The New York Times

Friday,January 21, 2000

In the Words of Helms: 'A Lack of Gratitude'

Following is the full text from a speech by Senator Jesse Helms to the United Nations Security Council yesterday as transcribed by the Federal News Service, a private company.

I genuinely appreciate your welcoming me here today.

You are distinguished world leaders, or you wouldn't be here.

It's my hope that there can begin today a pattern of understanding and friendship between you who serve your respective countries in the United Nations, and those of us who serve not only in the United States government, but also the millions of Americans whom we represent.

Now Mr. President, Mr. Ambassador Holbrooke, is an earnest gentleman whom I respect, and I hope you enjoy his friendship as much as I do. (Laughter.) He has the enormous of Foreign Service in his background; he is an able diplomat and a genuine friend to whom I am most grateful for his role and that of the Honorable Irwin Bell, my longtime friend, in arranging my visit with you today.

Now then, all that said, it may very well be that some of the things that I feel obliged to say will not meet with your immediate approval, if ever.

It's not my intent to offend you in any way, and I hope I will not. It is my intent to extend to you my hand of friendship and convey the hope that, in the days to come and in retrospect, we can join in a mutual respect that will enable all of us to work together in an atmosphere of friendship and hope, the hope to do everything we can to achieve world peace around the globe.

Having said all of that, I'm aware that you have interpreters who translate the proceedings of this body into a half-dozen different languages.

And they have a challenge today, a very interesting challenge. As some of you may have detected already, I do not have a Yankee accent.

(Laughter.) I hope you have a translator here who can speak "Southern," someone who can translate words like "y'all," and "I do declare." (Laughter.) In any event, it may be that one language -- another language barrier will need to be overcome this morning.

And I'm not a diplomat, and as such, I'm not fully conversant with the elegant and rarefied language of the diplomatic trade.

I'm an elected official with something of a reputation for saying what I mean and meaning what I say.

So I trust you will forgive me if I come across a little bit more blunt than you are accustomed to hearing in this chamber.

Now, I've been told many times that this is the first time that a United States Senator has addressed the United Nations Security Council, and I sincerely hope that it will not be the last.

It's important that this distinguished body have a greater contact with the elected representatives of the American people, and that we have a greater contact with you.

And in this spirit, tomorrow I will be joined here at the U.N. by several other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, plus the distinguished senator from Virginia, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee of the United States Senate, John Warner.

Together we will meet with U.N. officials and with representatives of some of your governments, and we will hold a sort of committee field hearing to discuss U.N. reform and the prospects for improved U.S.-- U.N. relations.

And this will mark another first. Never before has the Senate Foreign Relations Committee ventured as a group from Washington to visit an international institution.

I hope it'll be enlightening for all of us and that you will accept this as a sign of our desire for a new beginning in U.S.-U.N. relations.

I hope, I intend that my presence here today will presage future annual visits by the Security Council, who will come to Washington as official guests of the United States Senate and the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, which I chair.

And I trust that your representatives will feel free to be as candid in Washington, when you come, as I will try to be today, so that there will be hands of friendship extended in an atmosphere of understanding.

If we're to have such a new beginning, we must endeavor to understand each other better, and that is why I will share with you some of what I am hearing from the American people about the United Nations.

Now I'm confident that you have seen the public opinion polls commissioned by U.N. supporters, suggesting that the U.N. enjoys the support of the American public.

That's all well and good, but I caution that you not put too much confidence in those polls, because since I was first elected to the United States Senate in 1972, I have run for re-election four times.

Each time the pollsters have confidently predicted my defeat -- each time, I'm happy to confide, that they have been wrong.

I am pleased that thus far I have never won a poll, but I've never lost an election.

So, as those of you who represent democratic nations well know, public opinion polls can be constructed to tell you anything the poll takers want you to hear.

Let me share with you what the American people tell me.

Since I became chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, I have received literally thousands of communications from Americans all across the country expressing their deep frustration with this institution.

They know instinctively that the U.N. lives and breathes on the hard-earned money of the American taxpayers, among others, yet they have heard comments here in New York constantly calling the United States a "deadbeat nation." I dissent from that, and so do the American people.

They have heard U.N. officials declaring, absurdly, that countries like Fiji and Bangladesh are carrying America's burden in peacekeeping.

They see the majority of the U.N. members routinely voting against America in the General Assembly.

They have read the reports of the raucous cheering of the U.N. delegates in Rome when U.S. efforts to amend the International Criminal Court Treaty to protect American soldiers were defeated.

They read in the newspapers that despite all the human rights abuses taking place in dictatorships around the globe, a U.N. special rapporteur deciding that his most pressing task was to investigate human rights violations in the United States of America, and he found our human rights record wanting, of course.

The American people hear all of this and they resent it.

And I think they have grown increasingly frustrated with what they feel is a lack of gratitude.

And I won't delve into every port of frustration, but let's touch for just a moment on one -- the deadbeat charge.

Before coming here, I asked the United States General Accounting Office to assess just how much the American taxpayers contributed to the United Nations in the last year -- 1999.

And here is what the G.A.O. reported to me.

Last year, the American people contributed a total of more than $1.4 billion to the United Nations system in assessments and voluntary contributions.

That's pretty generous, but it's only the tip of the iceberg.

The American taxpayers also spent an additional $8,779,000,000 from the United States military budget to support various U.N resolutions and peacekeeping operations around the world.

Now, let me repeat that figure just for the purpose of emphasis: $8,779,000,000.

Now, this means that last year, 1999 alone, that 12-month period, the American people have furnished precisely $10,179,000,000 to support the work of the United Nations and no other nation on Earth comes even close to matching that investment.

So you can see, perhaps, why many Americans reject the suggestion that their country is a deadbeat nation.

And frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I resent it, too.

Now, I grant you, the money we spend on the United Nations is not charity.

I don't view it as such, and most Americans don't.

To the contrary, it is an investment; an investment from which the American people rightly expect a return.

They expect a reformed United Nations that works more efficiently and which respects the sovereignty of the United States of America.

And that is why, in the 1980's, Congress began withholding a fraction of our arrears as pressure for reform.

I remember the delightful senator from Kansas, Nancy Kassebaum, was a participant in that and a leader in it.

Congressional pressure resulted in some worthwhile reforms, such as the creation of an independent U.N. inspector general and the adoption of consensus budgeting practices.

But still, the arrearages accumulated as the U.N. resisted more comprehensive reforms.

When the distinguished secretary-general, Kofi Annan, was elected, some of us in the Senate in Washington decided to try to establish a working relationship with him.

The result is the Helms-Biden Law, which President Clinton finally signed into law this past November. It was the product of three years of arduous negotiations and hard-fought compromises and it was approved by the United States Senate by an overwhelming 98-to-one vote.

Now, I'm aware that this law does not sit well with some here at the U.N.

Some do not like to have reforms dictated by the United States Congress, and some have even suggested that the United Nations should reject these reforms.

But let me suggest a few things to consider:

First, as the figure I have cited clearly demonstrates, the United States is the single largest investor in the United Nations. Under the U.S. Constitution, we in Congress are the full guardian of the American taxpayers' money.

It is our solemn duty -- we stood in the well of the Senate and took an oath -- it's our solemn duty to see that it is wisely invested. So as the representatives of the U.N.'s largest investors, the American people, we have not only a right but a responsibility to insist on specific reforms in exchange for their investment.

Second, I ask you to consider the alternative.

The alternative would have been to continue to let the U.S.-U.N. relationship spiral out of control.

You would have taken retaliatory measures, such as revoking America's vote in the General Assembly, and Congress would likely have responded with retaliatory measures against the United Nations.

And the end result, I believe, would have been a breach in U.S.-U.N. relations that would have served the interest of no one.

Now, some may contend that the Clinton Administration should have fought to pay the arrears without conditions.

And I assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that had they done so, they would have lost and lost badly.

Let me go back into history a little bit to explain where I am coming from.

Eighty years ago Woodrow Wilson, President Woodrow Wilson, failed to secure congressional support for U.S. entry into the League of Nations.

Now, this administration obviously learned from President Wilson's mistakes 80 years ago. President Wilson probably could have achieved a ratification of the League of Nations if he had worked with the Congress of the United States.

And one of my predecessors, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge, asked for 14 conditions to the treaty establishing the League of Nations, few of which would have raised even an eyebrow.

These included language to ensure that the United States remained the sole judge of its own internal affairs, that the League not restrict any individual right of U.S. citizens, that the Congress retain sole authority for deployment of U.S. forces through the League, and so on and on and on. It would not have raised an eyebrow anywhere in the world -- except at home.

But President Wilson, history shows, indignantly refused to compromise with Senator Lodge, and he shouted at one point, "Never, never, never." And then the president said, "I'll never consent to adopting any policy with which that impossible man is so prominently identified." Well, what happened? President Wilson lost, and the final vote in the senate was 38 to 53.

And a two-thirds vote was required, as you know, and the League of Nations withered on the vine.

Now let's fast-forward 80 years. Ambassador Holbrooke and Secretary of State Albright understood from the beginning that the United Nations could not long survive without the support of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress.

Now, thanks to the efforts of leaders like Ambassador Holbrooke and Senator -- Secretary Albright, the present administration in Washington did not -- did not -- repeat President Woodrow Wilson's fatal mistake.

In any event, Congress has written a check to the United Nations for $926 million payable upon the implementation of previously agreed-upon common-sense reforms.

Now the choice is up to you here at the United Nations. And I suggest if the United Nations were to reject this compromise, it would mark the beginning of the end for U.S. support for the United Nations.

And I don't want that to happen.

I want the American people to value, to value a United Nations that recognizes and respects their interests, and for the United Nations to value the significant contributions by and of the American people.

Now I want to be crystal-clear and totally honest with you.

All of us want a more effective United Nations, but if the United Nations is to be effective, it must be an institution that is needed by the great democratic powers of this earth, the world, and most Americans -- I must be candid -- do not regard the United Nations as an end in and of itself.

They see it as just one aspect of America's diplomatic arsenal, and to the extent that the United Nations is effective, the American people will support it.

To the extent that it becomes ineffective or, worse, a burden, the American people, through its elected representatives, will cast it aside.

The American people want the United Nations to serve the purpose for which it was designed.

They want it to help sovereign nations coordinate collective action by coalitions of the willing, where the political for such action exists, and they want it to provide a forum where diplomats can meet and keep open channels of communications in times of crisis, and they want it to provide to the peoples of the world important services, such as peacekeeping, weapons inspections, and humanitarian relief.

But let me tell you something.

This is important work and work that must be done.

It is the core of what the United Nations can offer to the United States and to the rest of the world, and if, in the coming century, the U.N. focuses on doing these core tasks well, it can thrive and will earn and deserve the support and respect of the American people, along with peoples of other countries of the world.

But -- and candor compels me to say this -- if the United Nations seeks to move beyond these core tasks, if it seeks to impose the United Nations' power and authority over nation states, I guarantee that the United Nations will meet stiff resistance from the American people.

As matters now stand, many Americans sense that the United Nations has greater ambitions than simply being an efficient deliverer of humanitarian aid, a more effective peacekeeper, a better weapons inspector, and a more effective tool of great power diplomacy.

The American people see the United Nations aspiring to establish itself the central authority of a new international order of global laws and global governance.

This is an international order the American people, I guarantee you, do not and will not countenance.

The United Nations must respect national sovereignty in the United States and everywhere else.

The United Nations serves nation states, not the other way around.

This principle is central to the legitimacy and the ultimate survival of the United Nations, and it is a principle that must be protected.

The secretary-general recently delivered an address on sovereignty to the General Assembly in which he declared that, and I quote him, "The last right of states cannot and must not be the right to enslave, persecute or torture their own citizens.

The people of the world," he said, "have rights beyond borders." And I wholeheartedly agree with that.

What the secretary-general calls "rights beyond borders" we in America call "inalienable rights."

We are endowed with those inalienable rights, as Thomas Jefferson proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, and Mr. Jefferson emphasized that these rights cannot be cancelled by kings or despots, but only by our Creator.

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 lose their legitimacy when they rule without the consent of the governed.

They deservedly discard their sovereignty by brutally oppressing their people. Mr. Milosevic cannot claim sovereignty over Kosovo when he murdered Kosovar people and piled their bodies into mass graves.

And 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.

As we watch the United Nations struggle with this question at the turn of the millennium, 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 coming to the aid of those struggling for freedom.

In the United States during the 1980's, we called this the Reagan Doctrine.

In some cases, America has assisted freedom-fighters around the world who are seeking to overthrow corrupt regimes.

We have provided weaponry, training and intelligence. And in other cases, the United States has intervened directly.

And in other cases, such as in Central and Eastern Europe, we supported peaceful opposition movements with moral, financial and covert forms of support.

But in each case, it was America's clear intention to help bring down communist regimes that were oppressing their peoples, and thereby, replace the dictators with democratic governments.

The democratic expansion of freedom in the last decade of the 20th century is a direct result of those policies.

In none of those cases, however, did the United States ask for or receive, the approval of the United Nations to legitimize its actions. And it's a fanciful notion that free peoples need to seek approval of an international body, some of whose members are totalitarian dictatorships, to lend support to nations struggling to break the chains of tyranny and claim their inalienable God-given rights.

The United Nations, my friends, has no power to grant or decline legitimacy to such actions.

They are inherently legitimate.

Now, what the United Nations can do is help, the Security Council can, where appropriate, be an instrument to facilitate actions by coalitions of the willing, implement sanctions regimes and logistical support to states undertaking collective action. But complete candor, my friends, 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 1990's, the United Nations performed admirably.

In the more recent case of Kosovo, it was paralyzed.

The United Nations peacekeeping mission in Bosnia was a disaster, and its failure to protect the Bosnian people from Serb genocide is well documented in a recent United Nations 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 Castro (sic/means "Saddam") to play a repeated game of expelling UNSCOM inspection teams, which included Americans, and has left Saddam Hussein completely free for the past year to fashion his nuclear and chemical weapons of mass destruction.

Now, I'm being candid, of course. But I am here to plead, plead with you 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 this world.

But, some may respond, the United States Senate ratified the United Nations Charter 50 years ago.

Yeah, that's right. But in doing so, we did not cede one syllable of American sovereignty; not one syllable.

We didn't cede it to the United Nations or anybody else.

Under our system, when international treaties are ratified, they simply become domestic United States law.

As such, they carry no greater, no lesser, weight than any other domestic U.S. law.

Treaty obligations can be superseded by a simple act of Congress.

This was the intention, the intentional design of our Founding Fathers, if you look back, one of whom, our first president, cautioned against entering into entangling alliances.

Now then, when the United States joins a treaty organization, the organization holds no legal authority over us.

We abide by our treaty obligations because they are the domestic law of our land and because our elected leaders have judged that the agreement serves our national interest.

But no treaty, no law can ever supersede the one document that all Americans hold sacred, and that is the Constitution of the United States of America.

The American people do not want the United States -- the United Nations to become an entangling alliance, and that is why Americans look with alarm at U.N. claims to a monopoly on international moral legitimacy.

Americans see this as a threat to the God-given freedoms of the American people, a claim of political authority over America and its elected leaders without -- without -- their consent.

Now, the effort to establish a United Nations International Criminal Court is a case in point, which I am obliged to mention. Consider the Rome Treaty purports to hold American citizens under its jurisdiction even when the United States has neither signed nor ratified that treaty.

Nonsense. In other words, Rome claims sovereign authority over American citizens without their consent.

How can the nations of the world imagine for one instant that America's going to stand by and allow such a power grab to take place? I can guarantee you it's not going to happen.

Now the court's supporters argue that Americans should be willing to sacrifice some of their sovereignty for the noble cause of international justice.

Well, then, 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 greatest democracies.

And that principled projection of force is the only thing that will ensure the peace and the security of the world in the future.

More often than not, "international law," quote, unquote, has been used as a make-believe justification for hindering the march of freedom.

When Ronald Reagan sent American servicemen into harm's way to liberate Grenada from the hands of a communist dictatorship, the U.N. General Assembly responded by voting to condemn the action of the elected president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, as a, quote, "violation of international law," end of quote, and, I am obliged to add, they did so by a larger majority than when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was condemned by the same General Assembly.

Similarly, the U.S. effort to overthrow Nicaragua's communist dictatorship by supporting Nicaragua's freedom fighters and mining Nicaragua's harbors was declared by the World Court as a violation of international law.

And most recently, we learned that the chief prosecutor of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal has compiled a report on possible NATO war crimes during the Kosovo campaign. At first the prosecutor declared that it is fully within the scope of her authority to indict NATO pilots and commanders, and when news of her report leaked, she looked at herself and her decision a little bit, and then she started backpedaling.

She realized, I'm confident, that any attempt to indict NATO commanders would be the death knell of the International Criminal Court, but the very fact that she explored this possibility at all brings to light that it is wrong.

With this brave new world of global justice which proposes a system in which independent prosecutors and judges, answerable to no state or institution, have somehow unfettered power to sit in judgment of the foreign policy decisions of Western democracies, no U.N. institution -- not the Security Council, not the Yugoslav tribunal, not the future ICC -- is competent to judge the foreign policy and national security decisions of the United States of America.

American courts routinely refuse cases where they are asked to sit in judgment of our government's national security decisions, stating that they are not competent to judge such decisions.

Well, if we do not submit our national security decisions to the judgment of a court of the United States, why would Americans submit them to the judgment of an International Criminal Court a continent away comprised of mostly foreign judges elected by an international body made up of he membership of the United Nations General Assembly? It's not going to happen, my friends.

It's not going to happen.

Americans distrust concepts like the International Criminal Court and claims by the United Nations to be the sole source of legitimacy for the use of force because Americans have a profound distrust of accumulated power.

Our Founding Fathers, to whom I often refer, created a government founded on a system of checks and balances and a dispersal of power.

In his 1962 classic, "Capitalism and Freedom," the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman rightly declared, and I quote, "Government power must be dispersed.

If government is to exercise power, better in the country than in the state, better in the state than in Washington, D.C., because," he says, "if I do not like what my local community does, I can move to another local community. And if I do not like what my state does, I can move to another one. But if I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations."

Forty years later, the U.N. seeks to impose its Utopian vision of an international law on Americans.

We can add this question: Where do we go when we don't like the laws of the world?

Today, while our friends in Europe could cede more and more power upwards to supernational institutions like the European Union, the Americans are heading in precisely the opposite direction; America is in the process of reducing centralized power by taking more and more authority that had been amassed by the federal government in Washington, D.C., and referring it to the individual states, where it rightly belongs.

And that is why Americans reject the idea of a sovereign United Nations that presumes to be the source of legitimacy for the United States government's policies, foreign or domestic.

There is only one source of legitimacy of the American government's policies, and that is the consent of the American people.

And if the United Nations, my friends, is to survive into the 21st century, it must recognize its limitations.

The demand of the United States have not changed very much since Henry Cabot Lodge laid out his conditions for joining the League of Nations 80 years ago. And 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.

And that 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 instrument, 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 with you -- eventual U.S. withdrawal.

Thank you for putting up with a fellow who came here to speak candidly and honestly with you.

Now, you come to Washington, and let's talk further about it.