On January 20th, 2000, former Senator Jesse Helms gave a speech at the United Nations. As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “Senator No” had been a long-time opponent of the U.N. and had bottled up U.S. funding for the international body for years. In this speech, he bluntly informs the U.N. that the U.S. will not tolerate any attenuation of American sovereignty.
Here are some excerpts from that speech, which you can find here. In all cases, emphasis is in the originally-prepared text.
The sovereignty of nations must be respected. But nations derive their sovereignty -- their legitimacy -- from the consent of the governed. Thus, it follows, that nations can lose their legitimacy when they rule without the consent of the governed; they deservedly discard their sovereignty by brutally oppressing their people.
Slobodan Milosevic cannot claim sovereignty over Kosovo when he has murdered Kosovars and piled their bodies into mass graves. Neither can Fidel Castro claim that it is his sovereign right to oppress his people. Nor can Saddam Hussein defend his oppression of the Iraqi people by hiding behind phony claims of sovereignty.
And when the oppressed peoples of the world cry out for help, the free peoples of the world have a fundamental right to respond.
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But complete candor is imperative: 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 UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia was a disaster, and its failure to protect the Bosnian people from Serb genocide is well documented in a recent UN report.
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 allowed him to play a repeated game of expelling UNSCOM inspection teams which included Americans, and has left Saddam completely free for the past year to fashion nuclear and chemical weapons of mass destruction.
I am here to plead that from now on we all must work together, to learn from past mistakes, and to make the Security Council a more efficient and effective tool for international peace and security. But candor compels that I reiterate this warning: the American people will never accept the claims of the United Nations to be the "sole source of legitimacy on the use of force" in the world.
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If the United Nations is to survive into the 21st century, it must recognize its limitations. The demands of the United States have not changed much since Henry Cabot Lodge laid out his conditions for joining the League of Nations 80 years ago: Americans want to ensure that the United States of America remains the sole judge of its own internal affairs, that the United Nations is not allowed to restrict the individual rights of U.S. citizens, and that the United States retains sole authority over the deployment of United States forces around the world.
This is what Americans ask of the United Nations; it is what Americans expect of the United Nations. A United Nations that focuses on helping sovereign states work together is worth keeping; a United Nations that insists on trying to impose a utopian vision on America and the world will collapse under its own weight.
If the United Nations respects the sovereign rights of the American people, and serves them as an effective tool of diplomacy, it will earn and deserve their respect and support. But a United Nations that seeks to impose its presumed authority on the American people without their consent begs for confrontation and, I want to be candid, eventual U.S. withdrawal.
Thank you very much.
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