Does U.S. Participation in UNESCO Reduce U.S. Sovereignty

There seems to be a misperception in some circles that U.S. membership in international organizations such as UNESCO reduces national sovereignty. See for example this article which states:

direct sovereign control by the United Nations is not the issue. The issue lies in UN program mandates and implementation and how these programs link to other treaties and agreements, which, if accepted by Congress, could lead to direct loss of sovereignty. When an international treaty or agreement is signed, we agree to the terms and conditions of the agreements, and by default we have ceded a portion of our national sovereignty in order to meet those terms and conditions. And while the agreements do not specifically state that the United Nations has direct sovereignty, they do permit "partnerships" and other forms of cooperation between the US and the UN that provide the UN access to the sovereign policy decision making process of the United states in direct conflict with the Consititution (sic) of the United States.

The same article states with respect to two important programs of UNESCO:

Documents concerning these programs specifically state that each nation maintains its own sovereignty. Furthermore, there is no direct evidence that UNESCO, in which both programs reside at the international level, has ever directly dictated national policy concerning any Biosphere Reserve or World Heritage Site in the United States.

There is a tiny exception that the authors don't seem to recognize, which is that when the executive branch of the government agreed to join UNESCO and gets Congressional approval, it accepts the conditions of the organization that it will give notice before withdrawing (again) from the organization and will pay the assessed membership contributions while a member. Of course, the Congress must appropriate the funds to pay the dues and it frequently chooses to allow very large arrears to accumulate of unpaid dues.

It is true that UNESCO is the venue in which a number of conventions (multinational treaties) are negotiated. If the U.S. government chooses to ratify a convention, then it does agree to abide then the government does agree to abide by its terms. Of course the U.S. government has broken the terms of many treaties that it has signed in the past. Consider those with native American tribes for example. So even that concern might be overstated. However, treaties are ratified by the Congress only when the majority of its members believe that the benefits to be gained by the United States outweigh the obligations that the nation is incurring.

Note that the Constitution specifically states (Article II, Section 2) that the president "shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur." Thus the founding fathers recognized that the government would need and want to negotiate treaties, and that power has not been eliminated in more than 200 years.

Basically, UNESCO neither seeks nor has any capacity to interfere with the sovereignty of the United States, and has never done so. It does serve occasionally as a venue in which conventions are negotiated, and the United States government has sometimes ratifies these conventions, such as UNESCO's international copyright convention. When our representatives decide to ratify (or not to ratify) a convention they are performing a duty set forth in the Constitution.

The important point that seems to be missed by people worried about the possible loss of sovereignty by the United States is that the country does not have sovereign control over everything it needs. Take biodiversity, and a single example of the genetic diversity needed to assure that plant breeders can continue to produce crop varieties to improve productivity of American agriculture and protect us from new crop pests and diseases. The genetic diversity we need for each crop species is to be found in the wild species from which the domestic species was derived. Those centers of diversity are to be found in the Middle East, Asia, and South and Central America but not in the United States (except for a few species such as cranberries and sunflowers). It is only through international agreements that have put the collections of seeds in a commons for use by all countries that we have access to the genetic resources that have already been collected. UNESCO's biosphere reserve program offers the best possibility that I know of to develop the landscape management approaches that will be required to protect the wild species in their natural habitat against the pressures that are sure to come from increasing population and increasing economic demand for land resources.