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 his week, President
George W. Bush courageously defied the environmental radicals yet
again by announcing that the
United States was not going to be a party to the Kyoto Protocol
on Global Warming. This step not only had important economic implications;
it also signaled a notable contribution to national security.
Now having established that the nation can "unsign" treaties, Mr.
Bush has created a precedent that should be urgently applied to
another defective accord that also poses a serious problem for America's
armed forces: the Treaty of Rome, which established the International
Criminal Court (ICC).
Although the national security case against Kyoto has gotten scant
attention, it is a powerful further justification for Mr. Bush's
action.
Interestingly, one of the best arguments against the Kyoto Protocol
was actually advanced in September 1997 (i.e., before the agreement
was finalized) by, of all people, the Clinton administration's resident
"green weenie" in the Pentagon — then-Deputy Under Secretary
of Defense for Environmental Security, Sherri Goodman.
In a memo circulated to DoD's senior leadership, Ms. Goodman warned
that: "Any restriction on allowable carbon dioxide emissions for
[tactical and strategic] systems will affect DoD military operations
and readiness."
Accordingly, Secretary Goodman attached to her memorandum a proposed
"national security waiver" to the Kyoto Protocol, saying that this
waiver should apply to "military tactical and strategic systems
used in training to support readiness or in support of national
security, humanitarian activities, peace-keeping, peace enforcement
and United Nation's actions."
Such a waiver would have gone a long way toward insulating the American
armed forces from the effects of a mandatory greenhouse gas-reduction
scheme like that subsequently agreed to at Kyoto in December 1997.
Unfortunately, although the Defense Department had been assured
that such a blanket exemption would be forthcoming, its adoption
proved during the negotiating endgame to be inconvenient for Vice
President Al Gore and his National Security Advisor Leon Fuerth,
who directed the U.S. team to accept something quite different.
When the negotiations were over, the language adopted in the Protocol
read as follows: "The Conference of the Parties…decides that
emissions resulting from multilateral operations pursuant to the
United Nations Charter shall not be included in national totals,
but reported separately. Emissions related to other operations shall
be included in the national emissions totals of one or more parties
involved."
The Clinton administration subsequently asserted that this formulation
protects priority Defense concerns as well as all multilateral,
peacekeeping, and humanitarian operations — to include, for
example, those that might not actually be authorized by the United
Nations but simply be "consistent with" the UN Charter. In fact,
the treaty's text and its negotiating history clearly contradict
suggestions by the Clinton administration that the military's operations
and activities were fully protected. The result would likely have
been adverse, and potentially acute, with deleterious implications
for the forces' readiness, overseas presence, procurement, and combat
capability.
It is even conceivable that the nation's very ability to mount combat
operations could have been affected by the Kyoto Protocol's emissions-trading
arrangements governing greenhouse gasses. For instance, the United
States might have been put in the absurd position of being unable
to wage war without getting emission chits from prospective enemies
and/or their non-aligned friends! At the very least, the new one-world
mega-bureaucracy that would have been required to facilitate, monitor,
and regulate such a trading regime would have turned into an enormous
impediment to national security, as well as a grievous infringement
on U.S. sovereignty.
These implications might have been worse had the Russians been able
to realize the windfall from this emissions-trading scheme that
might have, by some estimates, been worth $40 billion. The wildest
dreams of medieval alchemists could not imagine such a magical transformation;
the most fatuous ideological ruminations of Marx and Engels could
scarcely have comprehended this sort of vast, undeserved redistribution
of wealth. And, given past experience, it could only be expected
that a substantial proportion — if not the lion's share —
of the proceeds from sales of Russia's emissions credits to Western
polluting nations would have gone to resuscitating the old Soviet
military-industrial complex.
Now that President Bush has spared the nation the negative repercussions
of the Kyoto Protocol, he should now "unsign" the International
Criminal Court treaty. As with the global-warming pact, unless and
until the United States government formally serves notice that it
is not going to proceed with ratification of the ICC treaty, the
nation will be bound to observe the provisions and obligations of
an accord that even President Clinton acknowledged had "serious
flaws."
That prospect is unacceptable in the extreme, both for practical
reasons that have prompted vehement opposition to the ICC from the
U.S. military and for the Treaty of Rome's larger implications for
American sovereignty and constitutionally defined jurisprudence.
These include:
1) In the absence of a clear UN Security Council veto over war-crimes
prosecutions, American troops and civilian leaders could be subjected
to politically motivated trials without the protections built into
our system of jurisprudence that are derived from the Constitution
and, in the case of the armed forces, enshrined in the Uniform Code
of Military Justice (UCMJ).
2) Without an agreed definition in the Treaty of Rome of the crime
of "aggression," U.S. political and/or military leaders could be
arrested and tried in the future in connection with combat operations
simply because others do not approve of those operations. And:
3) By dint of their unique global responsibilities and deployments,
America's armed forces have concerns about being subjected to extra-national
systems of justice that simply do not apply to other countries'
militaries. It is essential to the maintenance of good order and
discipline that the UCMJ be preserved as the preeminent code of
conduct for U.S. service personnel.
If President Bush now acts formally to unburden the United States
from both the depredations upon national security and sovereignty,
as well as the other dangers of the Kyoto Protocol and the Treaty
of Rome, he will be doing one thing more: He will be serving notice
on the international community that his administration will be an
American one — not a government that subscribes, as
its predecessor did, to what some have called the "post-American"
philosophy which has systematically subordinated national interests
and sovereignty to "aggressive multilateralism" and world governance.
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