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"LOST" Cause
Monday, May 24, 2004
By Steve Forbes
Like Hollywood horror movies, in which monstrous creatures keep coming back to life to plague us, bad diplomatic ideas never seem to stay dead. The latest example is the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which was presumedly torpedoed by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. LOST was designed to put the Earth's oceans under the control of the UN. The treaty would regulate deep-sea mining, maritime transit, fishing, pollution and oceanic research. t would establish the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which would act as a de facto world court. The ISA would be the first and final judge of deep-sea disputes. It would get into the mining business itself with forced subsidies from private companies. With its cut of profits, royalties and fees, the ISA would also be a redistribute-the-wealth mechanism for "deserving" developing countries. No wonder "the Gipper" wanted to pull the plug on the whole thing.
But the first Bush and Clinton administrations attempted to fix the treaty's flaws, and, incredibly, a revised agreement was signed--but never Senate-ratified--in 1994. There it lay until last October, when Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) suddenly pushed for ratification. (At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's hearing, only treaty proponents were invited to testify.) The White House--loath to be labeled a go-it-aloner again after waging war in Iraq despite some Allied opposition, and after opposing the economy-destroying Kyoto Protocol and the let's-arrest-U.S.-servicemen-and-diplomats-for-war-crimes International Criminal Court--went along.
Sensible senators should strangle this resurrected beast. The supposed fixes don't really deal with the convention's fundamental flaws, starting with the basic notion that the sea--and by precedent, space--should be managed by UN bureaucrats. LOST's structures--already in place but so far "inadequately" funded, at least until Uncle Sam opens his checkbook--read like names in a C-grade version of the movie Star Wars: the International Seabed Authority; its mining subsidiary, the Enterprise; the Council; the Assembly; the Finance Committee; and so on. All these would decide who mines what and where in the ocean--and at a stiff price. How do you think American interests would fare in today's environment?
The U.S. Navy and American shipping interests support LOST because, they say, it codifies the principle of freedom of navigation. But those rights already exist under traditional maritime law. And what makes those freedoms real is not a new piece of UN paper, but the might of our Navy. In fact, the treaty could impede what we do now because of ambiguous language concerning submarines and the gathering of military intelligence.
Administration officials claim LOST won't hurt U.S. military activities. But who's to say how the White House's claim will be respected by yet another UN-created, highly politicized, anti-U.S. body?
Someday ocean mining may become cost-effective on a major scale. Then the U.S. and other countries can negotiate an appropriate treaty concerning recognition of claims and adjudication of disputes à la today's World Trade Organization. In any case, we don't need the UN, which was recently implicated in a multibillion-dollar scandal concerning the Iraq Oil-for-Food aid program, to do this job.
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