Evidence: Most Popular

Finally, the critics brush aside the consensus among affected ocean interests and knowledgeable oceans experts in the United States in favor of their own judgment as persons who clearly lack expertise in international law or operational U.S. maritime policy. Indeed, few conventions have been so unanimously supported by knowledgeable experts and affected interests. Supporters include every president, both Democrat and Republican, who has considered the convention subsequent to the successful 1994 renegotiation of Part XI on deep seabed mining, Joint Chiefs chairman, combatant commanders and secretaries of state from the Nixon administration to today; not to mention every affected U.S. oceans interest including the oil and gas industry, fisheries, shipping and oceanic cables industries; to marine scientists and environmentalists. Most recently, the congressional U.S. Oceans Commission and the new Bush administration Oceans Interagency Task Force both unanimously recommended Senate advice and consent on the convention. As deliberations continue, senators might want to ask who they trust more for national security advice: every chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the combatant commanders of our united geographic commands and the consistent view of the Navy since the Nixon administration, or those few who admittedly are not naval, oceans or international law experts. Further, how can the totality of U.S. agencies, military departments and private sector oceans industries representatives constitute a "special interest" as charged by the critics? By what criteria are the most vocal critics not special interests?

In recent years, many of the most senior U.S. military officers have further articulated the national security benefits of the Convention. The Navy has been one of the strongest supporters of the Convention, with every serving and former Chief of Naval Operations lining up to publicly support U.S. accession.⁶¹ In 2004 when the U.S. Senate was actively considering the treaty, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the worldwide four-star unified combatant commanders, and the Chief and Vice Chief of Naval Operations strongly supported U.S. accession to the Convention.⁶² These uniformed senior flag and general level officers provided ample testimony to the Senate concerning the broad range of national security interests the Convention directly promoted. The treaty “helps [to] assure access to the largest maneuver space on the planet—the sea—under authority of widely recognized and accepted law and not the threat of force.”⁶³ The United States benefits from the navigational regimes of innocent passage and transit passage through straits and archipelagos, the exercise of high seas freedoms in the EEZ and high seas, as well as the concept of sovereign immunity for warships and other public vessels and public aircraft.⁶⁴ Also in 2004, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the Convention helps U.S. forces to “operate freely across the vast expanse of the world’s oceans under the authority of widely recognized and accepted international law.”⁶⁵ Additional testimony in support of the national security benefits of the treaty is included in the 2004 Report of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which voted the treaty out of committee in a bipartisan 19-0 vote.⁶⁶

Freedom of navigation also underpins global economic prosperity. The oceans, wrote Professors McDougal and Burke, were a “spatial extension resource, principally useful as a domain for movement.”²⁰ With the increasing trend in global trade, exercising the freedom to navigate on the seas is becoming even more important. This trend is accelerating in an era of globalization. “Shipping lanes are getting busier,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “not just from Asia to North America and Europe, but within Asia.”²¹ The initial rise of the globalized economy, which began in mercantilist Europe, can be attributed in large part to unimpeded ocean transit. Four hundred years ago, the legal scholar Hugo Grotius cogently set forth the commercial doctrine that fueled international trade. “For do not the ocean,” Grotius wrote, “navigable in every direction with which God has encompassed all the earth, and the regular and occasional winds which blow now from one quarter and now from another, offer sufficient proof that Nature has given to all peoples a right of access to all other peoples?”²² The model of freedom of the seas also is regarded as the logical analogue for developing the legal regime for outer space.²³

Protecting national sovereignty is a legitimate aim -- and one that some liberal internationalists may have been too cavalier about in the past. But for the goal to have any meaning, it must be framed so that it can be met. This is certainly what Reagan had in mind when he articulated a specific set of problems with the original UNCLOS that could be (and eventually were) dealt with. This time around, however, those who object to the treaty have defined sovereignty in such ideological terms that they will never be satisfied. By their reckoning, the United States can never be party to an international organization, even if it has veto status in it.

An international organization might very marginally limit U.S. freedom of action, but this is negligible in comparison to the harm that instability and conflict in the South China Sea could inflict on U.S. interests. Previous presidents from both parties understood the trade-off: In challenging times, and to exercise global leadership, Washington protected its interests by making enlightened commitments overseas, whether in the form of alliances, institutions, or foreign assistance.