LOST is a Loss for the United States
by Jeffrey Gayner

The Halloween vote by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in favor of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOST) represents an attempt to trick the American people into accepting a fatally flawed agreement. This complex international treaty, if adopted, would directly threaten American sovereign rights on the high seas and will transfer American wealth to a new rouge international organization.

The stealth campaign in the Senate to have LOST ratified with little debate or discussion wants to ignore many of the major problems with the treaty. Instead the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had only two hearings on it and only allowed two witnesses who were critical of LOST (two out of eleven total witnesses). No other Senate committee has held any hearings in this session of Congress on the broad military, economic and environmental implications of LOST. Never has a major international treaty received such superficial critical attention by the Senate.

As the most powerful and important sea-faring nation in the world, the United States has the most to lose and the least to gain from this agreement. At present American rights at sea are effectively guaranteed by a combination of existing treaties and agreements backed up by American military power. LOST would transfer jurisdiction of the seas over to a new United Nations entity that would be self-governing without an American veto power over its actions.

The United States wisely resisted joining either the International Criminal Court or the Kyoto Protocol on climate change because both agreements failed to guarantee existing American rights or fair treatment of our vital interests. Instead those treaties, like LOST, set up international rogue entities that could either curtail the rights Americans presently enjoy under the U.S. Constitution or required the United States to make exorbitant sacrifices compared to other countries.

LOST would take the United States into similar uncharted territory. For example, the United States has historically done more to protect freedom of the seas than any other nation in history, largely through exercise of real or potential military power at sea. Under LOST oceans are specifically reserved for “peaceful purposesâ€