The LOST Boys
AND THEIR PETER PAN PRESIDENT
…Secretary of State Haig tried to get President Reagan to agree to the Law of the Sea Treaty. This happened at one of the first meetings of Reagan’s National Security Council, when the hapless Mr. Haig suggested the treaty was…”something we didn’t like but had to accept, since it had emerged over the previous decade through a 150-nation negotiation.” Mr. Haig then lunged into details about the options and sub-options for revising the document.The president looked puzzled, then finally interrupted. “Uh, Al, isn’t this what the whole thing was all about?” Mr. Adelman recalls Mr. Reagan responding. Mr. Haig asked him what he meant. …
“Well,” Mr. Reagan shrugged, “Isn’t not going along with something that is ‘really stupid’ just because 150 nations had done so what the whole thing was all about — our running, our winning, our governing?”
A stunned Mr. Haig folded up his briefing book and promised to find out how to stop the treaty altogether.
FOX News:
Sen. John Kerry. Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said during a January confirmation hearing that he intends to push for ratification. “We are now laying the groundwork for and expect to try to take up the Law of the Sea Treaty. So that will be one of the priorities of the committee, and the key here is just timing — how we proceed.”Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saying the treaty is vital for American businesses and the Navy, told Kerry that his committee “will have a very receptive audience in our State Department and in our administration.”
William P. Clark and Ed Meese:
Ronald Reagan actually opposed LOST even before he came to office. He was troubled by a treaty that had, in the course of its protracted negotiations, mutated beyond recognition from an effort to codify certain navigation rights strongly supported by our Navy into a dramatic step toward world government. This supranational agenda was most closely identified with, but not limited to, the Treaty’s Part XI, which created a variety of executive, legislative and judicial mechanisms to control the resources of the world’s oceans.In a radio address titled “Ocean Mining” on Oct. 10, 1978, Mr. Reagan applauded the idea that “no nat[ional] interest of ours could justify handing sovereign control of two-thirds of the earth’s surface over to the Third World.” He added, “No one has ruled out the idea of a [Law of the Sea] treaty–one which makes sense–but after long years of fruitless negotiating, it became apparent that the underdeveloped nations who now control the General Assembly were looking for a free ride at our expense–again.”
The so-called seabed mining provisions were simply one manifestation of the problems Ronald Reagan had with LOST. That was made clear by an entry in his diary dated June 29, 1982, after months of efforts to negotiate extensive changes in the draft treaty text came to naught. On that evening, President Reagan wrote: “Decided in [National Security Council] meeting–will not sign ‘Law of the Sea’ treaty even without seabed mining provisions.” …
Ambassador Malone observed that: “Today, not only are the seabed mining provisions inadequately corrected, and the collectivist ideologies of a now repudiated system of global central planning still imbedded in the treaty, new and potentially serious concerns have arisen.”
Currently, these include: the increasingly brazen hostility of the United Nations and other multilateral institutions to the United States and its interests; the organization’s ambition to impose international taxes, which would allow it to become still less transparent and accountable to member nations; the determination of European and other environmentalists to impose the “precautionary principle” (a Luddite, “better safe than sorry” approach that requires proof no harm can come from any initiative before it can be undertaken); the increasing practice of U.S. courts to allow “universal jurisprudence” to trump American constitutional rights and laws; and the use of “lawfare” (multilateral treaties, tribunal rulings and convention declarations) by adversaries of the U.S. military as asymmetric weapons to curtail or impede American power and operations.
Such developments only serve to reinforce the concerns President Reagan rightly had about the central, and abiding, defect of the Law of the Sea Treaty: its effort to promote global government at the expense of sovereign nation states–and most especially the United States. …
Even if the 1994 Agreement actually amended LOST (and there are multiple reasons why it did not actually alter so much as a single word of the treaty), Ronald Reagan’s belief in the U.S. as an exceptional “shining city on a hill” and his enmity towards threats to our sovereignty in general, and global governance schemes in particular, were such that he would likely encourage the Senate to do today what he did in 1982: Reject LOST.
Articles 19 and 20 of the treaty would proscribe the U.S. Navy from training with weapons, collecting intelligence or interfering with enemy communications in the territorial waters of other states without their expressed permission. Military aircraft are specifically prohibited from taking off and landing in these waters, and severe limitations would be imposed on loading and unloading “any commodity, currency or person” including military equipment. Submarines are required to travel on the surface and “show their flag in territorial waters.” Article 30 states that warships not complying with the laws of a coastal nation can be forced to leave. Disputes over these issues would be adjudicated by international lawyers. Right. …Before casting a vote to ratify LOST, all 100 U.S. senators should read Article 314 of this onerous treaty and Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. The U.N.-crafted document specifies that amendments to the treaty can be adopted — and therefore enforced — without the consent of any signatory. Yet our Constitution requires that two thirds of our Senate concur in any treaty. Do 67 members of this Senate now want to surrender that authority to foreign governments?
Amb. Bolton, “The Coming War on Sovereignty”:
Traditionally, Americans have resisted the notion that their government’s actions had to pass muster with other governments, often with widely differing values and interests. It is the foreign-policy establishment’s unease with this long-held American conviction that is the motivating factor behind “A Plan for Action”, which represents a bold attempt to argue that any such set of beliefs has simply been overtaken by events. …“Sharing” sovereignty with someone or something else is thus not abstract for Americans. Doing so by definition will diminish the sovereign power of the American people over their government and their own lives, the very purpose for which the Constitution was written.
With the nomination of Harold Hongju Koh, the Dean of Yale Law School, as the Legal Adviser for the State Department, President Barack Obama is putting a world government team in place under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The other key appointment was Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, as Director of Policy Planning at State. Slaughter wrote the 2004 book, A New World Order, and believes in an international system dominated by the U.N. and other global institutions and networks. …Based on his public statements, one has to conclude that Koh believes in a world government financed by global taxes. This is the huge issue that the media should bring to the fore. America’s future as a sovereign nation is at stake.
Koh’s acknowledged mentor was Harvard Law Professor and international lawyer Louis B. Sohn, who was not only a key author of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), now waiting for Senate ratification, but offered a detailed proposal to transform the United Nations into a world government in his book, World Peace Through World Law.
Koh is to act not as our attorney to the world, but as the world’s prosecuting attorney against us. As I’ve said, Obama has a foreign policy for America…as if it were a foreign country. Because to him, it is.
To Obama and his radical pals, whatever the problem is, it’s America’s fault. Therefore, they believe that America must be held down and bled dry like Gulliver in Lilliput. And since they can’t get their favorite policies enacted by Americans, they plan to consult other countries, letting them have a vote, and imposing those policies on Americans by treaty. It’s the classic case of the government dissolving the people and electing a new one, instead of vice versa.
Beyond this horrible treaty, we’re in for the fight of our lives to maintain the sovereignty our Founders fought to achieve. Sovereign means we rule ourselves and decide for ourselves. It’s the most precious political gift ever given to a people by their forefathers–and these clowns mean to piss it all away for some utopian League of Nations pipe dream that has been tried and failed ever since the Tower of Babel.
And, President, please– get off your knees in front of that Saudi fraud, man. Your an American. Act like it for once in your life.
- Entries
(emphasis added.)
So...can someone explain to me why the above is a bad thing? Respecting the soveriegnty of other nations is something we don't want to do? Why not? We certainly expect other country's navies to behave themselves in our territorial waters, do we not?
Doesn't our own Navy support this treaty? Must we become mirror images of the moonbats on the left who opposed everything Bush did whether it made sense to do so or not?
Clinton, Bush and Obama all support this. But then, they also all supported this:
"In 2004 the World Court ruled 14 to 1 in favor of Mexico and ordered the United States to give Medellin another hearing, or perhaps another trial, at which he could receive the assistance of Mexican consular employees. At that time, the World Court was headed by a judge from Communist China.
A 1963 treaty known as the Vienna Convention, which both the United States and Mexico signed and ratified, provides that aliens who are accused of crimes in a foreign country are entitled to request the assistance of consular officials from their home country. Medellin never requested such assistance until long after he was tried, convicted and sentenced, and after all his appeals were denied.
Of course, Medellin did receive the assistance of competent American legal defense lawyers throughout the process, which lasted longer than the lives of the girls he murdered. There is no reason to think that the presence of a Mexican consul could have made any difference in the outcome.
Incredibly, the Bush Administration knuckled under to the World Court and ordered the Texas courts to give Medellin another hearing. The Texas courts properly refused to honor this unconstitutional presidential interference, and the Texas decision was upheld by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
This case is dramatic proof of why the U.S. Senate should not ratify any more UN treaties that put American law in the noose of foreign tribunals. The United States has only one vote out of about 150 nations, i.e., the same vote as Communist Cuba."--Eagle Forum.............
I'm not opposing this simply because it's Obama. I opposed it when Clinton and Bush tried it, too. But this time, it's even more dangerous with a true Trans-National Leftist in the White House and a Rubber stamp Congress.
I don't regard Reagan, Clark, Meese, North and Bolton as "moonbats".
Reagan got this right the first time and nothing jas happened since to make it any better--only worse.
Last July, I announced that the United States will not sign the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention that was opened for signature on December 10. We have taken this step because several major problems in the Convention's deep seabed mining provisions are contrary to the interests and principles of industrialized nations and would not help attain the aspirations of developing nations.
In the same announcement, he went on to say:
First, the United States is prepared to accept and act in accordance with the balance of interests relating to traditional uses of the oceans -- such as navigation and overflight. In this respect, the United States will recognize the rights of other states in the waters off their coasts, as reflected in the Convention, so long as the rights and freedoms of the United States, so long as the rights and freedoms of the United States under international law are recognized by such coastal states.
Finally, in the same announcement, Reagan went on to establish an Exclusive Economic Zone in accordance with the LOS Convention.
In 1990, both developing and industrialized states came to US officials to say they thought they could negotiate changes to the Convention that would meet all of Reagan's concerns. Consultations began under Bush in 1990 and were completed under Clinton in 1994. The six items to which Reagan were fixed, some by deletion, some by modifying the terms and some by specific additions (such as terms to guarantee that the US has a permanent seat on the executive council of the seabed authority and a blocking vote on rules, amendments and budgets).
I understand that some people believe that the US should not engage in conventions on the grounds that reciprocal agreements entail a restriction on freedom of action. What I don't understand is why opponents have to make up things and ascribe them to Pres. Reagan or make outrageous claims such as saying that nations can't sail their submarines submerged in their own territorial sea.
"The man selected by President Reagan to undertake those renegotiations was the remarkable James Malone. In 1984, Ambassador Malone explained why the Law of the Sea Treaty was unacceptable: "The Treaty's provisions were intentionally designed to promote a new world order--a form of global collectivism known as the New International Economic Order (NIEO)--that seeks ultimately the redistribution of the world's wealth through a complex system of manipulative central economic planning and bureaucratic coercion. The Treaty's provisions are predicated on a distorted interpretation of the noble concept of the Earth's vast oceans as the 'common heritage of mankind.'"
Interestingly, Ambassador Malone declared in 1995, "This remains the case today." That statement is particularly relevant insofar as LOST's supporters, including some of our colleagues from the Reagan administration, insist that the 1994 Agreement "fixed" the previously unacceptable Part XI provisions. As James Malone explained to a conference on the Law of the Sea Treaty before his untimely death more than a decade ago:
"All the provisions from the past that make such a [new world order] outcome possible, indeed likely, still stand. It is not true, as argued by some, and frequently mentioned, that the U.S. rejected the Convention in 1982 solely because of technical difficulties with Part XI. The collectivist and redistributionist provisions of the treaty were at the core of the U.S. refusal to sign."..........................
Reagan was an internationalist. He supported things like NATO. But he pulled us out of UNESCO because it was pro-thug, anti-capitalist and anti-American. Hell, he supported giving the Russians a missile shield, too, if he could get real disarmament. But he completely rejected the phony, one-sided disarmament of the anti-American Nuclear Freeze movement.
If this were simply about mining, that would have been settled long ago.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/internationalorganizations/wm1676.cfm
A January 1982 Presidential Statement also shows that Reagan's objections were not confined to the treaty's seabed mining provisions. Reagan stated that LOST was "not acceptable" as drafted, and would become acceptable only if it was revised in a manner that:
"will not allow for amendments to come into force without approval of the participating states, including in our case the advice and consent of the Senate; ... and;
will be likely to receive the advice and consent of the Senate. In this regard, the convention should not contain provisions for the mandatory transfer of private technology and participation by and funding for national liberation movements."..............
The '94 "fix" didn't mention national lib movements aka the PLO--and locked in place the provision that allowed the Treaty to be changed without our permission! Just like the "Living" Constitution, only a "Living" Treaty...what could possibly go wrong?
btw, I believe the sub thing refers to foreign territorial waters.
Again, Reagan got it right the first time.
A) The 1994 Amendments make distribution of revenues subject to consensus, so with the permanent seat on the Council we have a veto over any distribution plan we don't like, including any that funded the PLO or other such group. That was what Reagan wanted, that is what we got.
B) Regarding amendments to the convention, there are two types, each with its own way of protecting the United States and our constitutional process:
1) Amendments to the seabed provisions require consensus of the Council, giving us a veto by virtue of our permanent seat. This is reinforced in the resolution of advice and consent that requires any proposed amendment be sent to the Senate for consideration under the treaties clause of the Constitution.
2) Amendments to the rest of the convention only apply to states that ratify them, a point made clear in the text of the convention. If we are party and don't ratify an amendment, then all parties, even those who join after the amendment, have to deal with us on the terms as they are when we join it. This is a really sweet deal for us and it is part of what is meant by "locking in" the Convention by joining it. Col. North was wrong in his statement, and he should have kept reading because article 316 on how amendments come into force and for whom makes this clear. I regret that he has spread incorrect information on this point.
The requirement that submarines are required to operate on the surface in territorial seas is sometimes used by opponents to say that US subs in US waters - it seems stupid to me, but that argument is made. On the other hand, the provisions of innocent passage are almost identical to the 1958 Convention on the Territorial Sea, so if one opposes the provisions in the 1982 Convention, then one should be calling for the US to abandon the 1958 Convention as well, even though we have followed its rules to our advantage for over 50 years.
It is still unclear to me why people complain that there are restrictions inherent in innocent passage through foreign states' territorial sea. We certainly want the authority to force foreign submarines to surface in our own territorial sea, and to stop aircraft and warships from conducting military activities in our own territorial sea. And when it gets down to it, sort cuts through foreign territorial seas are a convenience, not a necessity. The right of innocent passage is the same for every country, so if we want it and if we want restrictions in our own waters, then others must have the same rights and duties,
And then, there is the American deep seabed mining industry that Pres. Reagan wanted to save. After the Convention came into force in 1994, all the foreign partners in the four US consortia left, leaving the mining operations with insufficient investment capital and incomplete technology and ready to quit. Of the 8 firms and consortia conducting exploration and preparing for exploitation today, none are American or have American partners. By staying outside the Convention after we got all the changes that Reagan wanted, we put the stake in the heart of our own industry. Germany has a site, as do France, Russia, China, India, Japan, Korea and a consortium of countries in which Russia has a stake in addition to their own site. Germany actually inherited the site abandoned by one of the US consortia.
I would say that Reagan found a good balance, and the negotiators who eventually fulfilled his instructions did a good job too.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/InternationalOrganizations/wm470.cfm
including The Top 5 Reasons Conservatives Should Oppose LOST.
One reason is because it amounts to an Underwater Kyoto. And the deck is still stacked against America.
This is the organization that was on Saddam's payroll. The Human Rights Commission is mostly a Who's Who of Human Rights violators. They're meeting again in Durban to Jew-bait while excusing themselves. Their Peacekeepers often rape. Their Global Warming Report was fiction except for the real money they hope to extort from the West. The Secretary General just called us deadbeats even though we're buying his Armanis. And half of them would like nothing better than a Nuremburg for Bush.
Plus, we've got something we've never had before: a Trans-National Leftist president with a Rubber Stamp Congress.
So you'll have to 'scuse me if this whole enterprise doesn't make my heart go pitter-patter. I've seen your team in action. Me, I'm with Ronnie.
One indication that Ed Meese did not share Reagan's view was that Meese tried to get Reagan to sign the convention with a reservation that the US did not accept the seabed provisions. The convention is a package deal that does not allow countries to pick and choose like a menu, so this action would have gone a long way to undercut the convention and return us to a world where every country was extending state control farther outward over the sea. Reagan refused to follow Meese's recommendation and even thought the difference in views so notable that he recorded the action in his diary.
You seem to be conflating the UN with the seabed authority. But the authority was organized independent of the UN, with its own membership and decision making rules - including, from 1994 on, the the permanent seat for the US with the power to block rules, amendments, distribution of funds and budgets. Once the US joins, we will also have a seat with a blocking vote on the committee that sets the budget. Those are powers we want in every organization but seldom achieve, and we owe that achievement to Ronald Reagan. Complaints based on the UN, particularly about the General Assembly or about other UN bodies such as the Human Rights Commission, are not relevant to the authority (as demonstrated throughout the 15 years of operation of the authority). Trying to tie it to ills of the UN ignores that from the very beginning we were negotiating for the authority to be under different leadership. We also arranged that it would be audited by commercial auditors so we would know where every penny went.
My team, by the way, was Reagan's. I was on his LOS delegation after joining his review of the draft LOS Convention in 1981. From before he became president, Reagan wanted to see an American seabed mining industry that would produce critical and strategic minerals under US flag. This could still happen, but not if our companies cannot get internationally recognized right of exclusive access to a minesite and to title to recovered minerals.
In a choice between Ed Meese and Ronald Reagan, I'm glad Reagan was the one making decisions.
I'm not really conflating. I know they are different, but related, entities. My point is that treaties with the "international community" have a way of morphing. Carter's Women's treaty (still unratified by us) was used to try to force doctors to abort and even to ban Mother's Day!
It is hard to read Reagan's diary entry in the way you suggest. Implausible at best.
How do you dismiss Amb. Malone's rejection of the '94 "Fix"?
You may be suffering from Treatus Interrupuptus.
As to Reagan's diary entry, I recall that internal battle very well. The Navy, Transportation Department (with the Coast Guard and Maritime Administration) and Commerce Department were very firm that trying to ratify part of the Convention but not all would open the convention to reservations from other countries that would destroy the features (such as the right of Transit Passage) that were essential to the US. It also would have encouraged other nations that did not have blue water interests to return to enforcing greater limits on activities within their territorial sea and economic zone. (And can you imagine the court battles in the US if we ratified a convention that said no reservations allowed and the US then tried to avoid commitments with a reservation to the seabed provisions.) Ed Meese placed opposing the convention over securing our maritime rights and would have risked legal complications with uncertain outcomes. That is why the battle was fought in the White House - it was Ed Meese who pushed the "ratify part/reject part" option, and it was Reagan who rejected that option, and it is pretty easy to see why he went the way he did.
BTW, the quote you have from Oliver North is a bit confusing. He is arguing against the principle of innocent passage, which is something we have used and defended for ages and we have never wanted to undercut it. I can't imagine wanting to allow foreign military activities in US waters, and I doubt that Col. North would either. Besides, we agreed to those provisions in 1958 and no one has suggested changing them. And as I said in an earlier comment, North's point on amendments was totally wrong.
Beyond the question of WWRD? however is all that we've learned about Trans-Nationalism in the years since. To me, it argues strongly against passage.
My preference, you might have guessed, is to jump into the fray, picking offense over defense almost every time, even in public policy and diplomacy.
Thank you for the debate. You host a good site here.
Caitlyn