David Attenborough said in his wondrous documentary film, Ocean, that it had taken him a long time in his 99 years of life to understand that for the survival of our planet the oceans are more important than the land.

This past four months, as we watched President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu send the military into a war against Iran, very few of us were thinking about the sea and oceans in the round, just the particular problem of that small stretch of sea, the Strait of Hormuz, which gives entry from the Indian Ocean to the Gulf of Iran.

So disdainful is Trump of the UN effort to secure universal ratification of the carefully negotiated Law of the Sea that he doesn’t even send a delegation to the occasional UN meetings on the issue. Yet the last Republican president before Trump, George W. Bush, announced that, if elected, he would move to ratify the UN’s Law of the Sea. He never did, outvoted by Republican isolationists. The same happened to Barack Obama. His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, flanked by senior military brass, announced that the Administration would immediately push Congress to vote for the long-delayed ratification of the treaty. She failed.

From Freedom to Regulation

Until the Law of the Sea was drafted, the seas and oceans around us, two-thirds of our planet, were largely lawless. When 350 years ago the Dutch jurist, Hugo Grotius, formulated the doctrine of the freedom of the seas, letting things be seemed a magnificent idea-........

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