What do ExxonMobil, Greenpeace, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Sierra Club, Senators Lugar and Kerry, and every living former Secretary of State of both parties have in common?
They have all come out publically in support of ratification of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. At a time when demoralizing partisan deadlock has dragged congressional approval to new lows, it is exciting to see such diverse interests as these line up in unanimous support for any legislation. Such broad-based and vocal support should have guaranteed a quick and painless ratification process, and could have even been an opportunity for Congress to prove that it still possesses the institutional fortitude to at least seize the low-hanging fruit of legislative accomplishments.
But it didn’t, and thanks to “New World Order” fear-mongering by a number of conservative think tanks, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee instead braces itself for an exhaustive summer of hearings on the treaty, designed by Senator Kerry to ensure that no one can claim ignorance or lack of information when he finally calls a vote on the treaty in November.
The “conservative” argument against the treaty, which is dismissed even by such staunch conservatives as Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, John Negroponte, and Sarah Palin, is based on the logic that any treaty that grants the United States sovereignty over anything inherently undermines American sovereignty by implying that we needed an international treaty in the first place.
Of course, in the topsy-turvy world of these radical anti-internationalists this argument could be applied to virtually any multilateral treaty, but for those at the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation who are leading the campaign against the Law of the Sea, that may be precisely the point.
In fact, the Law of the Sea would guarantee exclusive economic rights to the United States over huge swaths of ocean in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as well as the Arctic Sea, where tension over rights to shipping and mineral exploration are already heating up.
Roughly 1.5 million square miles (about the size of the Alaska and Louisiana Purchases combined) would become open for hydrocarbon and mineral exploration by U.S. firms alone, firms that won’t risk the costly capital investments required without a strong legal basis for their claims. This would dramatically increase our access to many resources, including strategically critical rare-earth elements that we presently can only buy from China.
If this weren’t enough of a reason to ratify, consider this: the right of our navy to navigate freely around the world is critical to our ability to project force globally, yet legally it is based on an unwritten code of naval tradition that already is being undermined and ignored by an increasing number of states.
As Gen. Dempsey observed in his testimony to the Foreign Relations Committee, reliance on Western naval tradition “plays into the hands of foreign states that seek to bend customary law to restrict movement on the oceans.” The Law of the Sea would guarantee our legal right to navigate freely in vital areas of the ocean, like the Western Pacific, without fear of impediment or harassment.
In an effort to remove the distorting lens of politics from the equation, Sen. Kerry has pledged not to hold a vote on ratification until after the November elections, but nevertheless conservative members of the committee have taken to the media and blogosphere to sound the alarm of an impending UN takeover of America’s shorelines. If they succeed, an opportunity to ensure America’s economic future and national security will have been scuttled as a bizarre sacrifice on the altar of American unilateralism.
Nathan Kohlenberg is Truman's Policy Fellow.
