IN THIS ISSUE:
- Trump Puts U.S. Sovereignty First
- Bad Energy Calculations Undercut Common Warming Claims, Says Study
Trump Puts U.S. Sovereignty First
During his 1796 Farewell Address, President George Washington advised the United States to avoid permanent alliances and “foreign entanglements,” urging the nation to prioritize its own interests, maintain neutrality, and foster trade without political ties. His admonition was intended to preserve American independence: “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.”
Sadly, in my opinion, politicians rapidly proceeded to ignore Washington’s warning. Across the years since 1796, foreign entanglements in the form of international, bilateral, multilateral, and virtually global agreements have become commonplace. Nearly every administration, if not every one, has negotiated or committed to some form of international “cooperation.”
Some of these agreements have probably advanced U.S. interests, but there is no question that each and every one of them has compromised U.S. sovereignty to some degree or another, legally limiting our nation’s course of action and domestic and geopolitical autonomy, at least to the extent that we have taken such commitments as seriously binding despite no authority beyond our own nation’s federalist system of government being available to enforce them.
Rarely have presidents clawed back U.S. sovereignty by pulling out of treaties unilaterally. Certainly, no president in my lifetime or likely ever has clawed back more American independence in the process of advancing the nation’s well-being as President Donald Trump did on January 7, 2026. To little fanfare, when one considers the economic, political, and geopolitical implications, on that day Trump withdrew the United States from 66 international organizations, agreements, and treaties covering a vast array of public policies. The withdrawal affected 31 UN-linked bodies and 35 other international entities established by bilateral or multilateral agreements not under the UN’s aegis.
Among the organizations and agreements Trump withdrew the U.S. from further participation in and, importantly, financial support of are these:
- Carbon-Free Energy Compact;
- Education Cannot Wait;
- European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats;
- Forum of European National Highway Research Laboratories;
- Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund;
- Global Forum on Migration and Development;
- Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research;
- Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals, and Sustainable Development;
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change;
- International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property;
- International Cotton Advisory Committee;
- International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies;
- International Renewable Energy Agency;
- International Solar Alliance;
- Pan American Institute of Geography and History;
- Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combatting Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia;
- Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century;
- Venice Commission of the Council of Europe;
- United Nations (UN) organizations:
- Department of Economic and Social Affairs;
- UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)—Economic Commission for Africa;
- ECOSOC—Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia;
- The UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent;
- UN Alliance of Civilization;
- UN Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries;
- UN Energy;
- UN Human Settlements Programme;
- UN Institute for Training and Research;
- UN Population Fund;
- UN Register of Conventional Arms;
- UN System Chief Executives Board for Coordination;
- UN System Staff College; and
- UN University.
Many of these organizations and treaties promote restrictions on fossil fuel use that are unnecessary from a climate-change perspective, are counterproductive toward economic progress, hamper the development of poorer countries, and contravene America’s interests and the long-term goals of energy dominance laid out by the Trump administration. Others promote population control, and still others promote social agendas that many in the United States and the present administration reject. For instance, any American who wishes to promote education and cultural activities or LGBTQ programs or policies in countries around the globe is free to do so, and taxpayer dollars should not be used to promote such programs any more than taxpayer dollars should be used to promote Christianity or libertarian philosophy being taught or enforced around the world in schools, through broadcast media, in playhouses, or through NGOs, UN-affiliated or not.
Every president and every member of Congress swears to uphold the Constitution of the United States: America first and often only. There is no grant in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights to the federal government to support foreign governments and their institutions or people, or economic, political, or social causes on foreign lands. Trump is taking that oath seriously. Neither he nor anyone in Congress was elected to represent the UN or the interests of foreign peoples or governments. They weren’t elected world leaders or international statespersons, but rather to represent the interests of the people of the United States, in large part by upholding the Constitution, and to promote prosperity and individual liberty and choice here. Part of the idea for that is that through the U.S. example and the success of the American experiment in producing prosperity and equal justice under the law, other countries would follow suit in the pursuit of the same goals. The ideal has never been obtained, of course, but it’s certainly a goal worth striving for and does not countenance or allow one group of Americans taking hard-earned dollars from other Americans (and also their liberty to choose how they spend those dollars and what causes to support) to promote the takers’ political and social goals in other countries, especially when those goals undermine U.S. sovereignty, which they often do.
Consider just one treaty Trump withdrew the United States from: the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). The clawing back of U.S. autonomy and the saving of future U.S. resources was tremendous. Trump had previously withdrawn the United States from the Paris climate agreement, but because Obama didn’t treat it as a treaty and America was still a party to the FCCC, from which the Paris agreement flowed, it was easy for Biden to take us back in. With the United States now having withdrawn from the FCCC itself, future presidents cannot bind us to any climate agreement or climate funding or resource commitment entered into under the FCCC. Before taking U.S. dollars to spend on international climate funds and commitments going forward, a future president would have to convince the Senate to rejoin the treaty, a high hurdle which is very unlikely to be overcome, which is why Obama didn’t submit the Paris agreement to the Senate for ratification.
The United States and other developed countries have squandered trillions of dollars on global climate efforts to no effect in limiting carbon dioxide emissions, preventing temperature rise, avoiding sea level rise, or increasing global resilience in the face of future extreme weather events. What the FCCC did result in were restrictions on the types of homes that could be built, limitations on the types of appliances and cars people could use, and higher prices for travel and food. The UN’s climate program is great at restricting personal choice but not so good at advancing personal well-being or prosperity.
We at Heartland and at the now-defunct National Center for Policy Analysis, where I worked previously, have been fighting for than 30 years for the United States to abandon the FCCC. Trump got us out in one day. If he had stopped there, it would have been a glorious day for freedom, but he didn’t, and instead he advanced U.S. sovereignty in other ways against the climate cabal and across an array of other public policy issue areas.
Why did Trump take such a bold and sweeping action? A fact sheet released by the U.S. Mission to the UN Aid Agencies in Rome explained:
Today, President Donald J. Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum directing the withdrawal of the United States from 66 international organizations that no longer serve American interests.
The Memorandum orders all Executive Departments and Agencies to cease participating in and funding 35 non-United Nations (UN) organizations and 31 UN entities that operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty. …
These withdrawals will end American taxpayer funding and involvement in entities that advance globalist agendas over U.S. priorities, or that address important issues inefficiently or ineffectively such that U.S. taxpayer dollars are best allocated in other ways to support the relevant missions.
RESTORING AMERICAN SOVEREIGNTY: President Trump is ending U.S. participation in international organizations that undermine America’s independence and waste taxpayer dollars on ineffective or hostile agendas.
Many of these bodies promote radical climate policies, global governance, and ideological programs that conflict with U.S. sovereignty and economic strength.
American taxpayers have spent billions on these organizations with little return, while they often criticize U.S. policies, advance agendas contrary to our values, or waste taxpayer dollars by purporting to address important issues but not achieving any real results.
By exiting these entities, President Trump is saving taxpayer money and refocusing resources on America First priorities.
Trump’s actions didn’t appear out of nowhere. Rather, it was one more embodiment of his longstanding “America First,” “Make America Great Again” philosophy and commitment. He believes, and I certainly concur, that reducing outside powers’ influence over U.S. domestic policy is a win for the American people, our economy, and our national security. Sovereignty is critical to every country’s political independence. It doesn’t guarantee that people will be well-served by the government they have, but it does offer the only hope that the laws and regulations placed on them will not be imposed from outside.
The full results of America’s abandoning of bad treaties and agreements have yet to play out. What should the clear from the outset, however, is that this action will prevent billions of taxpayer dollars from being spent on foreign boondoggles, many of which trickle down to fund our geopolitical enemies and interests and policies that undermine or run contrary to many average Americans’ interests and rights. Across a broad range of issues, it should also prevent foreign powers from restricting the choices of our leaders and industries through multilateral agreements that past administrations wedded America to. With these treaties no longer in place, American politicians can put Americans first (as they should always have been doing) without first checking with international bureaucrats.
Sources: The White House; U.S. State Department; The Heartland Institute
Bad Energy Calculations Undercut Common Warming Claims, Says Study
A recent paper published in the journal Science of Climate Change argues claims of unusual warming over the past century are built at least in part on improperly accounted-for measurements of global ocean heat content.
The researchers present evidence that the way ocean temperature and anomaly data are accounted for violates the scientific method in key respects, including established principles of thermodynamics, thus throwing temperature outputs in doubt.
The problems begin with the sparsity of the Argo system of floats. The system comprises 3,600 to 3,900 floats dropped into the Earth’s oceans over time. The 3,900 floats may sound like a lot until one recognizes that the Earth’s oceans cover more than 71 percent of the planet’s surface, with each Argo representing 35,864 square miles. For comparison, the United States, which comprises just about 1.9 percent of the Earth’s surface, has more than 7,300 stationary surface stations, and Europe, which makes up about 2 percent of the Earth’s surface, has about 6,600 surface stations.
Even more damaging to any true assessment of the oceans, the Argo floats bob up and down in the ocean and across the surface, travelling as much as 50 kilometers, measuring temperatures all along the way, yet when each Argo reports temperatures, it is documented as if the data were recorded at a single location on a particular day and time, the paper shows. Also, as the researchers note,
[Argo] samples only the upper ocean, excluding roughly 50% of total ocean volume and thermal energy, . . . [then] [a]nomalies are computed by subtracting values from statistically derived reference [temperatures] based on sparse historical data over arbitrary baseline periods. Measured temperatures are then interpolated onto global 3D grids using prescribed covariance functions. These anomalies represent numerical differences without physical meaning as temperature deviations … .
The research team also examined several other problematic aspects of the climate change narrative that humans are causing runaway global warming. Major uncertainties they examined, documented, and quantified include the following:
- unmeasured variability in boundary currents and energetic ocean regions;
- absence of data from half the ocean below 2,000 meters’ (1.2 miles) depth, plus other areas;
- severe under-sampling in polar regions where ice prevents float operations;
- arbitrary decisions in the choosing and calculation of reference baseline time periods; and
- errors caused by assigning measurements to incorrect positions.
In light of the discovered uncertainties, documented errors, and poor adherence to known scientific principles, the team concluded the “widely cited figure in IPCC AR6 showing Earth accumulating energy at a rate of 0.7 ± 0.2 watts per square meter has an actual uncertainty roughly ten times larger than what the IPCC claims, making the central value ‘statistically indistinguishable from zero,’” the press release announcing the study’s publication states regarding the UN’s influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“The public has been told that the ocean is ‘warming’ and absorbing over 90% of ‘excess’ planetary heat,” says lead author Jonathan Cohler in the release. “But when we examined how these numbers are actually calculated, we found they represent computational artifacts rather than measurements of real physical energy[,] rendering the entire process a category error.”
More importantly, the study found the calculations violate a known and widely accepted scientific principle established more than a century ago: that temperature cannot be meaningfully averaged across systems that are not in equilibrium.
“Temperature describes the state of a specific location at a specific moment,” says coauthor David R. Legates, Ph.D., in the press release. “Averaging temperatures from different water masses separated by hundreds of kilometers and weeks of time produces a number, but that number doesn’t correspond to any physical reality.”
Another coauthor, Willie Soon, Ph.D., notes the scientifically invalid, indeed fraudulent nature of adjusting data to conform to a theory.
“You cannot confirm a measurement by adjusting independent observations to agree with it,” Soon says in the release. “Without valid measurements of actual energy accumulation, assertions about human-caused warming lack empirical support.”
The IPCC has violated the scientific method in temperature measurement in general and in ocean temperature measurement in particular in multiple ways, says Kesten Green, Ph.D., another coauthor of the study:
The IPCC’s ocean heat content claim is based on research that failed to comply with five of eight criteria necessary for compliance with the scientific method. The research failed to give alternative hypotheses fair consideration, used unrepresentative (invalid) data and unvalidated methods, failed to test hypotheses using experiments and predictions, then drew strong conclusions that did not follow logically from their fatally flawed findings.
Sources: Science of Climate Change
