Description
The US has often, albeit not always, played a leading role in shaping global governance while China has been a rule-taker in the same process. This paper tries to re-examine this global rule-making situation from deep-sea mining (DSM), a policy area from which the US has been conspicuously absent.
An international governing regime for commercial DSM is being developed by the International Seabed Authority (ISA), established under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The US is not yet a full member of the ISA because Republican Senators have rejected the ratification of UNCLOS. It is fair to assume that the US Senate will not be ready for ratifying the treaty in the foreseeable future.
This paper asks, in particular, whether the global DSM governance process will be overwhelmingly dominated by China when the US is absent from the negotiation table. Historically ‘cooperating without America’ was possible and has been reasonably effective, as shown in the cases of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention and the International Criminal Court. Can other Western countries take up the slack again when the US is not present in DSM?
