The United Nations has gone through some tough times of late.
The body faces a public relation disaster over a tell-all book by
three U.N. employees. It charges that peacekeeping operations are
chock full of waste and abuse. Allegations of U.N. mismanagement of
the Iraqi Oil-for-Food program have led to a formal
investigation.
Its image battered, the U.N. is now turning to the United States
Senate to deliver some good news this summer by ratifying the Law
of the Sea Treaty (which goes by the wonderful acronym LOST). LOST
operates under the assumption that any minerals in the ocean floor
constitute the “common heritage” of all mankind — and therefore
cannot be the property of any one individual, company, or nation.
This treaty would give the United Nations authority over much of
the world’s oceans, including the power to regulate and tax
deep-sea mining, and redistribute the proceeds to Third World
governments.
LOST has been around for a long time. President Reagan rejected
it in 1982, citing the “deep conviction that the United States
cannot support a deep seabed mining regime with such major
problems.” He withdrew the U.S. from participation in negotiations
at all but the most “technical level.”
Clinton signed the agreement in 1994, but could not persuade the
Senate to ratify it. Now a loose coalition of American military
officials, politicians, bureaucrats, and activists is working to
force the Senate off the fence, on the treaty’s side.
Proponents argue that the parts of the treaty that Reagan found
unacceptable have been watered down. For instance, University of
Virginia law professor John Norton Moore told the L.A.
Times, “There is not a single sovereign right of the United
States that is conceded in this treaty.”
BUT DR. PETER LEITNER, of the Office of the Secretary of Defense,
who has studied LOST for years, in May — testifying before the
House International Relations Committee as a private citizen —
pointed out that LOST would give the U.N. the power to “tax,
regulate, and enforce its will” on companies attempting to mine the
seabed. Further, it would give the U.N. an independent source of
revenue, which would encourage that body to further “insulate
itself” from the nation-states on which it traditionally depends
for its funding.
This insularity would allow the U.N. to pursue one of the
treaty’s most obnoxious goals — to enshrine the world body as an
agent of global income redistribution. Paul Bamela Engo, a diplomat
from Cameroon who was involved in some of the early LOST
negotiations, has stated that LOST is not just about writing “a
business arrangement to facilitate exploitation of the seabed
resources by the industrially rich and powerful nations.” Rather,
its authors intended to “design a new relationship among
states.”
Given the United Nations’ dysfunctional management culture, the
countries that pay the bulk of the U.N.’s bills should be troubled
by the prospect of that organization developing an independent
revenue stream. How can the U.S., the UK, etc. know that the money
will be well spent? What guarantees do we have that, if seabed
mining becomes a profitable industry and the U.N. begins to take in
lots of revenue, the end result won’t be another debacle like the
Oil-for-Food program — but on a much larger scale?
As P.J. O’Rourke said of another set of bureaucrats, giving the
blue hat brigade more money and power through LOST would be like
giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
