The National Interest
Winter 2000

Extracts from American Sovereignty and the UN

by Jesse Helms

 

Earlier this year, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan delivered an address to the General Assembly in which he declared that "the last right of states cannot and must not be the right to enslave, persecute or torture their own citizens." The peoples of the world, he said, have "rights beyond borders." He is surely correct.

The sovereignty of nations must, of course, be respected. But, properly understood, nations derive their sovereignty–their legitimacy–from the consent of the governed. Thus, Slobodan Milosevic can hardly claim sovereignty over Kosovo when he has murdered Kosovars and piled their bodies into mass graves. Nor can Fidel Castro or Saddam Hussein hide behind phony claims of sovereignty while they oppress their peoples.

As they watch the UN struggle with the question of sovereignty, however, 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 doing so. During the 1980s, this policy was called "the Reagan Doctrine." In some cases, America assisted freedom fighters around the world who were seeking to overthrow corrupt regimes, providing them with weaponry, training and intelligence. In other cases, the United States intervened directly. In still others, such as in Central and Eastern Europe, America supported peaceful opposition movements with moral, financial and covert assistance. In each case, it was America's intention to help bring down oppressive regimes. The dramatic expansion of freedom in the last decade of the twentieth century has been a direct result of these policies.

In none of these instances, however, did the United States ask for or receive the approval of the United Nations to "legitimize" its actions. And yet the secretary-general now declares that approval by the United Nations Security Council is the "sole source of legitimacy on the use of force" in the world. It is a fanciful notion that free peoples need to seek the approval of an international body (a quarter of whose members are totalitarian dictatorships, according to Freedom House's 1999/2000 Freedom in the World) to lend support to nations struggling to break the chains of tyranny. The United Nations has no power to grant or decline legitimacy to such actions. They are inherently legitimate.

What the United Nations can do is help. The Security Council can, where appropriate, be an instrument to facilitate action by "coalitions of the willing", it can implement sanctions regimes, and it can provide logistical support to states undertaking collective action. As it stands, however, the Security Council has an exceedingly mixed record in being such a facilitator. In the case of Iraq's aggression against Kuwait in the early 1990s, it performed admirably; in the more recent case of Kosovo, it was paralyzed. The initial UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia was a disaster, and its failure to protect the Bosnian people from Serb depredations is well documented in a recent report issued by the UN itself. And, despite its initial success in repelling Iraqi aggression, in the years since the Gulf War the Security Council has utterly failed to stop Saddam Hussein's drive to build instruments of mass murder. It has repeatedly allowed him to play a game of expelling UNSCOM inspection teams, and has left him completely free for the past two years to fashion nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.

The American people will never accept the secretary-general's claim that the United Nations is the "sole source of legitimacy on the use of force" in the world. True, the U.S. Senate ratified the UN Charter fifty years ago. Yet in so doing, America did not cede one syllable of its sovereignty to the United Nations. Under the American system, when international treaties are ratified they simply become domestic U.S. law. As such, they carry no greater or lesser weight than any other domestic U.S. law. Treaty obligations can be superseded by a simple act of Congress. This was the intentional design of America's Founding Fathers, who cautioned against entering into "entangling alliances." This is why Americans look with alarm upon the UN's claim to a monopoly on international moral legitimacy. They see this as a threat to the freedoms of the American people, a claim of political authority over America and its elected leaders.

The effort to establish a United Nations International Criminal Court (ICC) is a case in point. Consider: the Rome treaty purports to hold American citizens under its jurisdiction–even though the United States has neither signed nor ratified the treaty. Put another way, it claims sovereign authority over American citizens without their consent. The Court's supporters argue that Americans should be willing to sacrifice some of their sovereignty for the noble cause of international justice. This, frankly, is laughable. 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 great democracies. And that principled projection of force is the only thing that will ensure peace and security on the international scene in the future. . . .