LOST keeps coming back “like Dracula”

Today, I got the opportunity to ask former American U.N. Ambassador John Bolton to comment on the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which is now before the U.S. Senate.

“It is a bad treaty; it needs to be defeated,” he told a group of bloggers, during a briefing to promote his new book on his time at the U.N.

Supported by a gang of anti-American Third World governments during the 1970s, when it was negotiated, noted Bolton, the treaty keeps coming back from the dead, “like Dracula” (fittingly, it was voted out of teh Senate Foreign Relations Committee this past Halloween).

The treaty’s refusal to die, he said, “shows the persistence of the international Left in never giving up” until America adopts it. And if LOST is ratified, a slew of sovereignty-shredding treaties will follow, including the International Criminal Court. Thus, it has “no constituency,” except for “the world federalists.”

“Our absence from the Law of the Sea Treaty has not cost us a single thing,” Bolton noted regarding navigation rights. For any disputes over the same — such as in the Arctic– “[w]e’ll negotiate this out” with other nations as each case comes up.

Bolton recommended the recent AEI paper by George Mason University Law Professor Jeremy Rabkin — who has also written on LOST for CEI.

For more on the Law of the Sea Treaty, see here.