The “doctrine of unstable alliances” in George Washington’s “Farewell Address” underpinned U.S. foreign policy for decades and is still considered wise, though mostly ignored. “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,” Washington wrote. “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” Even the opposing party under President Thomas Jefferson continued to rely on that wisdom. He explained an “essential principle of our government,” in his inaugural address: “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”
What a long way we have come, not only subjecting ourselves to hundreds of international agreements, treaties, and multinational authorities, but now using them to impose legal requirements on American citizens that Congress would never vote for.
America’s founders felt strongly about the dangers of foreign alliances, and made such agreements very difficult, requiring treaties to be approved by a 2/3 supermajority of the Senate. Unfortunately, they neglected to define what constitutes a treaty, so the requirement has been worth less than the parchment it was written on from the start. Presidents since John Adams have been making and unmaking deals with foreign governments ever since. Especially since World War II, much of U.S. foreign policy, and a vast body of “international law” has been based on multinational agreements, most of them never ratified by the Senate.
One exception is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, negotiated in 1992 at a conference in Rio de Janeiro and ratified by the Senate. It seemed fairly innocuous at first, nations of the world establishing a voluntary working relationship under which details about reducing greenhouse gas emissions would be worked out later by a “Conference of the Parties” at future meetings. Every UN member country has signed it.
The agreement said emission reductions would be voluntary, and it promised to protect taxpayers everywhere by providing that “policies and measures to deal with climate change should be cost-effective so as to ensure global benefits at the lowest possible cost.” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen now calls it “the single greatest economic opportunity of the twenty-first century” that the world will spend $78 Trillion on climate change policies.
Annual meetings that followed Rio de Janeiro have resulted in a steady string of onerous emission reduction targets and mandatory financial burdens, not one of which has been submitted to the Senate for its approval. Not one of which are supported by a majority of Americans, and not one of which could have been enacted by Congress.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol committed the U.S. to a 7 percent reduction in emissions, below 1990 levels, by 2012. Far from ratifying it, the Senate passed the “Byrd-Hagel resolution” 95-0 before the Kyoto meeting, warning President Clinton not to sign it. He never sent it to the Senate for ratification, and President Bush later repudiated it. Other agreements were reached in Bonn in 2001, Doha in 2012, Paris in 2015, and Glasgow in 2021.
Under those agreements, Presidents have committed the U.S. to international requirements they call “binding” – subsidizing other nations, reducing U.S. emissions 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050, even eliminating America’s use of coal. President Obama committed to the Paris Agreement as an “executive action,” not a treaty, and never submitted it to the Senate. Thus, Trump was able to withdraw from it, and Biden to rejoin it, both without the consent of the Senate. These agreements are additions to the 1992 treaty, which was ratified by the Senate. Can amendments change its voluntary goals to legally binding requirements that supersede federal law, without approval of the Senate?
Congress and federal courts acknowledge both treaties and “executive agreements,” but the latter are poorly defined. At least some precedents, Senate resolutions, and State Department manuals suggest such agreements might require Senate ratification if they: involve commitments or risks affecting the nation as a whole; affect state laws; might require legislation to implement; or impose major policy changes upon which there is no congressional direction. These climate agreements meet all those criteria.
They literally require fundamental changes in the American economy, culture, and way of life, not by the will of the people through their elected representatives, but at the will of foreign powers and international committees nobody ever voted for. Whether legal or not, the larger point is that these agreements are the definition of “entangling alliances.”
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