By Jonathan Power
LUND, Sweden | 1 July 2026 (IDN) — David Attenborough said in his wondrous documentary film, Ocean, that it had taken him a long time in his 99 years of life to understand that for the survival of our planet the oceans are more important than the land.
This past four months, as we watched President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu send the military into a war against Iran, very few of us were thinking about the sea and oceans in the round, just the particular problem of that small stretch of sea, the Strait of Hormuz, which gives entry from the Indian Ocean to the Gulf of Iran.
So disdainful is Trump of the UN effort to secure universal ratification of the carefully negotiated Law of the Sea that he doesn’t even send a delegation to the occasional UN meetings on the issue. Yet the last Republican president before Trump, George W. Bush, announced that, if elected, he would move to ratify the UN’s Law of the Sea. He never did, outvoted by Republican isolationists. The same happened to Barack Obama. His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, flanked by senior military brass, announced that the Administration would immediately push Congress to vote for the long-delayed ratification of the treaty. She failed.
From Freedom to Regulation
Until the Law of the Sea was drafted, the seas and oceans around us, two-thirds of our planet, were largely lawless. When 350 years ago the Dutch jurist, Hugo Grotius, formulated the doctrine of the freedom of the seas, letting things be seemed a magnificent idea- “Let no man possess what belongs to every man.”
But this is the age of giant tankers, oil spills that destroy whole coasts, declining fish catches, disputes over rights of passage (as with the Strait of Hormuz) and maybe the beginnings of a gold rush for minerals and genetic resources on the bottom of the sea.
After 26 years of negotiation in which America played an active part, the Law of the Sea came into force in 1994- even without the US, enough states had ratified it for it to become operational. It was a historic milestone in the annals of nation-state competition and commercial exploration. It gave the world a chance to arrange for humankind a fair distribution of its common patrimony of the seas. It has the potential to establish precedents that could be applied to other endeavours, such as the slicing up of oil-rich Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean, currently being disputed by nations as diverse as Denmark, the US, Canada and Russia, and the future frontiers of the moon, the planets and outer space. This is why some say it is, in its own way, a Magna Carta for the 21st Century.
America’s Ambivalent Record
It was Republican President Richard Nixon who first coined the term to describe the seas as “the common heritage of mankind”. Nixon’s attitude was anomalous- the US attitude to international law had long been ambiguous and uncertain.
President Harry Truman was the first to challenge the conventional wisdom then reigning as laid down by Grotius. In 1945 he proclaimed US jurisdiction over the seabed resources of the continental shelf. Three years later, Chile, Peru and Ecuador raised the stakes by claiming 20-mile maritime zones and seizing American tuna boats fishing in their waters. The fear was that nations might go further and declare exclusive 200-mile territorial waters.
It was in an attempt to find some accommodation between these new coastal jurisdictions and traditional high-seas freedoms that the Law of the Sea Conference was convened. The result was one of the great negotiating texts of all time- far more comprehensive, detailed and demanding of shared sovereignty than that for the International Criminal Court. It weighs the interests of continental nations like the US and Russia, island nations like Sri Lanka and Jamaica, and landlocked states such as Austria and Chad.
The Strait of Hormuz Test
The treaty rolls back existing claims to territorial jurisdiction beyond 12 miles. It writes into international law the right to free and unimpeded passage through the 100 straits that are narrower than 24 miles. In the present case of the struggle for supremacy in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is clearly in the wrong since the Law of the Sea Treaty grants the right of “transit passage”. However, Iran, along with the US, is one of the few non-ratifiers of the treaty. This is one reason why the Pentagon has long been firmly on the side of the treaty, following a series of disputes, including one with its neighbour, Canada, over the North West Passage, which is now steadily becoming ice-free. And the treaty, while recognising exclusive 200-mile economic zones for coastal states, does not allow them to restrict the passage of ships or the over-flight of planes of other nations.
Once the US ratifies the treaty, pressure will be on the remaining dissenting states to do the same. China, despite its nervousness about recognising a treaty that would give the US Navy the undisputed right to patrol the Taiwan Strait, has ratified it but has also ignored it in the South China Sea. More the pity that the Law of the Sea does not address territorial disputes that were underway before it was negotiated – like who controls the Spratly Islands that pits China against Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines. Future amendments to the treaty must address that.
A Choice for the Future
All eyes are presently looking at one strip of water, the Gulf of Iran and the Strait of Hormuz- yet another setback for those fighting to save our seas and to conserve our land. The US and Israeli attack has confused and obfuscated what should have been a clear picture. If the US wants to put Iran squarely in the wrong, it should ratify the Law of the Sea now, a much better way of wrong-footing Iran than bombing it and killing school girls. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Copyright: Jonathan Power