WASHINGTON – At a time when China is flexing its muscles over ownership of disputed territories in the South China Sea, Democrats and Republicans should come together and end decades of dispute over US accession to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, said American policy advisers in an article.
UNCLOS has been in place for nearly 30 years but there are those in the Senate who vehemently oppose ratification due to concerns the treaty would limit commerce and allow international bodies to wield greater control over US interests.
Thad W. Allen, Richard L. Armitage, and John J. Hamre in an article quoted the Joint Chiefs of Staff as saying ratification makes sense militarily because the convention “codifies navigation and overflight rights and high seas freedoms that are essential for the global mobility of our armed forces.”
In other words, it enhances national security by giving the US Navy additional flexibility to operate on the high seas and in foreign exclusive economic zones and territorial seas.
“This is particularly important in the Asia Pacific region and the South China Sea, where tensions among China, Japan and Southeast Asian nations have increased because of conflicting interpretations of what constitutes territorial and international waters,” they wrote.
The article appeared as an op-ed in the New York Times on Sunday and was published on Monday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a conservative-oriented foreign policy think tank headquartered in Washington.
It said last July, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gained much respect by reassuring the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that the United States strongly supported multilateral efforts to address those territorial disputes in the South China Sea and denounced China’s heavy-handed, unilateral tactics.
“But strong American positions like that are ultimately undermined by our failure to ratify the convention,” said the article.
Allen, a senior fellow at Rand, was the commandant of the Coast Guard from 2006 to 2010. Armitage, the president of a consulting firm, was the deputy secretary of state from 2001 to 2005 and Hamre, president of the CSIS, was the deputy secretary of defense from 1997 to 2000.
Meanwhile, Malaysia said it wants the claims on the disputed Spratly Islands chain in the South China Sea to be settled through application of UNCLOS.
Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin told reporters in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia he did not want the issue to harm its relations with other claimants – China, Brunei, the Philippines and Vietnam.
“China is of the view that the matter should be settled bilaterally. We think that is important, but we have ASEAN so discussions among ASEAN members are also important,” he said.
Referring to the territorial disputes, Walther Lohman of the Conservative Heritage Foundation in an article on Thursday said the US has long held that the Phl-US Mutual Defense Treaty does not extend to Philippine claims in the South China Sea.
There may have been a time when that position was prudent, he said, because what interest after all could the US have had getting involved in a spat among relatively weak claimants.
But that time has past, he said. China’s rapid military modernization has chased it away.
“There is now one claimant stronger than the others, growing stronger by the day and feeling it. We need to introduce some uncertainty into Chinese calculations,” he said.