LOST is right: the U.S. should steer clear of the Law of the Sea treaty.

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.

Jeremy Rabkin, a former professor of government at Cornell, points to two such practical risks arising from ratification. If the U.S. Navy were to interdict a foreign vessel thought to be carrying nuclear contraband, it might find itself hauled before ITLOS and entangled in complex legalisms indefinitely. At the very least, the possibility of this would be a strong obstacle to the implementation of the Bush administration's Proliferation Security Initiative--the single most successful example of international preventive action against terrorism to date. On the other hand, if a small U.S. intelligence-gathering vessel operating near a country's twelve-mile limit were to be seized, then the U.S. could well have to reveal sensitive information about its intelligence methods in legal proceedings before ITLOS. In general, as Rabkin points out, the U.S.--which has formidable independent diplomatic and military resources--would be hobbled, not assisted, by membership of UNCLOS in pursuing its existing maritime and diplomatic rights. The fact that the U.S. Navy supports all this signifies not that it is strategically sensible but that the naval-officer class has been colonized by the legalist mentality of civilian law schools through the agency of the JAGs.

If our supposed legal gains from the treaty are in fact losses, what of the acknowledged economic losses? These are admittedly less severe than those proposed in 1982, but they are still unjustifiable and, worse, capable of expansion as the ISA gets into its stride. Thus, if the U.S. wished to drill or mine on the continental shelf beyond a 200-mile limit, it would have to provide a percentage of its revenue, rising from 1 to 7 percent annually, to the Deep Seabed Authority established by the ISA to superintend such commercial exploitation. As Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy has vainly tried to explain to U.S. corporations, a company wishing to mine the deep sea has an obligation to set aside an area where the ISA can develop its own mining with financial and technological assistance from its commercial rival. The ISA is itself obliged by its UNCLOS charter to ensure that the seabed resources are used for the general benefit of mankind. What this means in practice is that the ISA would provide economic assistance to what have been described as "developing countries which suffer serious adverse effects on their export earnings" from deep-sea-bed mining. In other words, nations and companies that engage in commercial mining must subsidize their rivals and competitors.

Much more ambitious schemes of redistribution and technology-transfer were originally intended, but the unfortunate fact that no companies actually did any mining reduced the ambitions of the treaty-writers. Even so, as Rabkin points out, the 1994 revision still has commitments to technology-transfer--and the power to make it a condition of granting mining licenses to signatory countries. The treaty also contains large and vague provisions for protecting the marine and littoral environments. The structure of UNCLOS means that bodies it has created, such as the ISAand ITLOS, are now in effect independent international agencies accountable only to each other. They enjoy both the taxing power in light disguise and the ability to expand the reach of their regulatory activities. And they have a claque of external supporters in nation-states that are content to have their own sovereignty limited provided that America's sovereignty is curbed too--even without Washington's consent.

Even though the U.S. has not ratified UNCLOS, the Chinese government exploited its technology-transfer provisions to obtain advanced sonar technology from U.S. companies. Britain has joined UNCLOS since Thatcher, with the result that the Irish government sought to compel Britain to close down a nuclear reactor on British soil on the grounds that it was adversely impacting the maritime environment and so violating the environmental features of UNCLOS. And if the U.S. actually does sign on, that will add federal judges to the long list of people seeking to exploit the treaty to constrain and direct America's elected policymakers.

All in all the deal sounds a little like Kingsley Amis's description of Britain's joining the European Union: Sure, we'll find it more difficult to protect our maritime rights under UNCLOS, and of course it will hinder our exploitation of seabed mining, but in return we'll get loss of sovereignty.

So why is the Bush administration doing it?