Multiple historical examples of US ability to preserve its ECS rights through bilateral or unilateral agreements

Yet history has repeatedly and definitively debunked the notion that recognition of U.S. ECS claims is contingent on U.S. membership in UNCLOS or on the approval of an international commission. To the contrary, through bilateral treaties with the Cook Islands, Cuba, Mexico, Russia, the united Kingdom, and Venezuela, the United States has successfully established its various maritime boundaries and the limits of its continental shelf and ECS.

The United States has also acted unilaterally through presidential proclamations and acts of Congress to set its maritime boundaries and lay claim to the natural resources within its maritime zones and continental shelf:

• In 1945, President Harry Truman issued two proclamations. The first, the Policy of the United States with Respect to the Natural Resources of the Subsoil and Sea Bed of the Continental Shelf, claimed jurisdiction and control over the natural resources of the U.S. continental shelf.²⁷ Truman’s second proclamation established a conservation zone for U.S. fishery resources contiguous to the U.S. coast.²⁸
   
• In 1953, Congress codified Truman’s continental shelf proclamation by enacting the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which declared that “the subsoil and seabed of the outer Continental Shelf appertain to the United States and are subject to its jurisdiction, control, and power of disposition.”²⁹
   
• In 1983, in the wake of his decision not to sign UNCLOS, President Reagan proclaimed the existence of “an exclusive economic Zone in which the United States will exercise sovereign rights in living and nonliving resources within 200 nautical miles of its coast.”³⁰ In 1988, Reagan followed up his EEZ proclamation by extending the breadth of the U.S. territorial sea from 3 nm to 12 nm.³¹
   
• In 1999, building on Reagan’s maritime proclamations, President Bill Clinton extended the U.S. contiguous zone from 9 nm to 24 nm.32 No nation or group of nations, much less the “international community” as a whole, has objected to or otherwise challenged the unilateral proclamations by Presidents Truman, Reagan, and Clinton. No nation disputes that the United States has a 12 nm territorial sea, a 24 nm contiguous zone, a 200 nm EEZ, or jurisdiction and control over the natural resources of its continental shelf and ECS. In fact, foreign nations recognize and respect U.S. maritime claims and boundaries, and vice versa, as long as those claims and boundaries conform to widely accepted international law, including provisions of customary international law reflected in UNCLOS.