LOST is right: the U.S. should steer clear of the Law of the Sea treaty.(THE WORLD)

ON June 29, 1982, President Reagan decided at a meeting of his National Security Council not to sign the Law of the Sea treaty. He opposed it "even without its seabed mining provisions," as he confided to his diary that night. Four months later, the president took a further step to deep-six the treaty. In October 1982, he sent Donald Rumsfeld abroad to persuade America's allies to join Washington in "rejecting the deep-sea mining provisions" of what is known as either UNCLOS (the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea) or, more brutally, LOST (the Law of the Sea).

Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street was a natural supporter for Reagan's position, but she was not his only foreign ally. In the Cold War climate of the early 1980s, many West Europeans were reluctant to sign on to a document that was saturated in socialist economic assumptions. It looked like one element in the larger Soviet-Third World project--the New International Economic Order--to transfer resources from the West to developing countries through U.N.-organized raw-material cartels.

For UNCLOS yoked together two very different things. First, it codified customary law on such matters as freedom of navigation and the extent of a nation's territorial waters. (The U.S. accepted this codification, with some modest reservations.) But second, it defined the mineral and other resources of the deep sea beyond territorial waters as "the common heritage of mankind" and established a complex international bureaucracy--the International Seabed Authority (ISA)--to regulate their exploitation. This was objectionable to Reagan's America on any number of grounds: It intruded on national sovereignty. It was tantamount to an international tax on mineral extraction. And it forced U.S. companies mining the seabed to transfer technology--perhaps militarily sensitive technology--to the ISA and to other countries.

Reagan's firmness paid off. UNCLOS languished until the end of the Cold War. But a bureaucratic initiative never really dies. Inspired by the post-Cold War optimism about the new efficacy of international institutions, most European states and the EU itself signed on to the treaty. In 1994, the Clinton administration went back to the negotiating table and signed a new side agreement that allegedly removed the problems with the seabed-mining provisions of UNCLOS. Sen. Jesse Helms thought otherwise and blocked consideration of the treaty. Since his retirement in 2003, however, UNCLOS has gained the support of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Bush administration, and the U.S. Navy. They now hope that the treaty can be quietly smuggled into ratification and law without too much in the way of hearings and hostile witnesses. And the obvious question is: Why?

Those who support UNCLOS, in particular the U.S. Navy, argue that it is essentially a deal: The U.S. gets valuable legal rights of navigation in return for ceding to the ISA some regulatory powers that, since the 1994 agreement, are economically modest and politically unthreatening.

An obvious retort to this is that the U.S. already enjoys navigation and other rights under customary international law and earlier conventions. We gain nothing new by signing the treaty. The Navy responds that we would be on stronger ground in asserting our rights against challenge if we were supported by ITLOS (the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea) in Hamburg. But signatories to UNCLOS are bound to respect our rights under customary law anyway. Small powers are unlikely to challenge those rights. If a great power were to do so, the U.S. Navy is the only force capable of enforcing them. And that is so whether or not we are signatories to UNCLOS.

Signing UNCLOS would probably change two things about navigation rights: We would likely be asked to enforce such rights for others as well as for ourselves; and we would be conceding a dangerous regulation of those rights to a tribunal drawn from nations not very friendly to the U.S.