Frustrated by the refusal of the United States and Western European nations to give them the foreign aid to which they feel ent.i.tled, the third world nations have banded together to create a vehicle to seize our wealth. They have come up with a way to intercept American and Western revenues before they even reach our treasuries and to divert them to their own needs-often directly into their autocratic rulers" bank accounts. Troubled by how difficult it is to persuade Congress to vote them money, they have decided to allocate revenue to themselves directly from our offsh.o.r.e oil and mineral drilling. And, once we sign the treaty, we will have nothing to say about it.
Their chosen path to our wealth is through a new Law of the Sea Treaty (known by the appropriate acronym LOST). And, believe it or not, a coalition of liberal Democrats and RINO (Republican In Name Only) senators may have the votes to get this treaty ratified.
What is extraordinary is that our own leaders are backing these efforts and our president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, and Joint Chiefs of Staff are all supporting the treaty and urging its ratification.
REAGAN AND THATCHER REJECTED THE TREATY
But not all of the world"s recent leaders share their enthusiasm for the treaty. Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who recently testified against it, recounts how "thirty years ago, President Ronald Reagan asked me to meet with world leaders to represent the United States in opposition to the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty. Our efforts soon found a persuasive supporter in British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher."1
Rumsfeld recalls that when he met with Mrs. Thatcher in 1982, her conclusion on the treaty was unforgettable: "What this treaty proposes is nothing less than the international nationalization of roughly two-thirds of the Earth"s surface... . Tell Ronnie I"m with him [in opposing the treaty]."2
Negotiated in the 1970s, the treaty was "presented to [Reagan] as a done deal requiring only his signature and Senate ratification. Then as now, most of the world"s nations had already approved it. The Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations had all gone along. American diplomats generally supported the treaty and were shocked when Reagan changed America"s policy. Puzzled by their reaction, the president was said to have responded, "But isn"t that what the election was all about?"3
Ed Meese, who was attorney general under Reagan and who also opposes the treaty, quotes a 1978 Reagan radio address t.i.tled "Ocean Mining" in which he came out against the treaty even before he was elected. The future president said that "no national interest of ours could justify handing sovereign control of two-thirds of the Earth"s surface over to the Third World."4
GLOBAL REDISTRIBUTION OF INCOME
The treaty fit into a growing effort by third world countries to appropriate to themselves the wealth of the developed nations.
James Malone, Reagan"s point man in seeking unsuccessfully to modify the treaty, explains his president"s opposition: "The treaty"s provisions were intentionally designed to promote a new world order-a form of global collectivism ... that seeks ultimately the redistribution of the world"s wealth through a complex system of manipulative central economic planning and bureaucratic coercion."5
Doug Bandow, now a senior fellow at the Cato Inst.i.tute, served as a special a.s.sistant to President Regan and a deputy representative to the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea. He bluntly explains that "the treaty would resurrect the redistributionist lobbying campaign once conducted by developing states unwilling to deal with the real causes of their economic failures. Indeed, the LOST would essentially create another UN agency with the purpose of transferring wealth from industrialized states to the Third World voting majority."6
In the 1970s and "80s, third world nations promoted what Bandow says they "euphemistically called the New International Economic Order-global management and redistribution of resources, technology, trade, and wealth."7 In the United Nations, they formed a Group of seventy-seven countries that set about their search for new sources of income and wealth for their countries and their corrupt leaders. They tried to get the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Centre for Transnational Corporations (CTC), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and the United Nations itself to help them soak rich nations to benefit their third world dictators. All these agencies "became international battlegrounds" in the third world"s desperate search for wealth. Our wealth!
The demands of the third world dictators for more aid have become more insistent and their approach more militant over the past thirty years. Where once they played off the rivalry of the United States and Russia during the cold war-going first to one and then to the other in a bidding contest for their support-they now sought to play on the conscience of the developed world to pry out more aid. Suddenly music groups like U2 held concerts devoted to raising global awareness of poverty. Appeals to world compa.s.sion sparked efforts to increase foreign aid appropriations.
Britain"s prime minister Tony Blair took the lead in pledging to contribute seven-tenths of one percent of his nation"s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to third world nations and called on all developed countries to follow his lead.
Global economist Jeffrey Sachs wrote a book optimistically t.i.tled The End of Poverty, in which he chronicled the rapid decline of poverty throughout the world. Heralding China"s and India"s emergence from hardship, he called for ma.s.sive increases in foreign aid to continue the progress so evident in east and south Asia.
But Sachs missed the point. It was not foreign aid that had lifted China and India out of poverty, but international commerce. Through private sector entrepreneurial initiative rather than public charity, these nations cut their poor populations dramatically and spread a middle-cla.s.s standard of living. It was trade with the United States and direct foreign investment in their businesses rather than foreign aid that had vanquished poverty.
No matter how loudly U2 sang or Blair demanded higher levels of foreign aid, the American people weren"t biting. They were largely unmoved by these appeals. While we doubled our foreign aid spending, it still comes to only four-tenths of one percent of GDP-half of the hoped-for global standard.
Seeing that the strategy of trying to shame the developed world into increased aid wasn"t working, the third world dictators. .h.i.t on a new vehicle to get money: the Law of the Sea Treaty.
Why not grab hold of the money that gushed out of oil wells drilled deep in the bottom of the ocean? Weren"t these resources "the common heritage of mankind"? How could any nation lay claim to these rich resources that lay far off its coastline, even beyond the two-hundred-mile economic zone generally a.s.serted by seacoast nations?
These dictatorships acted like Groucho Marx did when he learned, in his movie Night at the Opera, that the wealthy, elderly widow he was currently romancing had given money to the opera so they could sign a tenor who would sing for a thousand dollars a night-an astronomical sum in those days. Rubbing his hands together, Groucho said, "There"s got to be some way I can get a piece of that."8
Bandow explains that to these African, Asian, and Latin American autocracies, "no fight was more important than that over the LOST." After all, didn"t the treaty itself explicitly articulate its purpose to "contribute to the realization of a just and equitable international economic order which takes into account the interests and needs of mankind as a whole and, in particular, the special interests and needs of developing countries"?9
The Law of the Sea Treaty does more than just increase the flow of wealth from developed nations to third world dictatorships. It confers on them the power to tax American property.
No longer do they have to ask for money. They can demand it. And it"s a lot of money. According to the US Extended Continental Shelf Task Force, which is currently mapping the undersea region, the resources there "may be worth billions if not trillions" of dollars.10
The treaty gives a new multinational body-the International Seabed Authority (ISA)-the right to impose taxes on offsh.o.r.e oil and gas wells equal to 7 percent of the royalties they would otherwise pay to their nation"s treasuries. The Seabed Authority, based in Kingston, Jamaica, would rule the waves-and the seabed beneath. A body much like the United Nations" General a.s.sembly, it is governed by 160 member nations, each with one vote.
Secretary Rumsfeld stresses that "pursuant to the treaty"s Article 82, the US would be required to transfer to this ent.i.ty a significant share of all royalties generated by US companies-royalties that would otherwise go to the US Treasury."11
"Over time, hundreds of billions of dollars could flow through the Authority with little oversight. The US would not control how those revenues are spent: The treaty empowers the Authority to redistribute these so-called international royalties to developing and landlocked nations with no role in exploring or extracting those resources."12
Rumsfeld calls this transfer of wealth by its real name: welfare. "This [treaty] would const.i.tute ma.s.sive global welfare, courtesy of the US taxpayer. It would be as if fishermen who exerted themselves to catch fish on the high seas were required, on the principle that those fish belonged to all people everywhere, to give a share of their take to countries that had nothing to do with their costly, dangerous and arduous efforts."13
US CAN"T CONTROL WHO GETS OUR MONEY
The money could go anywhere, with the US having little if any control over it. The money would go into a global fund that a thirty-six member committee of the ISA would allocate around the world. The United States would sit on the committee and have one vote, only one.
The treaty specifies that the distribution of the aid would be decided by the council based on "consensus," a provision that treaty advocates have said amounts to giving the US, in effect, a kind of veto. But experience has proven that without a formal veto the requirement of consensus would give us very little real leverage with which to direct the flow of aid, even to stop the money from going to terror-sponsoring nations or ent.i.ties.
And one wonders if President Obama"s representatives on the ISA Council can be counted on to fight to direct the revenue to good countries. After all, it"s his administration that gives $1 billion in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority and Hamas and $1.3 billion to the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt!
Rumsfeld explains that "these sizable "royalties" could go to corrupt dictatorships and state sponsors of terrorism. For example, as a treaty signatory and a member of the Authority"s executive council, the government of Sudan-which has harbored terrorists and conducted a ma.s.s extermination campaign against its own people-would have as much say as the US on issues to be decided by the Authority."14
Under the treaty, the transfer of these funds does not end with nation-states. These royalty revenues would even be extended to "peoples who have not attained full independence or other self-governing status."15 That means that groups like the Palestinian Authority and potentially other groups with terrorist ties could get in on the bounty.
The point is that it is our money, not the United Nations". American firms prospected for the oil, financed the drilling, invented the deep-sea technology, took the risk of a dry well, and are ent.i.tled to reap the rewards of their efforts.
AIDING THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES DOESN"T HELP THEM
But, our liberal friends ask, shouldn"t we extend our aid to the third world? Don"t we have a moral obligation to fight poverty and help them feed their people?
But wiser heads in the developed world realize that increasing the flow of revenue to third world autocracies would just expand their opportunities for graft and corruption. The funding would not flow to their needy people but to the avaricious Swiss bank accounts.
Indeed, some economists like Dambisa Moyo, an African woman who wrote Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, believe that foreign aid is really counterproductive.
She argues that aid is just an invitation to corruption. It means that governments become like private franchises, raising their money abroad and spending it in unaccountable ways. Their citizens don"t care. It"s not their money. And the effort of ambitious people to get their hands on the aid sparks civil wars, coups, corruption, and political instability, which makes real economic growth impossible.
Moyo, who studied at Harvard, earned a doctorate in economics at Oxford, and worked at the World Bank, poses the challenging question: "Has more than $1 trillion in development aid to Africa over the last several decades made the African people better off?"16