The Scramble for the Open Seas

Foreign Affairs | Michael Albertus

Great powers during the Cold War actively avoided an unrestrained race to partition the world's waterways and seabeds, despite technological advancements that made such division feasible. This restraint preserved the oceans as shared spaces, contrasting sharply with five centuries of land-based competition that successfully divided nearly all global territory outside Antarctica.

Historically, the sheer vastness of the marine environment defeated periodic national attempts to gate and regulate maritime passages. The oceans remained largely open. Although technological progress eventually simplified the mapping of deep seabeds, sovereign states chose cooperative restraint over unilateral expansion. This historical consensus established a framework where oceans remained global commons rather than zones of exclusive national sovereignty. The potential breakdown of this cooperative model now raises the stakes for a modern scramble as oceans increasingly become up for grabs, threatening to transform international waters into contested arenas of geopolitical competition.

Comment

The historical consensus that preserved the oceans as shared commons is codified in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This legal framework established Exclusive Economic Zones to balance coastal state jurisdiction with traditional high-seas freedoms. However, the rise of grey-zone maritime operations and unilateral seabed claims by major powers exposes deep structural ambiguities within the treaty. These legal loopholes allow revisionist states to restrict freedom of navigation under the guise of domestic environmental or security regulations.

Consequently, the erosion of UNCLOS compliance directly undermines the operational legitimacy of the U.S. Navy's Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPs). As coastal states increasingly assert domestic laws over international straits, routine transits through chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz risk escalating into active tactical confrontations. This legal friction ultimately forces the U.S. Pacific Fleet to deploy guided-missile destroyers to actively contest unlawful maritime claims in the South China Sea.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If the foundational consensus of UNCLOS continues to erode, how can the U.S. Pacific Fleet maintain the credibility of its Freedom of Navigation Operations without triggering direct kinetic conflict in contested waterways like the South China Sea?

The available evidence points toward a shift where the U.S. Pacific Fleet increasingly relies on minilateral coalitions, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, to share the political and operational burden of contesting maritime claims. My assessment is that this transition will likely replace unilateral FONOPs with joint patrol frameworks, thereby raising the diplomatic cost for revisionist states seeking to restrict passage. This trajectory indicates that deterrence in the South China Sea will increasingly depend on collective maritime presence rather than the enforcement of legacy international treaties.

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