In his Farewell Address to the American people, George Washington warned of the hazards of foreign entanglements. Unlike the political pygmies who inhabit the Land of Oz inside the Washington Beltway today, the hero of the American Revolution understood that while emergencies may require provisional alliances with foreign powers, he opposed them as a general principal in foreign policy. Here’s what he had to say in his Farewell:
Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.
The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. ...
… constantly keeping in view that it is folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another; that it must pay with a portion of its independence for whatever it may accept under that character …
It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world … let [existing] engagements be observed in their genuine sense, but in my opinion it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them.
Keep Washington’s warnings in mind vis-à-vis the United Nations, an aggregation of 193 foreign influences. Its Law of the Seas Treaty, appropriately referred to by the acronym LOST, is currently being debated in the Senate with the collusion of a surprising number of Republicans and military top brass. The ringleader, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, apparently sensing that there may be fewer Democrat derrières filling Senate and White House seats after November, is pushing the treaty toward a vote during the lame duck session before the moving vans arrive.
Kerry is short-listed to take over the State Department from Hillary, who is “retiring” even if Obama cons enough people to reelect him for four more years of national sabotage And, if Kerry could get LOST (no pun intended) passed into law, his name might be top-listed. Moreover, one of the treaty’s most passionate supporters on the other side of the aisle, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), was dumped last month by Indiana Republicans for going native after 36 years in the Senate, so he won’t be around to cheer Kerry on next year.
Although this horrible treaty has been hanging around the halls of Congress for 30 years, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger if you’ve never heard of it. That’s by political design. Lugar never mentioned in his primary race (wonder why?) and Obama, while an enthusiastic supporter of it, isn’t bringing it up in his reelection campaign either (wonder why?).
When the UN was created after World War II as a means for ignoble world leaders to work together for noble purposes, UN representatives of the Soviet bloc in concert with Third World dictators drafted the original treaty in 1968 in a not-so-subtle scheme to limit the power of the US and transfer the wealth of industrialized democracies to developing nations. The treaty has bounced around looking for sponsors among the mostly poor, mostly anti-US member nations and so far has 161 of them among the 193 UN members.
As the treaty was being negotiated during the 1970s, it was apparent to other nations that US interests were twofold: unrestricted navigation of the seas and the right to fishing and oil, gas, and mineral recovery beyond the 200-mile US continental shelf. We also wanted access to the oceans for research. The 77 developing nations quickly discovered that they could wring concessions in return for our concern for navigation freedom – and that they did with a vengeance. Ocean research was the first victim followed by restrictions on ocean mining to prevent competition with developing countries that engaged in land-based mining. Their next target was fishing, except Congress passed the Magnuson-Stevens bill that prevented foreign and domestic fishing fleets from over-fishing – a bill fought tooth and claw by our own State Department!
In 1982, President Reagan saw the treaty for what it was – a UN-backed heist of 70% of the earth’s surface and the largest redistribution of wealth in history – and he not only refused to sign it, he fired the State Department staff that helped negotiate it.
The history of the United Nations is not top of mind among stuff informed Americans know, but at least know this. When the UN was created as a forum for nations to resolve differences without war, many believed it would be little more than a debating society unless it became more empowered for its task. None other than Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell and Mohandas K. Gandhi, pushed their governments to go beyond debating and take steps to essentially form a federal world government. In subsequent years, the UN has grown more feckless and corrupt so thankfully it never has achieved world government status, but treaties like LOST would help move it in that direction.
If you have a bad case of insomnia some night, you can read the treaty in all its verbosity. Pay special attention to Section 82 – “payments and contributions with respect to the exploitation of the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles,” which says:
1. The coastal State shall make payments or contributions in kind in respect of the exploitation of the non-living resources of the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles from the baselines from which the breadth of the territorial sea is measured.
2. The payments and contributions shall be made annually with respect to all production at a site after the first five years of production at that site. For the sixth year, the rate of payment or contribution shall be 1 per cent of the value or volume of production at the site. The rate shall increase by 1 per cent for each subsequent year until the twelfth year and shall remain at 7 per cent thereafter. Production does not include resources used in connection with exploitation.
3. A developing State which is a net importer of a mineral resource produced from its continental shelf is exempt from making such payments or contributions in respect of that mineral resource.
4. The payments or contributions shall be made through the Authority, which shall distribute them to States Parties to this Convention, on the basis of equitable sharing criteria, taking into account the interests and needs of developing States, particularly the least developed and the land-locked among them.
Sorta’ takes your breath away, doesn’t it? This piece of work cedes US sovereignty to the UN, redistributes the fruits or our labor through royalties paid to the International Seabed Authority – royalties that come out of American pockets or its Treasury – and, thanks to Article 144, we would be forced to give away our drilling and sea floor mineral harvesting technology.
This thinly-disguised UN “constitution for the oceans” would push nations toward world government as Einstein, Churchill, Russell and Gandhi wanted. Especially troubling is Part XI, which sounds like the executive, legislative, and judicial methodology for governing the mineral resources of the ocean for the “benefit of mankind.”
The UN appropriation of 70% of the earth’s surface to regulate its oil, gas, and mining and its tax scheme called royalties is outrageous. Royalties are paid to owners. The oceans belong to everyone, not the UN. This treaty would funnel an enormous revenue stream to the UN corrupt bureaucracy which it would spend with little oversight. Hel-loooo! … anybody remember the UN-sponsored Iraq Oil for Food program that implicated the ethically-challenged UN Secretary General Koffi Annan and his family in its corruption?
When my children were small, I would read to them the story of the Little Red Hen who asked the other barnyard animals to help her plant wheat. No takers. She asked for help in tilling and weeding. Still no takers. Also no help in harvesting, grinding, and baking the bread. But all the animals were around the table when eating time came. This treaty is the Little Red Hen on an international scale. The UN will be capitalized to advance its agenda of international socialism by transferring royalties to developing and landlocked nations, no doubt with sticky UN fingers – nations which didn’t participate in the capital investment, exploration, extraction, and risks. The fact that most or all of the money would end up in the bank accounts of the dictators of these thugocracies, as it always has, seems not to trouble the UN socialists.
LOST would expropriate the technology and intellectual property of industrial nations as part of its redistribution scam, giving it to the “developing world” most of which hates America. The developing world can’t operate this technology’s ON-OFF switch!
The treaty would regulate Americans and their businesses without being politically accountable to the American people. It would ignore our constitutional processes in deference to the UN’s. In our country a person can only be tried in a court that has jurisdiction of him. Not so with this treaty. Disputes among the signers would be resolved by mandatory resolution processes with no constitutional underpinnings. The Secretary General of the UN has established an unelected, unaccountable 21-person tribunal in Hamburg as the final arbiter of disputes from which there is no appeal to an American court.
LOST contains provisions to stop “marine pollution.” Predictably, its broad definition of “pollution” could include anything that junk science says causes global warming and rising sea levels – like greenhouse emissions from ships. The radical environmentalists will have a field day.
“The Law of the Sea Treaty would help radical environmentalists achieve what they haven’t been able to achieve through legislation,” one authority stated. “Greenpeace has said ‘the benefits of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea are substantial, including its basic duties for states to protect and preserve the marine environment and to conserve marine living species.’ The Natural Resources Defense Council has already challenged the “intense active sonar” used by the US Navy, arguing that it violates the treaty by posing a danger to marine life. We aren’t a signatory to the treaty, still our brave Navy agreed to scale back use of this technology, making it harder to track the bad guy’s subs.
LOST was used by Australia and New Zealand to shut down an experimental blue fin tuna fishing program. Ireland used it to try to halt operation of a land-based plant in England. Such is the meddlesome nature of the treaty. I would make it easier for countries to muck around in the affairs of other countries whose activities they didn’t like.
Our Navy’s top admirals say we need LOST to assure safe transit through dangerous waters like the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has threatened to blockade, and the South China Sea, which China claims as its domain. I thought that’s why we put guns on our Navy ships. Freedom of the seas has been recognized for centuries and has been enforced by our Navy since the beginning of the Republic. Since the UN has no navy, guess who will enforce LOST treaty provisions on the high seas? Us. Just as the US Navy has assured safe seas for over 200 years. Putting our navy’s decision-making under the authority of the UN would limit our ability to defend our own interests, especially when we have a bowing, genuflecting president like Obama.
Some of the military brass has said LOST would improve national security and it would enhance US standing in the world. (The latter is really high on my priority list! I toss and turn worrying about it for at least a second before dropping off to sleep.) So, in recent hearings for the treaty, one senator asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, if failure to ratify compromises our ability to project force and help our allies around the world. Martin’s answer was essentially “no.” "Our ability to project force will not deteriorate," he said, if we refrain from ratifying the treaty. Well then, why sign a treaty that makes us no safer? At the end of the day, what keeps America safe is a strong military and a president with a backbone.
Pontificating at one of the Senate Committee hearings, Secretary Hillary told the committee members, “Whatever arguments may have existed for delaying US accession [to LOST] no longer exist and truly cannot even be taken with a straight face,” adding that some critics (like the author of this blog) seem to believe that because the treaty was negotiated under the auspices of the United Nations, “the black helicopters are on their way.”
This is the same woman who wants to cede American Second Amendment rights to the UN under the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty whose provisions extend even to accessories like scopes and magazines – a treaty that requires every country to keep track of weapons sold or transferred and to report transactions to the UN.
This is the same woman who wants to cede to the UN the power to regulate Internet content, charge user fees, limit access to outbound traffic originating in the US (Google, Facebook, Apple), and replace ICANN, which assigns Internet addresses, and has done so quite well I might add, to a UN bureaucracy which has never done it.
Such is the consequence of foreign entanglements – those “insidious wiles of foreign influence” which, Washington warned, is one of “the most baneful foes of republican government.”
In the days before the Republic existed, people thought of themselves in deeply partisan terms. The 55 men who gathered in Philadelphia to write the Constitution never thought of themselves as Americans. John Adams thought of himself as a Massachusetts man. Benjamin Franklin would have referred to himself as a Pennsylvanian, just as Edmund Randolph, James Madison, and George Mason considered themselves Virginians. They were rightfully suspicious of this new thing that would join them together as “united” states with a federal government. That a constitution ever got written was, as Catherine Drinker Bowen has rightfully called it, the miracle at Philadelphia.
In like manner, the United States is not a citizen of the world. It’s a sovereign nation that exists in the world. Our pin-headed politicians need to remember that important distinction. Otherwise, we need to get rid of them and elect people who will devote themselves to protecting American sovereignty.
In a little over 200 days, we’ll have that opportunity.
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