New world order strategist: thirty years ago Richard N. Gardner proposed a "piecemeal" approach to world government. The internationalist insiders have followed his blueprint ever since.

There have always been individuals who prefer to exercise the substance, rather than enjoy the pageantry, of power. Richard N. Gardner, professor of law and international organization at Columbia University, is one of them. Almost unknown to the American public at large, Richard Gardner is arguably one of the most influential men alive--an academic, lawyer, banker, economist and all-around internationalist political insider who for decades has been near the apex of the American and internationalist establishment. Gardner is the intellectual godfather of the modern new world order, an academic counterpart to the David Rockefellers who finance and the Henry Kissingers who lend political support to the accelerating drive for global government.

Thirty years ago, in April 1974, Richard N. Gardner penned an article for the Council on Foreign Relations journal Foreign Affairs, wherein he laid out a coherent, sweeping program for successfully setting up world government. That Richard Gardner's program is still being followed, with considerable success, three decades later, is testament to his cunning as a global strategist; that Gardner himself continues to be a guiding light, so to speak, for Democrat and Republican administrations alike--including the current one--is evidence of his enduring clout among the internationalist set in the United Nations, Congress, the State Department, and elsewhere in the corridors of global power in the United States and Europe.

Even by the ratified standards of the American Eastern Establishment, Gardner's resume is extraordinary. He holds a B.A. in economics from Harvard University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in economics from Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. His Oxford thesis is regarded as the "classic" study of Anglo-American diplomacy in the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 and in the creation of the GATT trade agreement. He is a member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Gardner serves on the International Capital Markets Advisory Committee of the New York Stock Exchange and sits on the boards of two major international banking institutions.

Gardner has long been closely affiliated with the United Nations, including a six-year stint as a member of the U.S. delegation to the UN General Assembly in the 1960s. In 1992 he was a special adviser to the United Nations at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. More recently, he has been involved in a UN project involving dialogue with the Chinese Institute of international Studies, the Chinese counterpart of the Council on Foreign Relations.

No less impressive is Gardner's record as an insider in domestic politics. Beginning in 1961, when Gardner left Columbia University to become President John F. Kennedy's deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, Gardner has served in nearly every presidential administration up to the present day. He was a member of President Richard Nixon's Commission on International Trade and Investment Policy, and served as President Jimmy Carter's ambassador to Italy and President Bill Clinton's ambassador to Spain. He is now a member of President George W. Bush's Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations as well as of the State Department's Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy.

The House of World Order

Richard Gardner began writing about world government in the early 1960s. His first book on the subject, In Pursuit of World Order, originally published in 1962, foreshadowed Gardner's later program for world order. Wrote Harlan Cleveland, President Kennedy's assistant secretary of state, in a laudatory foreword to a later edition of the book: "A decent world order will only be built brick by brick. Those who wish to help build it, and not merely to talk about building it, will concentrate on the next brick--on how it can be fashioned, where it belongs, how it will fit, when it should be added to the structure.... Richard Gardner ... has helped fashion most of [these bricks] during the past four years as part of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. He understands the process of international institution-building as clearly and deeply as any American of our time."

It was the "brick by brick" approach that obviously inspired Gardner to lay out, a decade later, a comprehensive strategy for world order in an influential article in Foreign Affairs entitled "The Hard Road to World Order." The significance of this article cannot be overstated; it lays bare, in plain if somewhat academic prose, the strategy for global control that internationalist insiders have followed with slavish dedication ever since. Gardner's article is both a strategic summary and a digest of recommended tactics, crucial reading for anyone wishing to make sense out of the multipronged and apparently haphazard internationalist assault on American sovereignty.

"The 'house of world order'," Gardner recommended, "will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great 'booming, buzzing confusion,' to use William James' famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault." This would entail the "decentralized, disorderly and pragmatic process of inventing or adapting institutions of limited jurisdiction and selected membership to deal with specific problems on a case-by-case basis, as the necessity for cooperation is perceived by the relevant nations. Such institutions of limited jurisdiction will have a better chance of doing what must be done to make a 'rule of law' possible among nations." Calling for "strengthened international institutions at the global and regional levels," Gardner repudiated the older formula of "building up a few ambitious central institutions of universal membership and general jurisdiction," such as the United Nations itself.

Gardner's program is based on strategic deception--except that the deception is deployed against the American public, not an enemy military force. By building world order one piece at a time, akin to assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, Gardner and his associates hope to create an illusion of incompetence and disorder--a "booming, buzzing confusion"--to confuse would-be opponents of world government. Even those perceiving the intent behind individual programs can nonetheless be kept from recognizing the overall design, or from recognizing that so many seemingly disparate globalist programs could possibly be connected as part of a coherent strategy.

World Economic Control

As to the tactical details, Gardner's article laid out a number of ambitious policy objectives, most of which remain front-burner priorities for the internationalist insiders. First on the list, Gardner recommended reform of the international monetary system, strengthening the International Monetary Fund with "power to back its decisions by meaningful multilateral sanctions, such as ... the withholding of multilateral and bilateral credits and reserve facilities from recalcitrant deficit countries." The global financial organization was created at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire in 1944. It has indeed been strengthened into an oppressive international creditor and debt collection agency with the power to insist upon stringent terms of "conditionality" for extension of credit, terms that often include constitutional reforms and higher taxation of citizenries of debtor nations. As any Argentine citizen can attest, the IMF now enjoys the leverage to wreck the economies of entire countries, as it did to Argentina after the latter's default on debts owed in December 2001. The resulting economic collapse was the worst crisis ever experienced in a nation already well acquainted with the ravages of hyperinflation and currency instability.

Gardner's second recommendation was to "rewrite the ground rules for the conduct of international trade," including "seeking new rules in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to cover a whole range of hitherto unregulated nontariff barriers." These new trade regulations, Gardner effused, "will subject countries to an unprecedented degree of international surveillance over up to now sacrosanct 'domestic' policies."

This plank of Gardner's program is being very actively fitted in place, and with unprecedented success (if progress towards such an outcome as world government can be so styled) both regionally and globally. At the global level, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was completely rewritten and re-ratified in the mid-1990s, and the resulting organization--the World Trade Organization or WTO--was given a broad range of powers to compel member states, including the United States, to accept its rulings on trade policies and disputes. The Bush administration, in fact, recently experienced the business end of the World Trade Organization when, under threat of WTO-mandated trade sanctions levied against the U.S., the administration lifted steel tariffs.

Regionally, the internationalists have had even more success creating transnational trade regimes. The most far-reaching of these, the European Union (EU), which began life back in the late 1950s as the Common Market, has been built into a continental superstate complete with a European parliament and currency, as well as a nearly complete constitution. In the Americas, meanwhile, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has unequally yoked the United States to both Canada and Mexico, and the planned Free Trade Area of the Americas would extend a NAFTA-type arrangement to the entire Western Hemisphere (except Cuba) and possess more powers than NAFTA. The FTAA, if put into effect, would wreak even more havoc than NAFTA, creating a massive outflux of jobs and factories from the U.S. and leading, over time, to a complete subordination of American government to a continental government authority--akin to what the once independent nations of Europe have experienced within the EU. Trade, in other words, has become one of the most important pretexts for international government, as Gardner clearly anticipated 30 years ago.

"Global Commons"

Another key element of Gardner's 1974 program is "continued strengthening of the new global and regional agencies charged with protecting the world's environment." This would include "international agencies ... given broader powers to promulgate and revise standards limiting air and ocean pollution." Since 1992, when the UN-sponsored international environmental conference at Rio de Janeiro begat Agenda 21, a massive blueprint for a 21st-century international environmental regime, global environmentalists have been on the offensive. (And remember that Gardner was at the summit as a special adviser to ensure the success of this particular plank.) Five years later the UN adopted the Kyoto Protocol, a massive, sovereignty-sapping treaty imposing international pollution emissions standards and other environmentally motivated controls on government and industry worldwide. The United States has so far refused to sign the treaty, but the current Bush administration is trying to implement the Kyoto standards anyway--no doubt with the encouragement of pro-world government insiders sympathetic with the political aims of global environmentalism.

"In the 1974 Law of the Sea Conference and beyond," predicted Gardner, "there should eventually emerge a new international regime governing the world's oceans." What's more, he expected that "the regulatory responsibilities of the new oceans agency are likely to exceed those of any existing international organization." Giving the United Nations ultimate jurisdiction over the so-called "global commons"--which includes most prominently the oceans but is also intended to mean the atmosphere, the electromagnetic spectrum, and even circumjacent outer space--is a very high priority item for the internationalist set. The Law of the Sea Treaty was completed in 1982, but the United States refused to sign it, citing apprehensions about sovereignty. President Clinton later signed a retooled version of the treaty but was rebuffed by the Senate, led by Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), which refused to ratify it.

Now the treaty is under review yet again by the Senate, with Senator Lugar (R-Ind.), a staunch internationalist, pushing for speedy ratification. Fortunately for those anxious to preserve American independence, the treaty's progress has been slowed by negative publicity and critical testimony at Senate hearings.

J. William Middendorf, former secretary of the navy, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 8 that the Law of the Sea Treaty represented nothing less than "a turning point for the U.S. in the history of international relations." Referring to the international regulatory authorities and compulsory jurisdiction brought into existence by the treaty, Middendorf said that the Law of the Sea Convention "presents the U.S. with a stark choice. On the one hand, the U.S. may enter into this treaty and proceed on a path that cedes U.S. sovereignty to executive and quasi-judicial international authority with compulsory powers or reject the treaty and stick to the tried and true international system where relations are established between and among sovereign states."

Among potentially fatal pitfalls of this treaty, Middendorf identified, in addition to loss of sovereignty per se, "unnecessary limitations on the exploitation of resources" (meaning seabed and other marine resources, access to which will be strictly controlled and parceled out by the UN), "a step in the direction of international taxing authority," and "unnecessary risks to national security."

Given the revolutionary nature of the Law of the Sea Treaty, it's no wonder that Gardner promoted it as a critical component of the New World Order assembly line. Nevertheless, this treaty may come up for a vote in the full Senate later this year, with another huge chunk of American sovereignty hanging in the balance.

Monopoly on Arms

"The Hard Road to World Order" also anticipated a growing involvement of the United Nations in military matters, both in expanding its disarmament drive to include "conventional weapons" and in enlarging its misnamed "peacekeeping operations." Disarmament remains a pet conceit of the internationalist coterie, for reasons laid out in the early '60s in the U.S. government's "Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World," introduced at the 16th UN General Assembly and printed by the U.S. State Department under the title Freedom From War. The program envisaged disarming all nations to such an extent that, eventually, "no state would have the military power to challenge the progressively strengthened U.N. Peace Force." Gardner praised this program and referred to it extensively in his book In Pursuit of World Order. To this day, efforts to strip the United States of its nuclear weapons proceed apace with instruments such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which the United States has made a policy of observing despite not having ratified it.

In what is being set forth as a new test case of the global disarmament regime, the nation of Libya has recently submitted to a comprehensive regime of inspection and disarmament. Not that disarming Qaddafi is a bad thing; of greater concern is the precedent being established that failure to submit unconditionally to international weapons inspections will lead to invasion and subjugation. The systematic conquest of the prostrate peoples of the Middle East will eventually be replicated elsewhere, as an emboldened global regime insists on holding the American government--and American citizens--to the same standard of other UN tributary nations. Already, the United Nations is aggressively promoting "microdisarmament"--that is, the confiscation of weapons from civilian hands--as well as the eradication of any military weapons, like land mines, that it deems distasteful.

As for peacekeeping, the UN's record in recent years scarcely needs comment. From Somalia to the Balkans to Sierra Leone to Afghanistan, United Nations peacekeepers have become nearly ubiquitous enforcers of world order out of the barrel of a gun. In Iraq as well, the push is on to place the United Nations in charge of occupying forces there--just as it was the United Nations under whose authority the original Gulf War, and its 12-year aftermath of bombing raids and crippling sanctions, was carried out.

Throat and Hope

All of these developments were plotted out, in essence, in Richard Gardner's seminal article three decades ago. Unfortunately, the strategy of piecemeal buildup, of "booming, buzzing confusion," has worked all too well, as Gardner himself predicted it would: "[T]he case-by-case approach can produce some remarkable concessions of 'sovereignty' that could not be achieved on an across-the-board basis," he wrote. Yet informed Americans who oppose world government should take comfort in the fact that the internationalist insiders have had to resort to Gardner's "piecemeal" strategy in the first place. If the insiders could have accomplished overtly and instantly what they are now piecing together through stealth and patient gradualism, they surely would have done so. They've had to proceed slowly and cautiously on their "Hard Road to World Order," and their slowness and caution shows that they fear awakening the American people if they try to do too much too fast.

However, if Americans are to halt the engineered slide into world government, they will have to recognize that it is happening not by chance but as a result of a brilliantly conceived and consistently executed strategy calculated to confuse the opposition. And thanks to Richard Gardner, one of its chief architects, it's still an open secret after all these years.