1 June 2012
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published an editorial by the five living Republican former Secretaries of State endorsing ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty by the US Senate (Dean Acheson could not be reached for comment).
Yet regardless of the blandishments by such grandees of the Republican foreign policy establishment, the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) remains a bad deal for America.
The distinguished heavyweights—from Henry Kissinger to Condoleeza Rice—argue that most of the objections that led President Reagan to reject the treaty have now been solved.They suggest that the United States has far more to gain from joining the treaty than from staying outside of it.
Yet the Treaty remains objectionable for three main reasons: it compromises US sovereignty, it gives undue power to the United Nations, and it will deter much needed investment in offshore resources.
All of these appear to be the intention of the Treaty’s authors. To the transnational progressive movement, these are features rather than bugs—which makes the Republican luminaries’ endorsement of LOST especially disappointing. Indeed, the Soviet Union was a supporter of LOST.
The Treaty endangers American sovereignty by placing US naval decision-making under the supervision of an international body.
As noted constitutional scholar Professor Jeremy Rabkin noted in a 2006 paper for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), ratiļ¬cation would seem to endorse the notion that American rights can only be secured by appealing to new international institutions.
From there it is only a small step to the claim that further progress on other international matters requires submission to new and more far-reaching international controls, developed and implemented by new supranational organs.
The error of conceding sovereignty would be compounded by whom it would be conceded to—the United Nations. The UN claims that the Treaty seeks to guard the 'common heritage of mankind,' but the fact is that the United Nations is little more than the Dictators’ Club of New York—the UN’s World Tourism Organization recently honoured Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe as a 'world leader for tourism.'
The Treaty empowers a transnational bureaucracy of the UN, like the World Tourism Organization, to regulate deep sea mining of mineral resources. It does so in a bizarre fashion, by creating, as it were, an 'internationalized industry,' which would mine the deep sea bed with the coerced assistance of Western mining companies.
In essence, the Treaty retains a fragment of the Soviet Union’s plans for the world’s seas—again, despite assurances that this problem was fixed with a set of revisions made in 1994.
Finally, by creating this entity, the Treaty impedes commercial development of these resources, discouraging not just mining entrepreneurship, but also technological development in related fields. As Cato Institute scholar Doug Bandow noted in 2007 in another paper for CEI: 'Ratifying the treaty, a disastrous throwback to the era when socialism was seen as the wave of the future, would be especially foolish today, in a world of exploding economic opportunities and technological possibilities.'
A LOST-like regime also would discourage exploration of other, currently unowned resources, most notably space.
The foreign policy establishment glosses over these objections—when it acknowledges them at all.
Yet they remain valid reasons for the US to reject the Treaty. It is conceivable, that the Senate may choose to ratify the Treaty during its lame duck session after the November election as a retirement gift to Senator Richard Lugar (R.-Indiana), who was unceremoniously dumped by his own voters for going native in Washington.
Thankfully, it only takes 34 Senators to kill ratification of a Treaty. You can write to your own expressing your disquiet by visiting LetsLoseLOST.com. The Law of the Sea Treaty deserves to be lost in the mists.
