The Future Maritime Operating Environment and the Role of Naval Power

globally proliferating activity. It can only take root in areas with a maritime tradition and the
maritime skills necessary to engage in it. Trading patterns help determine where piracy is likely to
occur because it is, as has already been noted, very much a crime of opportunity—the promise of
reward; however that is defined, is the pirate’s principal motive. Individual attacks can
nonetheless be disruptive over the short-term, as happened in 2002 when a suicide attack on the
tanker MV Limburg caused a temporary spike in global oil prices. 152
3.6 Regulation and International Competition
During the past two centuries, states have increasingly asserted their control over the ocean
commons. Today, much of the pressure to extend sovereign rights over the oceans comes from
developing countries. However the impetus for this trend originally came from the US. Although
today Washington is formally opposed to UNCLOS and continues to refuse to ratify the
convention, it was the newly independent US that established a precedent when it declared a
three-mile territorial sea over which it claimed the same rights it exercised on land. Very quickly
all other littoral states (i.e., those in Europe) followed suit. By the mid-20 th century, demands for
enlargement of territorial seas were frequent, but efforts to reach international agreement failed.
States unilaterally adjusted their claims, so that by the time of UNCLOS (1982), the three mile
limit had been replaced as the international standard by the 12 mile territorial sea. Pressure for
even greater state control over the ocean commons nonetheless persisted. It, too, found expression
in President Harry Truman’s September 1945 proclamation asserting “jurisdiction over all natural
resources of the subsoil and seabed” of the US continental shelf, the demand by governments for
greater national control over ocean space has grown. 153 That declaration was to later inform the
international legal recognition of EEZs through UNCLOS.
As an international accord, UNCLOS represents the most comprehensive effort to resolve the
tensions that have arisen between the traditional emphasis on the oceans as a commons and those
countries who advocate greater state authority. Despite the benefits it provides to the international
system, it also provides governments with what they claim to be international legal authority to
challenge the longstanding view of the oceans as a commons. By enshrining the concept of EEZs,
UNCLOS has given littoral states a much larger ocean space over which to exercise their
jurisdiction. This means that 35 percent of the world’s oceans are now enclosed within the
jurisdiction of national governments and a large proportion of the oceans’ resources have been
assigned to coastal states (see Figure 7).
UNCLOS has also generated a momentum in which a further extension of state control seems
very probable. The convention contains a provision (Article 76) by which states can extend their
EEZs beyond 200 nautical miles until the end of the continental margin, provided that this
extension does not extend more than 350 miles beyond the coastline or 100 miles beyond the
2500-meter isobaths. By mid-December 2014, 77 submissions requesting international recognition
of a variety of such claims had been made to the UN Commission on the Limits of the
Continental Shelf. Considering these submissions will require careful adjudication in some cases,
particularly where claims overlap and one can assume that, in some cases, international frictions
152 Chalk, The Maritime Dimension of International Security, pp. 24–25.
153 Proclamation 2667 of September 28, 1945 – Policy of the United States with Respect to the Natural
Resources of the Subsoil and Seabed of the Continental Shelf [accessed on 7 January 2015 at
www.gc.noaa.gov/documents/gcil_proc_2667.pdf].
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