The Law of the Sea Treaty should sink to the bottom

For centuries there has been a law of the sea. There might be marginal benefits from LOST’s clarifications and procedures for resolving disputes arising from that law — although China and the nations involved in contentious disputes about the South China Sea have all ratified LOST, not that it seems to matter. But those hypothetical benefits are less important than LOST’s actual derogation of U.S. sovereignty by empowering a U.N. bureaucracy — the International Seabed Authority (ISA), based in Jamaica — to give or withhold permission for mining, and to transfer perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. wealth to whatever nation it deems deserving — “on the basis of equitable sharing criteria, taking into account the interests and needs of developing states, particularly the least developed and the land-locked among them.”

Royalties paid by nations with the talent and will for extracting wealth from the seabed will go to nations that have neither, on the principle that what is extracted from 56 percent of the earth’s surface is, the United Nations insists, “the common heritage of mankind.” And never mind U.S. law, which says that wealth gained from the continental shelf — from which the ISA would seek royalty payments — is supposed to be held by the U.S. government for the benefit of the American people.