Earlier this week The New York Times published a story noting that few of the Republican party’s biggest foreign policy names (Henry Kissinger, Condoleeza Rice, George Shultz, James Baker, and Colin Powell) have endorsed Mitt Romney for president. Later that same day Rice did end up endorsing Romney.
That same day, The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed signed by Kissinger, Rice, Shultz, Baker, and Powell, urging Senators to approve the Convention of the Law of the Sea, more commonly referred to as LOST. The former secretaries of state wrote:
Reagan’s Attorney General Ed Meese begs to differ. In a 2005 op-ed, Meese wrote:
…
A 1994 limited agreement pertaining to deep-sea mining, negotiated by the Clinton administration, but not part of the treaty itself, does not make the treaty as a whole any more acceptable. America’s adherence to this treaty would entail history’s biggest transfer of wealth and surrender of sovereignty.
Meese is right. As reported this Tuesday, ratifying LOST would, for the first time in history, expose the United States to the jurisdiction of international arbiters who could impose job killing carbon emission caps on our economy by judicial decree.
Romney has not taken a position on LOST yet. He should. It is a great opportunity to distance himself from Bush and more closely align himself with Reagan.
Most voters have no idea what LOST is. But they do know exactly what “cap and trade” is … and they don’t like it. Obama’s efforts to ratify LOST are a grave threat to our already struggling economy. Romney should come out against it and urge conservatives in the Senate to do the same.
