Freedom of the Seas Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Freedom of the Seas - Essay Example Historically, it has been one of the chief means by which the United States has influenced international affairs; the vigorous assertion of the principle of freedom of the seas has been a major cause of four armed conflicts: the Quasi-War with France in 1798, the Barbary Wars, the War of 1812, and World War I. First established by the Romans, it was challenged in the sixteenth century to secure trade and by a Papal Bull that sought to divide the oceans between Portugal and Spain. During the eighteenth century, the principle again became widely accepted when the definition of territorial waters was extended to include a three-mile zone. While the United States strongly took the position that neutral ships should be allowed to carry goods for belligerents in times of war, other nations enforced rules of contraband (mostly defined as military stores) and blockade. This became an important issue during the wars after the French Revolution when Great Britain and France imposed maritime blockades. To force these nations to change their policies (and also to end British impressment on American ships), the United States passed the Embargo Act (1807) and the Nonintercourse Act (1809). After France declared it would lift its blockade, and when Great Britain did not follow suit within a three-month period as demanded by President James Madison, the United States declared war on Great Britain in June 1812. The United States accepted the concepts of contraband and blockade as legitimate during the Civil War but shied away from capturing Confederate diplomats off of neutral vessels during the Trent Affair. As long as the United States was a neutral during World War I and World War II, it protested the extensive blockades against Germany and very liberal British definitions of contraband. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, nonetheless, established "maritime control areas" at the beginning of World War II that extended into the high seas. In both wars, activities of German U-boats against neutrals provoked sharp American protest: by President Woodrow Wilson after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, and by Roosevelt in September 1941 after the torpedoing of American ships. The first major challenge to the freedom of the seas principle after World War II was President Harry S. Truman's 1945 announcement extending U.S. jurisdiction to natural resources on the continental shelf. Other nations followed by extending their territorial waters, some of them as far as 200 nautical miles. A 300-mile maritime defense zone around the American continents, established by the Rio Pact of 1947, was cited by the John F. Kennedy administration to legitimize the "naval quarantine" during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea agreed upon a 12-mile territorial limit and a 200-mile exclusive economic zone in December 1982. In 1982 a comprehensive United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty agreement was reached that established the twelve-mile limit for territorial waters and the two-hundred-mile "exclusive economic zone" that the United States had pushed for. The historic pact deemed the world's oceans the "common heritage of mankind" and