Here Come the Black Helicopters!

Frustrated by the refusal of the United States and Western European nations to give them the foreign aid to which they feel entitled, the third world nations have banded together to create a vehicle to seize our wealth. They have come up with a way to intercept American and Western revenues before they even reach our treasuries and to divert them to their own needs—often directly into their autocratic rulers’ bank accounts. Troubled by how difficult it is to persuade Congress to vote them money, they have decided to allocate revenue to themselves directly from our offshore oil and mineral drilling. And, once we sign the treaty, we will have nothing to say about it.

Their chosen path to our wealth is through a new Law of the Sea Treaty (known by the appropriate acronym LOST). And, believe it or not, a coalition of liberal Democrats and RINO (Republican In Name Only) senators may have the votes to get this treaty ratified.

What is extraordinary is that our own leaders are backing these efforts and our president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, and Joint Chiefs of Staff are all supporting the treaty and urging its ratification.

REAGAN AND THATCHER REJECTED THE TREATY

But not all of the world’s recent leaders share their enthusiasm for the treaty. Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who recently testified against it, recounts how “thirty years ago, President Ronald Reagan asked me to meet with world leaders to represent the United States in opposition to the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty. Our efforts soon found a persuasive supporter in British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.”¹

Rumsfeld recalls that when he met with Mrs. Thatcher in 1982, her conclusion on the treaty was unforgettable: “What this treaty proposes is nothing less than the international nationalization of roughly two-thirds of the Earth’s surface…. Tell Ronnie I’m with him [in opposing the treaty].”²

Negotiated in the 1970s, the treaty was “presented to [Reagan] as a done deal requiring only his signature and Senate ratification. Then as now, most of the world’s nations had already approved it. The Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations had all gone along. American diplomats generally supported the treaty and were shocked when Reagan changed America’s policy. Puzzled by their reaction, the president was said to have responded, “But isn’t that what the election was all about?”³

Ed Meese, who was attorney general under Reagan and who also opposes the treaty, quotes a 1978 Reagan radio address titled “Ocean Mining” in which he came out against the treaty even before he was elected. The future president said that “no national interest of ours could justify handing sovereign control of two-thirds of the Earth’s surface over to the Third World.”⁴

GLOBAL REDISTRIBUTION OF INCOME

The treaty fit into a growing effort by third world countries to appropriate to themselves the wealth of the developed nations.

James Malone, Reagan’s point man in seeking unsuccessfully to modify the treaty, explains his president’s opposition: “The treaty’s provisions were intentionally designed to promote a new world order—a form of global collectivism… that seeks ultimately the redistribution of the world’s wealth through a complex system of manipulative central economic planning and bureaucratic coercion.”⁵

Doug Bandow, now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, served as a special assistant to President Regan and a deputy representative to the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea. He bluntly explains that “the treaty would resurrect the redistributionist lobbying campaign once conducted by developing states unwilling to deal with the real causes of their economic failures. Indeed, the LOST would essentially create another UN agency with the purpose of transferring wealth from industrialized states to the Third World voting majority.”⁶

In the 1970s and ’80s, third world nations promoted what Bandow says they “euphemistically called the New International Economic Order—global management and redistribution of resources, technology, trade, and wealth.”⁷ In the United Nations, they formed a Group of seventy-seven countries that set about their search for new sources of income and wealth for their countries and their corrupt leaders. They tried to get the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Centre for Transnational Corporations (CTC), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and the United Nations itself to help them soak rich nations to benefit their third world dictators. All these agencies “became international battlegrounds” in the third world’s desperate search for wealth. Our wealth!

The demands of the third world dictators for more aid have become more insistent and their approach more militant over the past thirty years. Where once they played off the rivalry of the United States and Russia during the cold war—going first to one and then to the other in a bidding contest for their support—they now sought to play on the conscience of the developed world to pry out more aid. Suddenly music groups like U2 held concerts devoted to raising global awareness of poverty. Appeals to world compassion sparked efforts to increase foreign aid appropriations.

Britain’s prime minister Tony Blair took the lead in pledging to contribute seven-tenths of one percent of his nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to third world nations and called on all developed countries to follow his lead.

Global economist Jeffrey Sachs wrote a book optimistically titled The End of Poverty, in which he chronicled the rapid decline of poverty throughout the world. Heralding China’s and India’s emergence from hardship, he called for massive increases in foreign aid to continue the progress so evident in east and south Asia.

But Sachs missed the point. It was not foreign aid that had lifted China and India out of poverty, but international commerce. Through private sector entrepreneurial initiative rather than public charity, these nations cut their poor populations dramatically and spread a middle-class standard of living. It was trade with the United States and direct foreign investment in their businesses rather than foreign aid that had vanquished poverty.

No matter how loudly U2 sang or Blair demanded higher levels of foreign aid, the American people weren’t biting. They were largely unmoved by these appeals. While we doubled our foreign aid spending, it still comes to only four-tenths of one percent of GDP—half of the hoped-for global standard.

Seeing that the strategy of trying to shame the developed world into increased aid wasn’t working, the third world dictators hit on a new vehicle to get money: the Law of the Sea Treaty.

Why not grab hold of the money that gushed out of oil wells drilled deep in the bottom of the ocean? Weren’t these resources “the common heritage of mankind”? How could any nation lay claim to these rich resources that lay far off its coastline, even beyond the two-hundred-mile economic zone generally asserted by seacoast nations?

These dictatorships acted like Groucho Marx did when he learned, in his movie Night at the Opera, that the wealthy, elderly widow he was currently romancing had given money to the opera so they could sign a tenor who would sing for a thousand dollars a night—an astronomical sum in those days. Rubbing his hands together, Groucho said, “There’s got to be some way I can get a piece of that.”⁸

Bandow explains that to these African, Asian, and Latin American autocracies, “no fight was more important than that over the LOST.” After all, didn’t the treaty itself explicitly articulate its purpose to “contribute to the realization of a just and equitable international economic order which takes into account the interests and needs of mankind as a whole and, in particular, the special interests and needs of developing countries”?⁹

The Law of the Sea Treaty does more than just increase the flow of wealth from developed nations to third world dictatorships. It confers on them the power to tax American property.

No longer do they have to ask for money. They can demand it. And it’s a lot of money. According to the US Extended Continental Shelf Task Force, which is currently mapping the undersea region, the resources there “may be worth billions if not trillions” of dollars.¹⁰

The treaty gives a new multinational body—the International Seabed Authority (ISA)—the right to impose taxes on offshore oil and gas wells equal to 7 percent of the royalties they would otherwise pay to their nation’s treasuries. The Seabed Authority, based in Kingston, Jamaica, would rule the waves—and the seabed beneath. A body much like the United Nations’ General Assembly, it is governed by 160 member nations, each with one vote.

Secretary Rumsfeld stresses that “pursuant to the treaty’s Article 82, the US would be required to transfer to this entity a significant share of all royalties generated by US companies—royalties that would otherwise go to the US Treasury.”¹¹

“Over time, hundreds of billions of dollars could flow through the Authority with little oversight. The US would not control how those revenues are spent: The treaty empowers the Authority to redistribute these so-called international royalties to developing and landlocked nations with no role in exploring or extracting those resources.”¹²

Rumsfeld calls this transfer of wealth by its real name: welfare. “This [treaty] would constitute massive global welfare, courtesy of the US taxpayer. It would be as if fishermen who exerted themselves to catch fish on the high seas were required, on the principle that those fish belonged to all people everywhere, to give a share of their take to countries that had nothing to do with their costly, dangerous and arduous efforts.”¹³

US CAN’T CONTROL WHO GETS OUR MONEY

The money could go anywhere, with the US having little if any control over it. The money would go into a global fund that a thirty-six member committee of the ISA would allocate around the world. The United States would sit on the committee and have one vote, only one.

The treaty specifies that the distribution of the aid would be decided by the council based on “consensus,” a provision that treaty advocates have said amounts to giving the US, in effect, a kind of veto. But experience has proven that without a formal veto the requirement of consensus would give us very little real leverage with which to direct the flow of aid, even to stop the money from going to terror-sponsoring nations or entities.

And one wonders if President Obama’s representatives on the ISA Council can be counted on to fight to direct the revenue to good countries. After all, it’s his administration that gives $1 billion in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority and Hamas and $1.3 billion to the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt!

Rumsfeld explains that “these sizable ‘royalties’ could go to corrupt dictatorships and state sponsors of terrorism. For example, as a treaty signatory and a member of the Authority’s executive council, the government of Sudan—which has harbored terrorists and conducted a mass extermination campaign against its own people—would have as much say as the US on issues to be decided by the Authority.”¹⁴

Under the treaty, the transfer of these funds does not end with nation-states. These royalty revenues would even be extended to “peoples who have not attained full independence or other self-governing status.”¹⁵ That means that groups like the Palestinian Authority and potentially other groups with terrorist ties could get in on the bounty.

The point is that it is our money, not the United Nations’. American firms prospected for the oil, financed the drilling, invented the deep-sea technology, took the risk of a dry well, and are entitled to reap the rewards of their efforts.

AIDING THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES DOESN’T HELP THEM

But, our liberal friends ask, shouldn’t we extend our aid to the third world? Don’t we have a moral obligation to fight poverty and help them feed their people?

But wiser heads in the developed world realize that increasing the flow of revenue to third world autocracies would just expand their opportunities for graft and corruption. The funding would not flow to their needy people but to the avaricious Swiss bank accounts.

Indeed, some economists like Dambisa Moyo, an African woman who wrote Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, believe that foreign aid is really counterproductive.

She argues that aid is just an invitation to corruption. It means that governments become like private franchises, raising their money abroad and spending it in unaccountable ways. Their citizens don’t care. It’s not their money. And the effort of ambitious people to get their hands on the aid sparks civil wars, coups, corruption, and political instability, which makes real economic growth impossible.

Moyo, who studied at Harvard, earned a doctorate in economics at Oxford, and worked at the World Bank, poses the challenging question: “Has more than $1 trillion in development aid to Africa over the last several decades made the African people better off?”¹⁶

Her answer is a resounding no. She elaborates: “In fact, across the globe the recipients of this aid are worse off; much worse off. Aid has helped make the poor poorer and growth slower…. The notion that aid can alleviate systemic poverty and has done so is a myth. Millions in Africa are poorer because of aid. Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world.”¹⁷

Moyo says that revenues such as what the Law of the Sea would cause to flow to the third world creates a pot of money over which various factions, tribes, parties, and regions can compete. She likens it to diamond mines or oil wells, “a kind of curse because it encourages corruption and conflict, while at the same time discouraging free enterprise. Not only is aid easy to steal, as it is usually provided directly to African governments, but it also makes control over government worth fighting for. And, most importantly, the influx of aid can undermine domestic savings and investment.”¹⁸

US foreign aid has failed in its primary mission of alleviating poverty. Since 1980, the United States has given more than $309 billion (in inflation-adjusted money) in development assistance to poor countries. (This sum does not include military aid or humanitarian relief for natural disasters.) And it hasn’t worked.

Of the 97 countries that got development aid from the United States between 1980 and 2006:

• a quarter actually saw a net drop in their per capita GDP.

• 28 had almost no growth—less than one percent.

• 39 had minor growth averaging only 1–4 percent per year.

• Only 4 had real economic growth of 5 percent or more. They were Bosnia, Serbia, Cambodia, and Botswana.

WE’D HAVE TO GIVE AWAY OUR TECHNOLOGY, TOO

But sending money to third world dictators is not even the most obnoxious part of the Law of the Sea Treaty. Beyond taxing royalties, the treaty obliges American energy companies that wish to drill more than two hundred miles off our Continental Shelf to share their technologies—for free—with the ISA.

Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and John Cornyn (R-TX)—both opponents of the treaty—warn that under it “nations with mining and resource recovery technologies like the United States will be obligated to share those technologies with Third World competitors, and that is one of the many issues, which trouble those of us opposed to the treaty.”¹⁹

They add: “in other words, US companies would be forced to give away the very types of innovation that historically have made our nation a world leader while fueling our economic engine.”²⁰

In a phrase out of Star Trek, the treaty sets up an “Enterprise” to facilitate third world access to drilling technology. It provides that “if the Enterprise or developing States are unable to obtain” drilling equipment commercially, there is a duty imposed on signatory nations to “facilitate the acquisition of mining technology.”²¹

Sensibly, the Cato Institute argues that “the Enterprise and developing states would find themselves unable to purchase machinery only if they were unwilling to pay the market price or were perceived as being unable to preserve trade secrets. The clause might be interpreted to mean that industrialized states, and private miners, whose ‘cooperation’ is to be ‘ensured’ by their respective governments, are then responsible for subsidizing the Enterprise’s acquisition of technology.”²²

Cato also notes that the treaty empowers the Seabed Authority to “take measures… to promote and encourage the transfer to developing States [of] technology and scientific knowledge so that all States Parties benefit therefrom.” If the US signs the treaty, the Seabed Authority would have enormous leverage over American energy companies to compel them to “share” their technology for free!²³

American firms will have to survey the ocean floor, locate mineral reserves, raise the capital to drill, assume the risk of failure, and even pay the Enterprise a quarter-million-dollar application fee to get their approval for the well. Then, when they get oil, they must pay royalties to the Seabed Authority and give the Enterprise access to their technology!

And the application fee and royalty tax could go higher. Cato warns that the treaty allows an “as yet undetermined, level of royalties and profit sharing. The Institute notes that the ‘system of payments’… shall be ‘fair both to the contractor and to the Authority,’ fees ‘shall be within the range of those prevailing in respect of land-based mining of the same or similar minerals,’ even though, as Cato notes, “seabed production is more expensive, riskier, and occurs in territory beyond any nation’s jurisdiction.”²⁴

Yet some major oil companies support the treaty! They argue that their legal claims to the right to drill far offshore (beyond the two-hundred-mile limit) are shaky and that recognition of their wells by an international authority would give them the legal protection that they need.

Elliot Richardson, who led the American delegation that negotiated this treaty during the Carter years, says that the United Nations’ assertion that the ocean’s resources are “the common heritage of mankind” has made it impossible for any seabed mining without UN approval. He warns that “if any mining defied international law, its output would be subject to confiscation as contraband.”²⁵

The Cato Institute rightly asks “who would do the seizing?” There is no UN Navy, but there is a US Navy that would protect our commercial interests in the face of a hostile seizure.²⁶

Indeed, Cato stresses that the arguments of the oil companies make it “all the more important that the United States refuse to ratify the [Law of the Sea Treaty]. Once Washington has done so, a future renunciation of the LOST might not be considered enough to reestablish Americans’ traditional freedom on the high seas.”²⁷

Backers of the treaty see the agreement as a fait accompli since more than the necessary sixty nations have already ratified it, putting it into effect (according to its own terms). But, as Cato notes, “nations cannot be held to surrender their rights because other states have ratified a treaty. Put bluntly, it matters little whether or not Djibouti, Fiji, or Zambia approves of American mining consortia operating in the Pacific.”²⁸

SHACKLING THE US NAVY

The Law of the Sea Treaty has other horrific implications. Essentially, it makes the entire seabed and the waters above it the sovereign property of the United Nations and disempowers the US Navy.

Ever since the United States won the Cold War and acquired unquestioned global military superiority, the other nations of the world have sought to rein in American force. Two treaties represent their most audacious effort to stop the United States from exercising its military sway throughout the world.

The Law of the Sea Treaty gives the International Seabed Authority (ISA) the right to adjudicate disputes over the seas, deciding who can sail where and drill where on the seabed. Currently, the US Navy, as a practical matter, makes these determinations since no one can challenge its power. But prevailing anti-American sentiment throughout the world is leading other nations to try to reduce its power.

The second effort to restrain our military power is through the International Criminal Court. It would ban any American president—on possible penalty of criminal prosecution before the court—from going to war without the approval of the UN Security Council, a body hobbled by the Russian and Chinese veto power. The treaty would, in effect, require the approval of Moscow and Beijing before our armed forces could be committed to combat. (See more on the ICC in Part Six.)

The right of open seas and freedom of navigation is maintained for all nations by the unrivaled and unequaled power of the US Navy, which, after Great Britain found its resources too limited to afford a large navy, has protected open seas for almost a hundred years.

But, now, in an era of defense spending cuts, some urge that the US Navy pull back from its historic mission and turn the protection of free navigation over to the International Seabed Authority.

Disputes that were once adjudicated by the US Navy will now go before international arbitrators meeting in Hamburg, Germany, appointed by the ISA—and almost certainly hostile to American interests. The arbitrators, whose decisions are binding on signatory nations, are chosen by the parties to the dispute, each getting the right to name one or two of the five judges. In the event that a fifth judge satisfactory to the contending nations could not be negotiated, the power to appoint the judges would fall on the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, whose tenure has been noted for its corruption, anti-Americanism, and overt advocacy of the transfer of resources to the third world. Good luck getting a fair trial out of him!

Peter Brookes of the Heritage Foundation asks the key question: “Why risk sacrificing US sovereignty under the treaty if it makes us no more secure? After all, what initially established and still ensures freedom of navigation under international law is naval power. To secure navigational freedom, territorial rights and all national and international interests addressed in LOST, we must maintain the strength of the US Navy, not look to an anachronistic pact that is intent on advancing a one-world agenda.”²⁹

The treaty itself has been kicking around for years. Negotiated by the misguided globalists of the Carter administration, the drive for US participation was only temporarily halted after Reagan refused to sign on in 1982.

President Clinton signed the treaty Reagan had rejected, after it was renegotiated in 1994. The changed treaty was hailed as solving all the objections Reagan had raised and Clinton called for prompt Senate ratification. But a careful examination of these changes revealed that they were largely cosmetic, fudging some issues and avoiding others. Those who had opposed the treaty are largely still opposed. Conservative objections to the revised document were so strong that the Republican majority on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee refused to report the treaty to the floor of the Senate in the 1990s.

Now, in the current drive for ratification, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mocked those who raised legitimate questions about the treaty in her Senate testimony, saying that the arguments against the treaty “cannot even be taken with a straight face.” She said the opposition to the treaty was “based in ideology and mythology, not in facts, evidence, or the consequences of our continuing failure to accede to the treaty.”³⁰

As noted, the secretary of state dismissed concerns over the treaty, noting that if the US signed it or any UN treaty, “[o]f course, that means the black helicopters are on their way,”³¹ a reference to conspiracy theories about a world government and a quote that inspired the title of this book. Thank you, Hillary!

One of the changes made in 1994 excluded military vessels from the regulation of the International Seabed Authority. But Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) notes that while

The Senator noted that “military training exercises that do not have the approval of other nations could be prevented because of potentially negative environmental impacts. US military vessels could be stopped on the grounds that they are too heavy a polluter.³²

Currently, the US Navy is subject to the Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organization, now called the International Maritime Organization (IMO). The IMO sets maritime laws to improve safety at sea, facilitate trade, and protect the marine environment. The Law of the Sea Treaty would supersede the IMO. The IMO already gives the US a free hand to pursue commerce and military operations around the globe. So why hamper and hinder our own Navy and subject us to the jurisdiction of the Seabed Authority?

CAN THE TREATY STOP CHINA AND RUSSIA FROM THEIR TERRITORIAL CLAIMS?

Defenders of the Law of the Sea Treaty say that it is necessary to resolve two regional problems: China’s attempt to assert control over the South China Sea and Russia’s efforts to claim sovereignty over the Arctic ice shelf, where the warming global climate may make oil drilling more technically feasible in the future.

China is a signatory to the Law of the Sea Treaty but, nevertheless, it is ignoring one of its key provisions—the offshore exclusive economic zone. The treaty gives each country bordering the ocean a zone of two hundred miles off its coast in which it can drill for oil or engage in any economic activity. Even though the treaty bars other nations from economic activity—such as oil drilling—within another country’s two-hundred-mile zone, China is claiming that it can drill anywhere in the South China Sea, even right off the Vietnam coast.

In June 2012, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation announced that it was “offering a new batch of oil-exploration blocks inside the 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone granted to Vietnam under the United Nations’ Law of the Sea Treaty.”³³

Vietnam protested, but the International Seabed Authority—charged with enforcing the treaty—did nothing to bar the Chinese action. China does whatever it wants, wherever it wants, as usual, and only nations like the United States scrupulously abide by their treaty commitments.

To believe that China would be deterred from its imperialistic ambitions by the rulings of the International Seabed Authority is ridiculous. The fact that China is already a signatory to the treaty has obviously not stopped it from trying to elbow aside not only Vietnam, but also the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia for control of the South China Sea.

Peter Brookes debunks the idea that the treaty would inhibit China, noting that China, “claims ‘indisputable sovereignty’ over the entire South China Sea—more than 1 million square miles. (LOST allows for 12-mile territorial waters and a 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone—or EEZ—from a country’s coastline.) Beijing has flouted LOST for years while building a mighty military machine, especially a navy, to assert its claims. It’s fantasy believing that an American signature on a piece of paper will change China’s mind about the South China Sea and EEZ freedom of navigation.”³⁴

One of the nation’s most astute observers of China, Gordon Chang, agrees. Writing in the World Affairs Journal, Chang said that “although Beijing ratified the [LOST] pact in June 1996, it continues to issue maps claiming the entire South China Sea. That claim is, among other things, incompatible with the treaty’s rules. It’s no wonder Beijing notified the UN in 2006 that it would not accept international arbitration of its sovereignty claims.”³⁵

China seems totally undaunted by its treaty commitment under the Law of the Sea Treaty.

Nor would LOST be any more helpful in adjudicating the controversy with Russia over the Arctic.

Brookes points out that advocates of the treaty say we

Former assistant secretary of defense Frank Gaffney points out that it is a lot easier to get five governments to agree than the 160 that make up the International Seabed Authority.³⁷

And all this assumes that the Seabed Authority would dispense justice. The record of the United Nations is dismal in this regard and the chances are that the ISA nations would seek to curry favor with Moscow or Beijing—or repay their bribes and favors—by unjust and arbitrary rulings, even if just to stick it to the United States.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta defended the treaty before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, saying that “by moving off the sidelines, by sitting at the table of nations that have acceded to this treaty, we can defend our interests, we can lead the discussions, we will be able to influence those treaty bodies that develop and interpret the Law of the Sea.”³⁸

But Frank Gaffney argues, “This is simply not so if, as is true of the LOST’s various institutions, we would have but one seat among many, and no certainty that we can decisively ‘influence bodies that develop and interpret the law of the sea.’”³⁹

“In fact,” Gaffney adds, “thanks to the rigged-game nature of those institutions, such bodies can be relied upon to hamstring us—by, for example, applying environmental regulations over which we have no control to our Navy’s anti-submarine warfare exercises and our domestic emissions into inland air and water that migrates to the international oceans.”⁴⁰

TREATY OPENS DOOR TO NAVAL WEAKNESS

Yet admirals and Navy service chiefs have advocated ratifying the Law of the Sea Treaty. General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, said this treaty “codifies navigational rights and freedoms essential for our global mobility.”⁴¹

Former defense secretary Rumsfeld rejects the Navy’s argument for the treaty:

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) argues that “ceding any authority to an international body is not only a threat to our sovereignty, it also creates another avenue for other nations to stop US unilateral activity.”⁴³

So why are the admirals pushing the treaty? Inhofe believes that the likely future weakness of the US Navy may be at play here. He explains that “some fear the Navy is at a tipping point. Increased global threats, combined with fewer resources, have created growing concern for its future. Devastating budget cuts under the Obama administration mean doing even more with much less. If the proposed defense cuts through sequestration go into effect, potential cuts include the littoral combat ship, amphibious ships, a reduction in aircraft carriers and far fewer sailors. After sequestration, our fleet could be smaller than 230 ships—the smallest since 1915.”⁴⁴

Inhofe wonders, “could it be that some have decided to put their hope in a piece of paper rather than provide the resources necessary to maintain our Navy’s traditional strength?”⁴⁵

But it is pure fantasy to assume that the Seabed Authority would be impartial and just in its rulings. And it is further fantasy to believe that powers like Russia and China would listen to it. What recourse would we have if they don’t? Both nations have veto power in the UN Security Council and can stop any enforcement action with teeth. The US will, of course, honor the decisions of the authority if we join, but other, autocratic nations will thumb their noses at it.

Brookes says that relying on the treaty rather than on our own Navy to keep the sea-lanes open is “outsourcing national security”!⁴⁶

Democratic Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) asked General Dempsey the key question during hearings on the LOST: “Does failure to ratify this treaty… in any way compromise the ability of the United States to project force around the world, to support and sustain our allies…? Are we at risk as a result of failure to ratify this treaty?”

Dempsey’s response boiled down to “no.”⁴⁷

“Our ability to project force will not deteriorate,” he said, if we refrain from ratifying the treaty.⁴⁸

A BACKDOOR GLOBAL WARMING TREATY

In 1997, amid much fanfare, the nations of the world signed the Kyoto Protocol on Global Climate Change. The treaty took effect in 2005. While it was signed and ratified by 191 nations, the United States, to the intense frustration of the global community, never approved it. Indeed, it has never even been submitted to the Senate for ratification, so slight would be its chances. (In 2011, Canada renounced the treaty.)

The document commits thirty-seven largely European and Western nations to a 5 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. While the US did not ratify the treaty, the fact is that we have more than doubled the reduction goals of the treaty through market forces—high gasoline and low natural gas prices—and public education and conservation. China, India, and much of the developing world refused to sign up for any carbon emission reductions and have not achieved any. For more information about the US record on curbing carbon emissions, see the chapter on Saudi Arabia in our previous book, Screwed!.

But it has been a goal of the liberal globalists to get Uncle Sam’s signature on a global climate change treaty. They say that this is because the US generates one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases. But America’s record in cutting emissions is so extraordinary that it gives the lie to this stated objective. Their real goal is to control the United States, diminish our power, and assert regulatory jurisdiction over our power plants, factories, and entire economy.

Obama tried to force our cooperation in this effort by pushing Congress to enter a global system of cap and trade that obliged us to pay for our emissions by giving money to third world nations that do not emit comparable levels of greenhouse gas. His bill passed Nancy Pelosi’s House but was rejected by the Senate (even when the Democrats had the requisite sixty votes to pass it if they wanted to do so).

So when Congress didn’t act as Obama wanted, he turned his attention to the Law of the Sea Treaty. Environmentalists hope that they can bind the US finally to their emission targets by getting us to ratify the treaty.

How does LOST replace the Kyoto accords? It requires its signatories to prevent the release of pollution from land-based sources that can enter the ocean through either the atmosphere or from seagoing vessels.

Article 212 of the treaty states, in part, “States shall adopt laws and regulations to prevent, reduce and control pollution of the marine environment from or through the atmosphere…. States, acting especially through competent international organizations… shall endeavor to establish global and regional rules, standards and recommended practices and procedures to prevent, reduce and control pollution.”⁴⁹

When it was written in the 1970s, nobody was thinking about climate change. But today, green advocates are breathlessly awaiting Senate ratification of LOST so they can use this provision to force emissions controls on American power plants and industries.

Environmentalists claim that carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere create global warming through what they call the “greenhouse effect.” And, conversely, the warmer the ocean becomes, the more it emits carbon dioxide on its own. The ocean, literally, pollutes itself!

At the Senate hearing on LOST in June 2008, Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said that he believed that the UN will “look upstream” at the causes of marine pollution and pass binding regulations on signatory nations to reduce them.⁵⁰

Already, environmentalists have begun an action under LOST to stop the United Kingdom from operating its power plant at Sellafield, which produces MOX nuclear fuel for Japan’s reactors. Sellafield has closed anyway after the Fukayama nuclear power plant disaster. But the precedent has been set that LOST can be used to modify the environmental policies of signatory nations. (The UK is a signatory.)⁵¹

The latest panic among environmentalists concerns the “acidification” of the ocean. About a quarter of atmospheric carbon dioxide goes into the ocean, where it forms carbonic acid and changes the base/acidic ratio (pH ratio) of the seas.

Between 1740 and 1994, scientists tell us that surface ocean pH has dropped from 8.25 to 8.14, almost a 30 percent increase in the acidity of the oceans. Environmentalists worry that the change in pH may impact our food supply from the seas.

Christopher C. Horner, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says that “LOST is a sweeping regime cracking down on all activities arguably depositing pollutants into the seas. Under the precautionary principle, which LOST adopts, allegation is sufficient to establish the offense. With ‘ocean acidification’ the latest nominee to supplant troubled CO2-warming theory, LOST supplants the failed Kyoto Treaty. It invites attacks on, e.g., America’s transport and energy policies, claiming our cars and coal-fired power plants contribute to the latest claimed phenomenon, ‘acidification.’”⁵²

WILL THE SENATE RATIFY LOST?

The fact that the Senate is even considering ratifying LOST is hard to fathom. Why would we subject ourselves to the jurisdiction of a third world–dominated body that hates us?

As Gaffney says: “If Americans have learned anything about the United Nations over the last 50 years, it is that this ‘world body’ is, at best, riddled with corruption and incompetence. At worst, its bureaucracy, agencies and members are overwhelmingly hostile to the United States and other freedom-loving nations, most especially Israel.”⁵³

Michelle Malkin asks the key question: “So why on earth would the United States Senate possibly consider putting the UN on steroids by assenting to its control of seven-tenths of the world’s surface?”⁵⁴

After all, let’s remember with whom we are dealing when we give the United Nations the kind of power conferred by LOST. Malkin lists the “well-documented fiascoes” that bespeckle the UN’s history, including “the UN-administered Iraq Oil-for-Food program; investigations and cover-ups of corrupt practices at the organization’s highest levels; child sex-slave operations and rape squads run by UN peacekeepers; and the absurd, yet relentless, assault on alleged Israeli abuses of human rights by majorities led by despotic regimes in Iran, Cuba, Syria and Libya.”⁵⁵

She fittingly warns that “the predictable effect of US accession to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea—better known as the Law of the Sea Treaty (or LOST)—would be to transform the UN from a nuisance and laughingstock into a world government: The United States would confer upon a UN agency called the International Seabed Authority (IA) the right to dictate what is done on, in and under the world’s oceans. Doing so, America would become party to surrender of immense resources of the seas and what lies beneath them to the dictates of unaccountable, nontransparent multinational organizations, tribunals and bureaucrats.”⁵⁶

This does not sound good.

So what will the Senate do?

In plotting how to get approval for this act of self-enslavement, the Obama administration has craftily decided to seek ratification only during the lame-duck session of the Senate, after the ballots have been counted in the 2012 election. Then, some senators will be retiring—a few voluntarily and a great many Democrats involuntarily—and they will have no worries about running for reelection. For the others, the classes that will face reelection in 2014 and 2016, the balloting is in the distant future and not a matter of immediate concern.

Obama’s hope is that these factors induce senators to back him in passing the treaty. He used much the same tactics in getting the START Treaty with Russia ratified, submitting it to the lame-duck session of the Senate after the massacre of 2010 had left many senators still in office but doomed to retirement as soon as the new year dawned. This one-sided giveaway to Russia—which limited ballistic and strategic nuclear weapons but did nothing to curb the tactical nuclear weapons in which Moscow has a decided advantage—was ratified easily by the lame-duck body.

Likely all Democratic senators will back the treaty. But since a two-thirds majority is needed, the support of 14 Republicans, in addition to all 53 Democrats, will be required for ratification. With 47 Republicans in the current Senate, if 34 vote no, the treaty can be scuttled.

By a razor-thin margin, the Republicans in the Senate seem to be coming through. In July of this year, the bare minimum thirty-four Republican senators signed a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid signaling their intention to vote against the treaty. Is the treaty dead? Not by a long shot! Several of the thirty-four senators only jumped on board the bandwagon at the end and expressed doubts about voting no. Most important, at this writing, the two top Republicans on the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Senate—Dick Lugar (R-IN) and Bob Corker (R-TN)—weren’t among the thirty-four opponents. Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Committee, supports the treaty, and Corker, the likely incoming chairman should the Republicans win the Senate (Lugar was defeated in a primary), is uncommitted. We need to keep up the pressure to make sure these folks stay committed to vote no.

Their letter began: “We are writing to let you know that we believe this Convention reflects political, economic, and ideological assumptions which are inconsistent with American values and sovereignty.”⁵⁷

The Republicans laid out their reasons: “by its current terms, the Law of the Sea Convention encompasses economic and technology interests in the deep sea, redistribution of wealth from developed to undeveloped nations, freedom of navigation in the deep sea and exclusive economic zones which may impact maritime security, and environmental regulation over virtually all sources of pollution.”⁵⁸

They particularly highlighted their concerns about the cessation of sovereignty to the United Nations. “To effect the treaty’s broad regime of governance,” they wrote, “we are particularly concerned that United States sovereignty could be subjugated in many areas to a supranational government that is chartered by the United Nations under the 1982 Convention. Further, we are troubled that compulsory dispute resolution could pertain to public and private activities including law enforcement, maritime security, business operations, and nonmilitary activities performed aboard military vessels.”⁵⁹

They concluded flatly by saying, “If this treaty comes to the floor, we will oppose its ratification.”⁶⁰

Bravo!

Here’s the list of the Republicans who signed the letter:

But what we really need to focus on is the ones who did not affix their signatures.

Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Dick Lugar (R-IN) have publicly endorsed the treaty. That leaves these senators as uncommitted:

Likely RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) Snowe and Collins of Maine are going to back the treaty, all the more so since Snowe is retiring.

A bunch of senators from conservative southern states—Alexander (TN), Cochran (MS), Graham (SC), and Hutchison (TX, but retiring)—may be subject to pressure.

Murkowski from Alaska might feel she needs to vote for the treaty because of her worry about Russian Arctic claims. But can she be deluded enough to think that the UN would rule in our favor?

Scott Brown of Massachusetts comes from a liberal northern state and it will be harder for him to vote no, but he’s a man of deep conservative convictions and well might stand up for American sovereignty.

But the larger point is that the ball is in our court. It is not Blue Dog Democrats we must persuade but Republicans who trumpet their conservatism. It is within the Red States and among the Red Senators that we must find courageous members willing to vote no.

If you live in one of the states where these senators are from, go to work! Our sovereignty depends on it!