The United States and the World
A C Grayling examines America's awkward reluctance to co-operate with the United Nations
At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 2012 on whether the US should accede to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS-III) the then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, scoffed at nationalistic fears on the Right of American politics that the UN’s “black helicopters are on the way” – the far Right’s conspiracy theory that the UN is seeking to be a World Government and is gathering military forces to take over Washington. As ludicrous as the fears are, the fact that the Republican Party is influenced by them explains much about US reluctance to join UN efforts to garner international support for protecting global commons such as the deep seabed outside territorial waters.
This reluctance is just one example of an habitual US attitude to global agreements which extends beyond the seas to the world at large and its currently precarious situation; a situation that will be exacerbated if Donald Trump regains the White House in November.
The UN’s efforts, thwarted by the US, to protect the oceans is a worrying example. The UN has been trying for decades to achieve international agreement on the matter. As marine technologies have advanced, making the prospect of deep sea mining a reality, so environmentalists have raised major concerns about the damage this would do to ocean ecosystems.
Modern technologies’ hunger for rare minerals is behind the issue. Different metal deposits are found at different depths, and therefore none of the oceans are safe. Cobalt crusts are found on seamounts, accessible at 1000 metres depth; polymetallic sulphides (‘sea floor massive sulphides’) are found on mid-ocean ridges at 2000 metres depth; ferromanganese crusts and polymetallic nodules lie on the abyssal plains at 5000 metre depths. Drilling will at least disturb, and at worst destroy, the areas themselves, generate plumes of waste and sediment in the water column above them thus compromising respiration and feeding of marine creatures, causing noise that will stress and disorientate them, and damaging the ecological balance of the living organisms within the radius of the exploited region.
But note that the UN has not tried to prevent mining outright, only to control it, and – to its great credit – to argue that the profits from it should be shared internationally, on the premise that the seas are ‘a common inheritance of humankind’, and therefore even those countries without a shoreline should benefit. It is therefore not only fears of World Government that drive US reluctance, but the unwillingness to see US marine industries obliged to share profits.
Yet it is an irony of the US refusal to sign UNCLOS that its own marine industries have suffered as a consequence. One of the submissions to the 2012 hearing pointed out that the US’s deep seabed industry had been virtually abandoned because companies like Lockheed Martin, which had ‘legacy’ claims to ocean mining before UNCLOS, had responded to uncertainty about the legal implications of the Convention and US compliance with aspects of it (required because it has the status of international law) by pulling back for fear of losing their investments.
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