My Take | Militarising exclusive maritime zones – a new global US security doctrine?
- International law of the sea is set to be subverted as America seeks to exercise extraterritorial defence claims over foreign exclusive economic zones beyond those of three Pacific island states
The United States is about to upend the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the basis of international law with regard to the oceans and maritime resources. Its new maritime claims, if not reversed, will likely encourage other countries, especially rival states such as China, to do the same.
As I reported previously, the US is about to turn the maritime exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of the Marshall Islands, Palau and Micronesia into zones of defence entirely controlled by the US military in addition to the defence of their territorial seas, lands and air. That’s quietly being done by the renewal of their long-standing mutual compact as “freely associated states” with the US.
Bear in mind that these are notionally sovereign states that have formally agreed under the compact to give up their own defences. If access to their EEZs can be denied to other countries at the discretion of the US military, what’s stopping the US from asserting the same right of denial of access to all the EEZs of continental US, Alaska and its other overseas dependent territories? And what of those of its allies and partners?
Like the secret “torture memo” legalising torture under the George W. Bush administration, there are probably already secret documents and doctrines legitimising such an interpretation of EEZs against international law and its own previous position on access to them.
A highly contentious point
Sovereign or territorial waters, the maritime equivalent of sovereign land, extend from shores to 12 nautical miles. From there out to 200 nautical miles are what people usually call EEZs.