New U.S. Ambassador to UN: U.S. Should Give Up a "Pinch of Sovereignty"

Samantha Power with her husband, Cass Sunstein

By  Joe Wolverton, II, J.D. 

On August 1, 87 senators agreed that Power should be the U.S. ambassador to the UN. Only 10 senators opposed her confirmation. 

Despite speculation that “Power would be the target of concerted opposition by Republican lawmakers concerned with her past positions on Israel or American responsibility for failure to intervene in humanitarian conflicts,” President Obama’s nominee sailed safely into Turtle Bay.

The identity of many of those whose names appear on the roster of “nay” votes is by now familiar, including Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Ted Cruz (R-Texas). 

Lee took to Twitter to express his concerns with the Power confirmation: “The U.N. is in need of sweeping reform, and I don't believe Samantha Power is the right person to lead this effort,” Lee tweeted.

Despite his good intentions, Senator Lee should understand that no amount of reform will ever repair something that is fundamentally flawed and absolutely antithetical to the timeless principles of liberty upon which the United States was founded.

For his part, Cruz went the extra mile in his effort to thwart Power’s appointment, issuing a strongly worded warning to citizens and colleagues that Power’s record evinced that she would surrender U.S. sovereignty to the globalist bureaucrats at the UN. Wrote Cruz:

Today I voted to oppose the nomination of Samantha Power to be Ambassador to the United Nations. My opposition to her nomination comes down to one word: sovereignty.

I have seen firsthand how treaties and conventions negotiated at the United Nations and elsewhere can have unintended consequences for the United States when I represented Texas before the US Supreme Court in successfully arguing that no President has the authority to force a state to comply with an order from the United Nations and the International Court of Justice.

Samantha Power’s positions on the United Nations suggest she agrees with President Obama in giving the United Nations authority over fundamental rights, such as our right to bear arms, and in allowing US taxpayer dollars to be used at the UN to undermine our ally, Israel.

In 2003, she wrote that “giving up a pinch of sovereignty” to organizations such as the UN is good for the United States and our security.

There is no higher national security principle than defending American sovereignty, especially at the United Nations, where it has been demonstrated time and time again that when it comes to authority over the United States, when you give the UN a pinch, they will take a mile.

As is so often the case, Cruz’s criticism is spot-on.

Despite Power’s maddening (and perhaps treasonous) agenda, the United Nations poses an even greater and more immediate threat to the perpetuation of freedom in the United States.

In a wide-ranging and well-documented article published by The New American, William Jasper laid out the plans being cooked up and carried out by the globocrats in the UN. Speaking of the establishment media’s effort to downplay the UN’s threat, Jasper wrote:

However, very influential Americans, as well as foreign leaders, in politics, media, and academe, have been advocating — blatantly and openly, as well as indirectly — for transforming the United Nations system into a full-blown world government. What’s more, they have begun actual implementation. It is no longer hypothetical that the UN and its affiliated institutions will usurp legislative, executive, and judicial powers, including taxing, policing, and military powers. It has already begun; it is already happening. And it is happening with the acquiescence, approval, encouragement, and funding of globalists in our own government, both Republicans and Democrats.

Later, regarding the UN’s drive to consolidate control over the entire planet, Jasper warns:

The UN grabs for power cited above are far from a complete list. The UN’s Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) aims to give the UN authority over the planet’s oceans, coastal waters, fisheries, seabed oil and mineral wealth, and maritime traffic. The UN’s World Health Organization and Food & Agriculture Organization are in charge of the Codex Alimentarius, the UN effort to regulate and take control over raw food, processed food, and semi-processed food, including vitamin and mineral supplements, herbs, and other nutritional products. UNESCO has insinuated itself into American schools and families through “partnerships” with our federal and state Education Departments that include curriculum design and invasive, psychologically manipulative “emotional wellness” evaluations. The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) not only supports forced abortion in China, but works assiduously with Planned Parenthood to overturn national abortion laws and make abortion legal and commonplace worldwide.

Now that she will occupy the driver’s seat in the United States’ presence on the Security Council, it is likely that Power will coordinate an unprecedented acceleration of the drive toward one world government and a subordination of U.S. sovereignty to the unelected, unaccountable whims of that world body.

With regard to the policies she will promote from her new global bully pulpit, Samantha Power’s record speaks for itself.

Ambassador Power rose to prominence in government circles as part of her campaign to promote a doctrine known as the Responsibility to Protect. Notably, this philosophy was also espoused by Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian lawmaker who has publicly questioned the reality of the Holocaust and who was a dedicated lictor of the late leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization — Yasser Arafat.

Responsibility to Protect (also known as Responsibility to Act) is a doctrine advanced by the United Nations and is predicated on the proposition that sovereignty is a privilege, not a right, and that if any regime in any nation violates the prevailing precepts of acceptable governance, then the international community is morally obligated to revoke that nation’s sovereignty and assume command and control of the offending country.

The three pillars of the United Nations-backed Responsibility to Protect are:

• A state has a responsibility to protect its population from mass atrocities.

• The international community has a responsibility to assist the state if it is unable to protect its population on its own.

• If the state fails to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful measures have failed, the international community has the responsibility to intervene through coercive measures such as economic sanctions.

Military intervention is considered the last resort.

Records indicate that the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, of which Samantha Power is a co-founder, participated in the advisory board of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty that was established by the Canadian government in September 2000 to address the growing problem of “mass atrocities.”

It was this “independent” commission that coined the term “responsibility to protect.”

Also of significance to the current examination of Samantha Power is the fact that she is the founding executive director and the head of the Carr Center at the precise time it was helping to hammer out the details of the implementation of the Responsibility to Protect.

There are other more ominous threads in the tapestry depicting the relationship that exists among President Obama, Samantha Power, the Atrocities Prevention Board that she currently heads, the United Nations, and America’s official sponsorship of the Responsibility to Protect.

The worldwide leader in the promotion of this sovereignty-stealing doctrine that Samantha Power worked to develop is the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect (GCR2P).

As published on its website, the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect’s mission is:

to help transform the principle of the responsibility to protect into a practical guide for action in the face of mass atrocities. The GCR2P was founded by leading figures in government and academia, as well as by International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam International, Refugees International, and WFM-Institute for Global Policy. 

The GCR2P engages in advocacy around specific crises; conducts research designed to further understanding of R2P; recommends and supports strategies to consolidate the norm and help states build capacity; and works closely with NGOs, governments and regional bodies which are seeking to operationalize the responsibility to protect.

One of the biggest financial supporters of the GCR2P is the Open Society Institute, which itself is a branch of the Open Society Foundation, an organization created by leftist financier and Rothschild benefactor George Soros.

A quick perusal of the GCR2P website reveals that Soros’ group is one of a very small cadre of sponsors not affiliated with any government. The other two sponsors are the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (a substantial funder of National Public Radio) and Scott and Elena Lawlor.

Apart from providing financial backing to the Responsibility to Protect, Soros personally believes in and promotes the philosophy. In an article published by Foreign Policy in 2004 entitled “The People’s Sovereignty: How a New Twist on an Old Idea Can Protect the World’s Most Vulnerable Populations,” Soros presented his take on the principles that undergird the Responsibility to Protect. “True sovereignty belongs to the people, who in turn delegate it to their governments,” Soros wrote.

And:

If governments abuse the authority entrusted to them and citizens have no opportunity to correct such abuses, outside interference is justified. By specifying that sovereignty is based on the people, the international community can penetrate nation-states’ borders to protect the rights of citizens.

In particular, the principle of the people’s sovereignty can help solve two modern challenges: the obstacles to delivering aid effectively to sovereign states, and the obstacles to global collective action dealing with states experiencing internal conflict. 

So deep are Soros’ roots in the Responsibility to Protect family tree that Ramesh Thakur, one of the men credited with first uttering the term “responsibility to protect,” sits with Soros on several boards and is a former distinguished fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, which participates in international efforts with another institute founded by Soros.

The picture is darker still. Thakur, the co-author of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine that is so dear to Samantha Power, was quoted in a Canadian newspaper article published in March 2011 pushing for a “global rebalancing” and “international redistribution” of power that would usher in a “new world order.”

As The New American and The John Birch Society have chronicled for decades, the only way to protect U.S. sovereignty from the globalist government-in-waiting and the establishment of the new world order is to get the United States out of the UN and the UN out of the United States.

With Power in power, the need is urgent: Now, more than ever. 


Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels frequently nationwide speaking on topics of nullification, the NDAA, and the surveillance state. He can be reached at jwolverton@thenewamerican.com.