The Obama administration’s recent announcement of the intention to bring thousands (and perhaps tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands) of unvetted Syrian refugees for resettlement throughout the United States was not a sudden, spur-of-the-moment decision. It was the result of a multi-year, internationalist push to implement the United Nations High Commission for Refugees’ “Transformative Agenda.” That official agenda aims at transforming Europe and America into chaotic, Balkanized regions afflicted with ethnic and religious strife, social turmoil — and terrorism — by surging masses of Muslim migrants into the European Union and the United States.

The UNHCR Transformative Agenda also aims at vastly boosting the funding for UN agencies and increasing UN authority over entire regions of the world beset with refugee crises — many of which are the result of wars and “peacekeeping” operations conducted jointly by the United States and the UN.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) executive director Anthony Lake are the UN point men working closely with the Obama State Department. The active leadership of both these individuals in the U.S. and EU refugee policies is cause for alarm. Even more alarming is the fact that they are not the only troubling participants; the ranks of the UN officials involved in formulating refugee “solutions” are filled with persons — including from Communist China — who have neither the interests of the refugees nor the security concerns of the West in mind. Guterres is the former Socialist Party prime minister of Portugal and former president of the European Council. Perhaps most notably, he was, from 1999-2005, president of the Socialist International, the radical Marxist organization that includes many “former” communist parties that have rebranded themselves as “socialist” or “social democrat” — without significantly changing their politics or personnel.

Although virtually unknown to most Americans, the Socialist International (SI) has been exerting enormous political influence worldwide since the 1950s, especially through its dominant influence at the United Nations.

SI “ultimate objective ... nothing less than world government”

The Socialist International membership includes more than 160 socialist parties from more than 100 countries, including from 54 nations where SI member parties are currently running the show or sharing power in a coalition government. At its 1962 Congress in Oslo, Norway, the Socialist International candidly proclaimed: “The ultimate objective of the parties of the Socialist International is nothing less than world government.... Membership of the United Nations must be made universal.” The SI has never deviated from that objective, and has used its growing influence to push greater empowerment of the UN and its agencies, to the point that the UN is now on the brink of becoming a world government.

On September 14, the SI and its parties weighed in on the growing refugee crisis in Europe, launching a global appeal for the EU to accept “the continuing flow of refugees and asylum seekers fleeing conflict zones.”

“The Socialist International calls on the EU to reach a speedy agreement on a fair and humane plan for accommodating the continuing flow of refugees and asylum seekers fleeing conflict zones,” the organization declared in a press statement. “While it is important to recognise that this is an issue of global dimension and requires that countries from all continents assume their fair share of responsibility,” the statement continued, “it is crucial for Europe today to act in line with the values, the spirit of solidarity and of common progress upon which the EU was founded with the participation of our movement, and in keeping with its moral and legal obligations.”

Like Guterres, many former to SI officials now occupy (or have occupied) top slots amidst the UN’s burgeoning bureaucracy. Guterres and these ex-officio SI brass continue to regularly attend SI programs and use their UN offices to promote the SI’s Marxist agenda. This is plainly evident from a casual perusal of the SI website. The SI’s involvement with Guterres and the UNHRC is touched on in the SI appeal, which notes the “numerous meetings” of its various committees on the issue, including SI meetings at the UN headquarters in New York.

“The Socialist International remains committed to promoting political solutions to this crisis, convinced that political action is the only way to achieve the conditions necessary for peace, democracy and equality,” says the SI September 14 appeal. “This position has been borne out at the numerous meetings of its Migrations Committee, its regional committees and its Councils, the most recent of which, held at the UN headquarters in New York, adopted unanimously a Charter for the Rights of Migrants, Refugees and Asylum Seekers to which all its member parties worldwide subscribe.”

The SI appeal goes on to note: “At the SI Council meeting held at the UN in Geneva in December 2014 António Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees and former President of the Socialist International, warned that the humanitarian system was reaching breaking point. He also stressed the crucial need to tackle the root causes that create humanitarian problems, which urgently needed to be addressed from a political perspective.”

It is significant that the above-mentioned SI appeal does not call on China, Russia, Turkey, or any of the nearby wealthy Muslim states of the gulf region — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates — to shoulder any of the refugee burden. All the aforementioned Muslim states have been conspicuous by their failure to take in any of their displaced fellow Muslims, leaving the burden to the nations of the post-Christian West.

UNHCR’s Guterres is not the only SI veteran at the UN involved in planning the global refugee diaspora. Overseeing the UN’s operations in this sphere is the UN’s Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), where Guterres is considered "first among equals." Also prominent among the IASC “principals” is Mrs. Helen Clark, a longtime SI leader who has vigorously advanced the UN’s socialist agenda in her current post as administrator of the UN Development Program (UNDP), mostly under the rubric of “biodiversity” and “sustainable development.”

As we noted in an article here last year, Mrs. Clark “served three terms as prime minister of New Zealand (1999-2008) and took over as administrator at the UNDP, the third-highest office at the UN, in 2009.” We reported further that, according to the online New World Encyclopedia: “She represented the New Zealand Labour Party at the congresses of the Socialist International and of the Socialist International Women in 1976, 1978, 1983 and 1986, at an Asia-Pacific Socialist Organization Conference held in Sydney in 1981, and at the Socialist International Party Leaders' Meeting in Sydney in 1991.”

Another “principal” member of the UN’s IASC is Dr. Margaret Chan, from the Peoples Republic of China, who took over as director-general of the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) as the result of a high-pressure lobbying campaign by her Communist Party overlords in Beijing. Dr. Chan has proven that those efforts were not misspent. Among other things, she notably used her new position at WHO to misdirect world attention away from Communist China’s toxic milk and baby formula scandal that resulted in tens of thousands of casualties and an unknown number of deaths.

Another of the troubling IASC principals heavily involved in the UN refugee resettlement program is UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake. Lake will be remembered by many as the extreme leftist whose nomination by President Bill Clinton to be director of the CIA might have succeeded, except for an article in The New American by this writer (and an extensive effort by The John Birch Society) that the New York Times and other establishment media outlets credited with torpedoing the appointment.

On April 15, 2013, Lake co-authored an op-ed for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune entitled “A U.N. Appeal to Save Syria.” The op-ed authors said they were not appealing for more funds, “needed as they are,” but for governments to do all they possibly can “to save the Syrian people and save the region from disaster.” Their disclaimer aside, the point of the op-ed was indeed to gin up support for more funding for the UN and its agencies, as well as political commitments to support a greater footprint and greater institutional clout for the UN. Anthony Lake’s co-authors of the op-ed were IASC fellow members Guterres and Dr. Chan, whom we’ve already mentioned; Baroness Valerie Amos, former SI leader and head of Britain’s Labour Party in the House of Lords, now UN under secretary general for Humanitarian Affairs; and Ertharin Cousin, a Chicago attorney and Obama UN appointee who is now executive director of the World Food Program, the mammoth UN program that even many “mainstream media” have condemned for “rampant corruption.”

The collaborative relationship between the U.S. State Department and the UNHCR (including IASC, on which Antony Lake, Antonio Guterres, et al serve) is spelled out formally in the State Department document : "2014-2015 Framework for Cooperation Between the United States Department of State's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees."

That document begins: “The Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration at the United States Department of State (hereinafter referred to as PRM) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (hereinafter referred to as UNHCR) have been working in formal partnership through a Framework for Cooperation since the year 2000 to provide protection, humanitarian assistance, and durable solutions to UNHCR’s beneficiaries.”

It continues: “They have a unique relationship: PRM has long been UNHCR’s top donor, while UNHCR has been PRM’s largest multilateral partner. PRM and UNHCR renew their bilateral Framework for Cooperation biennially to advance shared objectives.”

In future articles, we will we will be providing more details on the little-known but extensive “unique relationship” between officials and agencies of the U.S. government and the United Nations “refugee resettlement” lobby.

Photo of Syrian refugees in Europe: AP Images