Dealing With Conspiracy Theories and Rumors Is No Walk in the Park

If you want to know the sorry direction in which American foreign policy is drifting these days, you have to look not in Los Angeles or Washington, but in small towns and rural areas--like Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountain National Park.

This summer, the Smokies Guide, the official brochure distributed to hikers and other visitors, contains a short but extraordinary article. “Park Is Not Run by United Nations,” the headline says. The article reassures readers that the national park “remains the property of the United States government.”

Why was such an article felt to be necessary? It turns out that a few years ago, the park was designated by the United Nations as an international “biosphere preserve” in recognition of its fine trees, plants and wildlife. A few hundred areas around the world enjoy this honor.

But during the past year, park officials say, the rumor has begun to spread on radio talk shows that Great Smoky has been taken over by the United Nations. “We’ve been getting a rash of inquiries,” said park spokesman Bob Miller. “There are even claims that we aren’t spraying our trees because the U.N. won’t let us.”

It turns out that Great Smoky is not alone. Rumors have been spreading that other national parks have also fallen under the control of the United Nations--or even that the national parks are being used as staging areas for U.N. troops.

Yellowstone National Park, the nation’s best known, is also the target of the conspiracy theorists. Since 1978, Yellowstone has been listed as a World Heritage site, an award given to about 100 famous places in the world, including Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and Tanzania’s Serengeti plains.

As a result, says Yellowstone official Cheryl Mathews, “We have been getting calls over the past year. The callers have heard from radio talk shows that the U.S. government no longer controls or runs Yellowstone. . . . We reassure them that there is nothing to all the talk.”

In other words, our national parks are now being forced to defend themselves against the current delusion of the far right: that the United States, the world’s only superpower, whose defense budget dwarfs that of any other nation, is somehow losing its sovereignty.

The imagined perpetrator of this conspiracy is not always clear. Sometimes it is said to be the United Nations. Sometimes it is a vague “new world order.” That phrase was coined by President Bush to describe the international alliance America put together during the Persian Gulf War. Now, turning reality upside down, the conspiracy theorists have decided that the new world order is some sort of plot against the United States.

Does any of this really matter for American foreign policy? Do the fantasies of these extremists affect how the United States deals with the world?

Absolutely. For concrete examples, ask the Pentagon, or look at some of the hassles it has recently had as it has tried to nurture working relationships with other armies.

* At Ft. Polk, La., a year ago, the Pentagon for the first time welcomed soldiers from East European nations and former Soviet republics--places like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Ukraine--to take part in mock peacekeeping exercises under NATO’s Partnership for Peace program.

A rational person might think the only country that might be threatened by these exercises would be Russia. This was, after all, the United States forging new military ties with members of the former Warsaw Pact. Nevertheless, local militias in Louisiana warned that the exercises were part of a new world order plot, and U.S. military officials were obliged to issue a fact book rebutting the rumors.

* At Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico last May, U.S. military officials launched a training program for German air force pilots. The arrangement seemed straightforward enough to the Pentagon; after all, Germany is not only an ally but turned over large chunks of territory to U.S. bases and hundreds of thousands of troops during the Cold War.

But Air Force bases across the country were besieged by phone calls after a Florida talk show host claimed the German pilots were evidence of “a global plan by the United Nations nitwits to control the world.”

In other words, these conspiracy theories about the United Nations and the new world order make it more difficult for the United States to deal with old friends or develop new ones. Any hint of cooperation with a foreign government or international organization is seized upon as part of a plot.

If these theories were just the fervid outpourings of a few powerless extremists, perhaps one could dismiss them as harmless. But they are starting to affect America’s political leadership. Some of our politicians are moving in to capitalize on the conspiracy theories, and other leaders are simply looking the other way rather than seeking to combat them.

In June, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), chairman of the House Resources Committee, sent a letter to his congressional colleagues. “Is Boutros Boutros-Ghali Zoning Land in Your District?” asked the letter in large, bold type. He warned that the biosphere reserve program is part of a “one-world zoning enterprise” run by the United Nations.

At the Republican National Convention last month, Rep. Robert S. Walker (R-Pa.), presenting the party’s plank on foreign policy and defense issues, thundered to the delegates that American citizens will never “face taxes implemented by the United Nations.” The audience cheered and clapped.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) accused President Clinton of the crime of “U.N.-following.” And Bob Dole, accepting the Republican presidential nomination, pledged that if he is president, American troops “will know the president is commander in chief, not Boutros Boutros-Ghali or any other U.N. secretary-general.”

For his part, Clinton has done little to dispel the illusions or challenge the nationalistic obsessions about the United Nations. Indeed, his administration seemed be trying to co-opt the attacks on the U.N. when it announced this spring what amounts to a public campaign to replace Boutros-Ghali as secretary-general.

The truth is that the United Nations is a broke, mostly powerless and ineffectual organization that, however, American presidents from Harry S. Truman to Clinton have found moderately useful for both American diplomacy and security interests--including the Korean War and the Gulf War.

The organization was created by the United States and is housed on American soil. It doesn’t have the power to zone or tax American citizens or anybody else. The attacks on U.N. control over American troops date back to the 1993 deaths of 18 American soldiers in Somalia; but they were, in fact, under the direct command and control of the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla.

What do the spreading, groundless fears about the United Nations taking over our national parks tell us? First, that some Americans seem desperate to find some grand new conspiracy they can blame for undermining America, now that the idea of a communist takeover has vanished with the end of the Cold War.

But the roots of the U.N. conspiracy theories date back long before the Cold War. In his classic study, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” political scientist Richard Hofstadter described how these conspiracy theories have cropped up throughout American history. In the 19th century, the Masons and the Catholics were accused of plotting against America. Now it is the United Nations.

If politicians running for office aren’t willing to denounce these conspiracy theories, then maybe other well-known Americans could, like Bush or Nancy Reagan or Colin L. Powell or Mario M. Cuomo. Any of them might point out that this country has profited from its participation in the United Nations, and that the U.N. poses no threat to American sovereignty.

At Great Smoky Mountain National Park, authorities say even trips to the park by international visitors, or exchange students from abroad, are prompting worried phone calls about who the strange foreigners might be. “There are enough things in life to worry about without this,” park spokesman Miller said.

This is not some abstract issue. What’s at stake is our ability to deal with the rest of the world. When we reach the point where even Great Smoky and Yellowstone are the subject of far-fetched conspiracy theories, it’s time for the rest of America to stand up and take notice.