclear plants (which don’t produce carbon dioxide). The 130 developing nations, including China and Mexico, would have no limitations at all! It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that U.S. fossil-fuel-burning plants would move out of the United States to countries where there are no such restrictions. Whole industries and a million U.S. jobs would move overseas, making us a non-industrialized nation.

The World Heritage Convention of 1972 granted special powers to the corrupt UN agency called UNESCO to designate selected American treasures as World Heritage sites and develop regulations and policies concerning their use. The United States doesn’t even belong to UNESCO because Ronald Reagan pulled us out of it. Nevertheless, 20 World Heritage Sites have already been claimed and marked by UNESCO, including Yosemite National Park, Yellowstone National Park, the Grand Canyon, and even the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor and Independence Hall in Philadelphia.(10)

All these treaties are dangerous attacks on American freedom, our national security, our land ownership, and our private property. Every one of these treaties involves setting up a new global bureaucracy that would have some kind of obnoxious control over American citizens, or our families, or our schools, or our businesses, or our use of natural resources and energy, or our land.

UN Conferences Promote Feminist Agenda

UN conferences are the other method used by the Clinton Administration to take us along the road to global governance. UN conferences pretend to be democratic gatherings of diverse delegates from all over the world who hammer out their differences and agree on plans of action. Nothing could be further from the truth. The conference managers write the reports and recommendations ahead of time and then manipulate the so-called delegates to call it a “consensus.” Although the result is not submitted to our Senate for ratification or our Congress for legislation, the Clinton Administration implements it anyway through the executive branch.

Bella Abzug, the former Congresswoman who is now head of the tax-funded Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), has surfaced as the head of the very successful effort to use UN conferences to serve radical feminist goals. First, she hijacked the UN Conference in Cairo, which was supposed to be about population, and used it for the feminist agenda.

Then, she was in her glory at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in September 1995.(11) She boasted at Beijing: “You made a contract with the world’s women, and that has to be enforced. And how does it get enforced? By politics, by political action.” Of course, the American people made no such contract; what she was talking about was the fabricated “consensus” in Beijing.

Soon after the feminists returned from China in 1995, UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright, who was the U.S. Delegation chair in Beijing, spelled out the goals in a document called “Bring Beijing Home.” These included “family responsibilities must be shared” (obviously, the government should force husbands to do the dishes and the diapers) and, of course, assuring abortion rights.

In May 1996, the Clinton Administration set up the President’s Interagency Council on Women chaired by Hillary Rodham Clinton and HHS Secretary Donna Shalala. Its mission is to “follow up on U.S. commitments made” in Beijing. The Beijing commitments are now being implemented by the Clinton Administration through a federal entity composed of high-level representatives from 30 federal agencies. It holds monthly meetings, engages in outreach activities, conducts local seminars, and uses a White House address.

Abzug has promulgated a 12-point “Contract with American Women” that includes demands for affirmative action, abortion, and ratification of the UN Treaty on Women. She boasts that work is under way to promote her platform in high schools, colleges and universities through courses and seminars on Beijing’s notion of “gender equity.”

UN Conferences on Energy and Property

The principal UN conferences of this type were the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio (which produced the Biodiversity Treaty and Climate Change Treaty), the Istanbul Habitat Conference in 1996 (which was designed to make the United States feel that we should provide housing for people all over the world), and the Rome Conference on Food in 1996 (which was designed to make the United States feel that we should feed the world).

The code words of these conferences are “human habitat” and “sustainable development.” The people who use these words have an agenda that includes putting limits on American consumption, land use, transportation, and energy.(12)

The people and groups promoting this and related treaties have a particular world view. They think that our high standard of living is destroying the earth and, of course, Americans are the guiltiest. They say we’ve exceeded our sustainable development and should go back to being agrarian peasants. They want to drastically restrict our use of automobiles, fuel, refrigeration, air conditioning, and meat. They want to create bio regions and put 50% of our land into wilderness. Their mindset is to subordinate humans to the environment.

Other global conferences have produced “consensus” on even more exotic ways to coopt American wealth for global purposes. The 1995 UN World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen, Denmark discussed imposing a global tax to give the UN its own flow of money independent of Congressional appropriations.(13) The Clinton-appointed head of the UN Development Program, James Gustave Speth, called for a global tax on international financial transactions. Naturally, all the UN bureaucrats thought that was a smashing idea and they began to orchestrate demands for it.

U.S. Armed Services under Global Control 

The Reagan vision of military strategy was firmly grounded in the principle of “peace through strength,” that is, having more weapons than any possible enemy so no bad guys would dare to attack us. It worked — Reagan ended the Cold War without firing a shot! The Clinton policy is just the opposite.

The Clinton Administration wants to lock us into a perpetual interventionist policy under which American servicemen and women will be sent to faraway places to fight never-ending foreign wars disguised as “peacekeeping” operations.

In May 1994, Clinton signed a Presidential Decision Directive, PDD 25, asserting his authority “to place U.S. forces under the operational control of a foreign commander” and under the United Nations rules of engagement. It is the most unconstitutional transfer of power in the history of America.(14)

In 1995, the Clinton Administration ordered American troops to go on a so-called “peacekeeping” expedition to Macedonia wearing the United Nations uniform. When Army Specialist Michael New protested that this order was illegal because it conflicted with his oath to the U.S. Constitution, he was court-martialed.(15) His conviction was a watershed event on the way to abandoning control over American armed services.

When American soldiers were killed over Iraq, Vice President Al Gore told their widows and orphans that “they died in the service of the United Nations.” That wasn’t a slip of the tongue; his words reveal the Clinton Administration’s plan to use our armed forces as UN mercenaries all over the world at the whim of UN bureaucrats. And the worst part is that U.S. troops are sent to faraway places where we have no national security interest.

The Clinton Administration is well aware that the United Nations is no longer popular with any Americans except Ted Turner and Jane Fonda. Americans resent the impudent demands that we pay alleged back “dues” when we are already paying big dues plus over $3 billion a year in “peacekeeping” operations. The Somalia, Haiti, and Rwanda expeditions were very unpopular, especially when a U.S. solider was dragged through the streets in Somalia.

That’s why the globalists chose NATO, rather than the UN, to sponsor the Bosnian expedition, and Bosnia is a good example of the future the Clinton globalists have in store for us.(16) The Clinton Administration has just announced that our troops will not be pulled out on the promised deadline but must maintain a continuing presence in Bosnia. Why is anybody surprised! Everything that has happened was wholly predictable. The fact that Bosnia is a terrible failure does not phase the globalists in the slightest because their game plan all along is to keep us forever on an interventionist path with our troops under foreign control.

The globalists have now come up with a new plan to lock America into never-ending foreign wars that are none of our business and keep American troops forever hostage in Europe — it’s called NATO expansion.(17) All the propaganda mechanisms are moving into high gear to tell the American people that we must manifest “global leadership,” which means that our armed services will serve as global policemen and global social workers, while the U.S. taxpayers will play global sugar daddy.

Why should Americans commit to defend faraway European borders that have been the locus of ethnic, nationalist and religious disputes for hundreds of years? Make no mistake: NATO is a life-and-death U.S. promise to go to war to protect any of the other members.

The principal purpose of NATO expansion is to legitimize the President’s ability to continue to engage American troops in foreign quarrels without ever asking permission from Congress, as the Constitution requires. It’s a sort of “back-door interventionism.”

Global government is not just a pipe dream of starry-eyed dreamers. It is the world view and goal of the Clinton Administration. Its advocates are all around us.

The attempt by the Clinton Administration to give away the rights of American inventors is another example of Clintonian globalism. The number-one argument used to defend this giveaway is that we must harmonize our system with the rest of the world. This particular sellout wasn’t even a treaty; it was just a private deal made between Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and the Japanese Ambassador to give away a great and unique American constitutional right.(18)

The National Education Association passes a resolution every year calling for global education in the schools. Public school textbooks are filled with concepts about world citizenship rather than American independence, protection of the earth and biodiversity rather than human rights, and definitions of family to conform to the feminist agenda enunciated in Beijing.(19)

I received a letter from Walter Cronkite, the longtime icon of television news, asking me to contribute to the Campaign for Global Change. He urged a “global call” for a reinvigorated United Nations, permanent UN peacekeeping forces, an international Court, and a strong Commission on Sustainable Development that would restrict our property rights.(20) As Walter used to say, “And that’s the way it is.”

When Bill Clinton delivered his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in New York City in 1992, the only person he mentioned besides his mother and grandfather was his history professor at Georgetown University’s Foreign Service School, the late Carroll Quigley, whom Clinton credited with helping to form his own political outlook. Quigley was a liberal professor known principally for his 1,300-page book called Tragedy and Hope, published in 1966, in which he approvingly described the small elite group which he said actually runs the United States.(21)

Quigley labeled this group “the Network,” and he said it consists of men who are “cosmopolitan and international . . . close to governments . . . equally devoted to secrecy and the secret use of financial influence in political life.” Professor Quigley taught his student from Hope, Arkansas how to tap into the power centers of the Network, the people who yearn to control the world through the mechanisms of global governance. When Bill Clinton became President, he surrounded himself with people who share that vision.

Global treaties and conferences are a direct threat to every American citizen. They are an assault on our right to raise and educate our children as we see fit. They are an attack on our ownership of our private property and on American ownership of our national treasures. They are an attack on our pocketbooks because, if the UN ever gets taxing power, there is no limit to how much of our money it can grab. They are an attack on the American standard of living because their goal is to steal American wealth and give it to the rest of the world.

Global treaties and conferences are an assault on the soul and sovereignty of America because they mean that young American men and women will be sent around the world on phony “peacekeeping” expeditions.

The Senate should reject all UN treaties out of hand. Every single one would be a diminution of our rights, freedom and sovereignty. That goes for treaties on the child, women, the sea, trade, chemical weapons, biodiversity, and heritage sites. Congress should stop financing UN conferences and put a stop to all Clinton attempts to implement them through the bureaucracy.

Americans are not willing to have our property stolen by envious dictators or our standard of living reduced by those who whine about sustainable development. Americans are not willing to let Clinton turn our armed services into global social workers or global cops.

Americans are not willing to be ruled by Strobe Talbott’s “global nation,” or by Walter Cronkite’s “reinvigorated United Nations,” or by Bill Clinton’s treaties and conferences.

If the rest of the world wants to enjoy the blessings of liberty and prosperity, they can copy our system. We are not going to compromise with theirs.