Environmental Handcuffs

If eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, then certainly we should heed George Washington’s counsel to "steer clear of entangling foreign alliances." That warning was never more important than today.

The past decade proved there is little safety in international organizations, nor in international treaties, conventions and protocols. Amerca’s experience with the United Nations in Iraq, the loneliness of the coalition of the willing and the naked hatred of the U.S. by friends and foes should be lesson enough.

Envy of our prosperity is evident even in our allies’ disparagement of our not ratifying the Kyoto Treaty, when doing so would affect a massive decrease in Americans’ standard of living, yet fail to have any significant effect on global warming.
In the face of this hostility, the Bush administration should be mindful of protecting our national sovereignty and avoid any multinational regulatory morass. Yet the White House is fast-tracking the dangerous Law of the Seas Treaty (LOST), which would place 70 percent of the Earth’s surface under United Nations control.
It would turn all the oceans’ surface, estuaries, straits, resources, fisheries and seabed wealth over to the international body.

When LOST first emerged in 1982, President Reagan quickly deep-sixed it. Unfortunately, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice now praises LOST, saying it "serves our national security interests, serves our economic interests. We would very much like to see it go into force."

Turning control of the planet’s oceans over to 191 U.N. nations, most of whom don’t share our fundamental beliefs in individual liberty and economic freedom, and many of whom dislike us, seems disastrous.

The Rx for this rush into a new world order based upon global governance lies in Jeremy Rabkin’s Law Without Nations? Rabkin traces the interwoven history of national sovereignty and international treaties, from the first maritime treaties between sovereign nations to the current efforts by international Greens to slow economic growth and halt free trade.

Rabkin shows how global environmental protection has successfully been used to erode economic freedom and individual liberty, but which if promoted as central planning would have been rejected.

Just as national Greens have learned that the road to serfdom can be more easily paved with green bricks than red bricks, so have the international Greens learned that by repeatedly posing imminent global environmental disasters to our common "Spaceship Earth," they can exceed the traditional concept of treaty powers. Their goal is to ultimately mandate actions that will distort the constitutional system, threaten federalism and the manufacturing and trading practices of our economic system and property rights.

Let’s hope this book becomes must reading in the Bush administration.