OPINION:
The Washington Post recently published a front-page story as to how Xi Jinping’s China is seeking to dominate the mineral resources of the deep seabed.
These resources of copper, nickel, cobalt, manganese and rare earth minerals are the most important remaining strategic minerals on Earth. Moreover, China seeks to control the important environmental rules that will govern the harvesting of the nodules containing these critical minerals.
But the Post piece left out the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as to how this happened and the simple solution that will put the U.S. back in the game.
The U.S. led the world in the negotiations leading to the Law of the Sea Treaty and was by far the biggest winner. We quadrupled our sovereign territorial sea and extended our control over offshore resources, both fisheries and oil and gas, in an area larger than the entire U.S. landmass — for the largest such area in the world.
We also won our “no sign” issues, ensured access to strategic minerals of the deep seabed, and navigational freedom for our Navy and commercial shipping.
Thus, we ended the negotiations with four USA-designated deep seabed sites in the mineral-rich Clarion-Clipperton Zone of the Pacific — each site approximately the size of Rhode Island, and each containing minerals estimated at $1 trillion in value.
We secured freedom of navigation in the new 200-nautical-mile “economic” zones as well as the right of transit passage for our ships and aircraft through straits used for international navigation.
Since no nation owned the deep seabed and our industry needed clear property rights to a specific site before spending the billions required to develop a site, the U.S. supported the creation of a small international agency called the International Seabed Authority to provide those property rights through licenses to be issued to treaty parties.
When early drafts of the seabed mining regime were unacceptable, President Ronald Reagan announced changes required for the U.S. to accept the treaty, changes that were subsequently agreed upon in a lengthy renegotiation.
As part of this renegotiation, the U.S. was given the only permanent seat on the Council of the International Seabed Authority, a seat with substantial authority over deep seabed harvesting rules, environmental rules, and other critical council decisions. This renegotiation was a victory for Reagan.
After this renegotiation, our NATO allies, as well as China and Russia, quickly became parties to the Law of the Sea Treaty. Today, 168 countries and the European Union are parties to the treaty. But responding to a drumbeat of false and misleading arguments against the treaty for over 25 years, the Senate has never given advice and consent.
The result has been the loss by the United States of “USA-2” and “USA-3” and a growing risk of loss of “USA-1” and “USA-4.” In the meantime, Russia has been licensed for three deep seabed sites and Xi Jinping’s China for five.
Just as Russia and China are seeking dominance over land-based deposits of these minerals in Africa and Latin America, they are taking advantage of the United States’ absence from the treaty to seek to do the same in the deep seabed.
As our national security, business and environmental leaders told the Senate in 2012, the last time the treaty was before the Senate for advice and consent, it is imperative that the U.S. accede to the treaty. But the 10-plus years since this last Senate consideration of the treaty, coinciding with Mr. Xi’s rise to power in China, has made U.S. adherence of much greater importance today.
Today, America’s absence from the treaty has empowered three critical security threats from Mr. Xi’s China.
The first is the effort to obtain dominance over strategic minerals from the deep ocean floor and to exclude the United States from this most important remaining source of such minerals, as discussed in the Post story.
The second, of equal concern for the United States, is China’s whole-of-government campaign to increase the restrictions on navigational freedoms embodied in the treaty that are critical for the U.S. Navy and American trade. Our allies need us in the effort to enforce these freedoms won in a difficult negotiation lasting a quarter century and now embodied in the treaty.
The third is a Xi-Putin laser focus on the Arctic, America’s fourth seacoast, while nonadherence to the treaty is inhibiting the United States’ response to their Arctic activism.
There is a simple solution that can change the game overnight. That is for the Senate to provide prompt advice and consent to the treaty and for the United States to take its seat on the Council of the International Seabed Authority and license our remaining two USA-designated sites.
This provides both U.S. input on the important environmental rules for seabed mining and protects access to $2 trillion in critical strategic minerals. Our membership in the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea will also immediately strengthen our hand against these other efforts from Mr. Xi’s China to dominate ocean space.
• John Norton Moore formerly served as U.S. ambassador for the U.N. Law of the Sea Convention and chair of the NSC Task Force for UNCLOS. His book about the urgent need for the United States to adhere to the Law of the Sea Treaty, “The Struggle for Law in the Oceans: How an Isolationist Narrative Betrays America,” was just published by Oxford University Press.
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