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Sea Treaty A Necessary Risk In Dangerous, Shrinking World

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 27, 2007

The Law of the Sea Treaty, up for ratification soon in the Senate, can be described in ways that would frighten anyone who believes in U.S. sovereignty and objects to world government.

Still, the United States should join the treaty because going it alone is worse, and far more risky. If international problems cannot be solved internationally, how are they to be solved?

Opponents of the treaty say the United States is strong enough to get its own way without submitting to rules controlled by other countries, many of whom wish us ill. But military might does not solve the many legal and practical problems of those doing business on or under the sea.

Supporters of the treaty include the Navy, Coast Guard, fishing companies, oil companies, many environmentalists, President Bush, international shippers and 155 countries who have already signed it.

Treaty opponents include people who think the United Nations is inept and corrupt beyond redemption. The United Nations is imperfect, but it is the best international forum that exists.

No treaty will be ideal from the U.S. perspective. This one attempts the necessary job of setting up workable rules for regulating international waters, mining the seabed and honoring national borders. If the United States does not participate in writing and enforcing the rules, it won't get to help make many vital decisions, such as: Who controls the thawing Arctic waters? What limits should be placed on fishing? Who regulates navigation in the sea lanes? How is the world to deal with terrorists on the oceans? Who has a right to the many undiscovered resources of the world's vast oceans and how should the wealth be shared?

The treaty would be enforced by a United Nations agency called the International Seabed Authority, based in Jamaica. It would be a bureaucracy capable of much mischief. But the United States could better protect itself from the inside than from isolation.

It is possible to think of many potential excesses. The seabed bureaucrats, backed by a majority of nations antagonistic to U.S. interests, could treat the United States unfairly. Specifically, the agency might try to enforce its own version of environmental protections, such as trying to stop the warming or pollution of the seas by imposing taxes on land-based activities, perhaps the generation of electricity or the operation of cars.

There is the additional fear that if the United States participates in the treaty, it would be one of the few countries to follow it, as the U.S. Constitution requires. Many other countries would violate it on the whims of their kings or dictators.

Signing a treaty would not tie the hands of the world's biggest military and economic power in protecting its own interests.

Being a world leader demands engagement, not seclusion.

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