In late April, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order that many international onlookers viewed as a startling provocation: he directed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to expedite its process for issuing commercial deep sea mining permits in areas beyond U.S. jurisdiction.

This was hardly Trump’s first time making brazen claims with respect to lands beyond U.S. borders. The president’s unilateral declaration of U.S. authority over the mineral-rich stretches of the international seabed comes in the wake of inflammatory statements about annexing or controlling foreign territory—from Canada to Greenland to the Panama Canal.

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Trump’s offshore minerals order makes no direct territorial claims. But in asserting U.S. authority to regulate commercial seabed mining on the high seas, Trump seeks to bypass an international regulatory regime many decades in the making. In so doing, he threatens to destabilize international oceans governance. History suggests the move may prove counterproductive, undermining concrete American interests in the name of rushing into a speculative new extractive frontier.

Scientists first discovered deep sea deposits of manganese, copper, cobalt, and nickel in the form of potato-sized nodules in the 1870s. Yet, for nearly a century, the mining industry took little notice. Seabed nodules were located at profound depth and pressure; extracting them was therefore a complex and capital-intensive process. Interest in commercial recovery began only in the 1960s, when Space Age technologies and Cold War resource anxieties made deep sea nodule harvesting seem both possible and worth the effort.

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After World War II, a wave of decolonization across Africa, Asia, and the Pacific impeded the Western powers’ access to resources once under colonial control. Mining boosters argued that the deep sea could provide a crucial alternative to terrestrial mineral markets controlled by potentially unfriendly postcolonial governments. With mining now technically feasible, the U.S. and other industrialized nations rushed to explore these vast, untapped mineral reserves.

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