LONDON – It seems a strange time to organize a millennium meeting of the world’s heads of government at the UN this week. What are they supposed to do? What are they supposed to say? Is anything new afoot? (Indeed one could ask, in all seriousness, are there enough toilets for them all with their mammoth entourages?) Isn’t it the same old dreary UN that everyone loves to use as a punch-bag and which they occasionally run to when they are in trouble? The millennium changes nothing- eight months on that is very clear. The thing that could give the UN a jolt, a charge, that would give it a chance of re-capturing its old idealism is not a poorly prepared meeting of bosses, nor is it a new Secretary General. It would be for the world’s only superpower to take it seriously. Not only does the U.S. need to pay off its enormous debt of back dues, it needs to put a stop to its unerring ability to paint the organization black.

The latest phase began with President Bill Clinton’s malevolent campaign to shift the killing of American soldiers in Somalia onto the UN, even though it emerged that the U.S. troops were operating independently from the UN, directly under the U.S. command in distant Florida. It interfered counterproductively with the UN operation in Bosnia, criticizing from the sidelines, but slow to act where it might have been useful, with logistics and transport. And it continued with the use of its veto to block pre-emptive peace-keeping in Rwanda, an action that could have headed off the genocide that followed. Perhaps, for the long run, its gravest fault has been to play around with UN treaty-making on crucial issues, acting the “big boy” that could have his cake and eat it.

The U.S. works hard to get other countries involved in these path-breaking treaties- and later expects them to toe the agreed lines- but then has a nasty habit of stepping back at the last minute and playing the rest of the match by its own rules. We have seen this lately with the establishment of the International Criminal Court for trying war criminals and with the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. With the first, after pushing it hard, Mr Clinton, subject to remorseless pressure from the Pentagon, suddenly got cold feet at the last minute. In the second, after years of hard American effort (beginning with President Dwight Eisenhower) to get the world on board, Mr Clinton seemed to lose interest in pulling out the stops to get it ratified in the Senate and last October lost the vote.

The story of the Law of the Sea – the UN effort to bring law and order to the anarchic world of the seas and oceans that occupy the greater part of our planet- is nothing less than a parable for our times. It is the UN at its best and the U.S. at its worst and the blame stretches over a number of U.S. administrations. The most that can be said for Mr Clinton is that he appears to have forgotten about it.

The Convention on the Law of the Sea came into force in 1994. Before then the seas were ruled by a mixture of customary practices and the dictates of whoever was the predominant power of the time- the Romans, the British and, more recently, the Americans. Control over territorial waters was for long enough accepted as lying only within cannon-shot, later firmed up as 3 nautical miles from the shore. World war submarines made nonsense of that and since 1945 these traditional limits lost their force. Particularly badly hurt was the fishing industry. With no agreed limits on territorial waters there was massive over-fishing.

Iceland started the ball rolling in 1979 when it unilaterally announced an exclusive fishing zone off its coast. Other fish-dependent countries quickly followed, sparking clashes between coast guards and foreign fisher boats. Britain and Iceland ended up in the 1970s fighting the so-called “Cod Wars”.

At around the same time mining companies became intrigued with the lure of mineral riches on the seabed. Undersea oil started to become a big business. Countries created exclusive economic zones extending up to 200 miles from their shore. Uninhabited islets and barren reefs- the Spratlys, a source of dispute between China and South East Asian nations is a good example- have become strategic places to be fought over.

The Law of the Sea has seven main provisions. It gives coastal states sovereignty over their territorial seas, twelve nautical miles out from their shoreline miles, and economic rights up to 200 miles out. But all foreign vessels are allowed innocent passage through these seas. Coastal states have sovereign rights over the continental shelf but beyond 200 nautical miles out they must share the revenue they derive. Fifthly, the high seas are to be enjoyed by all. Finally, there is an International Tribunal to judge disputes. In July 1999 New Zealand and Australia made use of it to bring a successful case against Japan over its “experimental” fishing for bluefish tuna in violation of conservation agreements.

Interestingly, on this convention the Pentagon favours U.S. ratification. American naval officers have pointed out that difficulties could arise for U.S. forces moving between the Far East and the Persian Gulf if either Malaysia or Indonesia were to close the Strait of Malacca. In fact, the Senate’s reservations about the provision on sharing the profits from deep sea mining have fallen away with time. Under the Reagan administration these were much watered down from the original concept of a “global commons”. These days, moreover, mining companies have lost interest in deep sea mining on economic grounds. Instead the interest has switched to the harvesting of genetic resources from the sea bottom, which the Law of the Sea has no provision for. Nevertheless, the Senate is still ruled by the sentiment that as the world’s only maritime superpower, the US can make or break rules unilaterally and does not need to be bound by international law.

The trouble with this approach is that when you bend the UN so far out of shape, it does not spring back to where the U.S. wants it to be the next time there is a crisis in which it needs the majority of the UN membership’s support- the crisis that arose when Iraq invaded Kuwait is a good example. Even more seriously, it is a slow, insidious whittling away of both the authority and the useful practice of the UN. However, even the U.S.’s closest allies like Britain and Canada, do not want the world run by American unilateralism. If the U.S. doesn’t soon come to terms with that fact, it is going to rue the day, as the rest of the world increasingly digs in its heels. America’s next president will inherit a difficult legacy from Mr Clinton. No millennium meeting and no amount of the hearty back-slapping that will go with it can change that fact.

I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com