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

New American, The, May 3, 2004 by Steve Bonta

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.