Over the last half millennium, societies around the globe competed fiercely to divide up the world’s landmasses. Through centuries of exploration, colonization, and state-building, nearly every square inch of soil outside of Antarctica has been claimed, mapped, and tucked neatly within established national borders.
Yet, for much of modern history, the vast oceans have largely been spared that fate. There were certainly times throughout history when ambitious empires tried to gate, tax, and regulate the seas. However, the world’s waterways were simply too vast, deep, and dynamic to be controlled by any single power for long periods.
During the Cold War, as rapid technological advancements made it far easier to imagine partitioning the globe’s waterways and valuable seabeds, great powers consciously avoided an unrestrained, zero-sum race to grab the oceans. Instead, most governments agreed to manage maritime affairs through a complex patchwork of international treaties and multilateral bodies. These systems sought to guarantee the freedom of navigation in international waters while assigning coastal seabeds to adjacent littoral states, establishing a semblance of order on the high seas.
Today, that foundational global order is rapidly collapsing. A cascade of recent events demonstrates how quickly traditional norms are eroding. The Houthis are persistently disrupting commercial shipping in the Bab el Mandeb Strait, creating dangerous bottlenecks at the vital gateway to the Red Sea. Meanwhile, Iran and Oman have discussed plans to charge transit fees for ships utilizing the Strait of Hormuz, a critical maritime chokepoint for global energy supplies and agricultural fertilizers. In July, former U.S. President Donald Trump even floated the radical idea that the United States could impose its own unilateral toll on maritime traffic moving through Hormuz, though the administration ultimately dropped the plan.
Other global governments are also jockeying aggressively to claim international waters and marine resources for themselves. Russia is attempting to assert strict control over vast, ice-covered swaths of Arctic waters and seabeds. China continues to build militarized artificial islands across contested territories in the South China Sea. The United States has expanded its unilateral claims to valuable seabeds far beyond its traditional exclusive economic zone, while numerous nations are rapidly laying the legal and industrial groundwork to mine the ocean floor for critical minerals.
The international institutions that have historically kept the world’s oceans free and open are failing to meet the moment. In key strategic areas, major powers have simply stopped abiding by the rules that have held firm for decades. Sovereign states are already making aggressive tactical moves to control the seas. If governments rush to claim the world’s waters the way they once carved up the land, they will severely complicate global commerce, drive up costs for consumers, and invite a dangerous new era of seaborne conflict. A world in which the oceans are divided into national territories will invariably be poorer, more volatile, and far more dangerous.
FOR WHOM THE STRAIT TOLLS
Governments around the globe are taking close note of the apparent success of maritime blockades and choke-point leverage in the Middle East. Just as Iran signaled its intent to introduce tolls in the Strait of Hormuz, Indonesia’s finance minister briefly suggested that Jakarta might follow suit in the Strait of Malacca. This critical shipping lane in Southeast Asia carries roughly 29 percent of global maritime oil flows, making any disruption a matter of intense international anxiety. (While the minister eventually walked back the idea, the mere suggestion underscored a shifting global mindset.)
The forced closures and threats surrounding the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el Mandeb Strait are merely the latest in a relentless series of violations of the norms and rules governing the world’s oceans. China, for instance, has routinely flouted a binding 2016 ruling under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) that soundly rejected Beijing’s expansive historical claims in the South China Sea. Beijing openly contravenes the international decision by continuing to construct artificial islands on disputed reefs, aggressively infringing upon the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone, and regularly encircling Taiwan with naval exercises.
Russia, for its part, is strongly suspected of breaking UNCLOS rules by operating ships with concealed identities to deliberately cut undersea telecommunications cables. These actions are viewed by intelligence analysts as part of a broader, covert campaign to sow panic and unsettle European nations.
This escalating aggression is possible in large part because the international institutions responsible for managing and protecting the oceans are fundamentally ineffectual. The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the judicial body meant to mediate maritime disputes, is chronically slow and lacks any teeth or independent enforcement mechanism. The same structural weakness plagues the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which makes binding legal rulings on international treaty violations.
Furthermore, the UN Security Council—the body that possesses the authority to levy severe economic penalties or greenlight military action to protect international shipping lanes—is almost always paralyzed by a veto from China, Russia, or the United States. Punishing undersea saboteurs is further complicated by archaic rules of maritime jurisdiction. Under current international law, only the country in which a ship is officially registered holds prosecutorial authority, allowing perpetrator states to shield troublemaking crews simply by refusing to pursue legal cases.
MIGHT MAKES RIGHT
Looking ahead, climate change is poised to spur entirely new categories of disputes over the oceans. Over the next two decades, as Arctic ice continues to melt at an unprecedented rate, the Northern Sea Route connecting Europe and Asia along Russia’s rugged northern coast will see dramatic growth in commercial shipping. It is difficult to envision Moscow allowing genuinely free access to this lucrative trade corridor.
Already, Russia forces foreign commercial vessels to submit to a complicated, suffocating system of permissions and permits to operate within its declared exclusive economic zone. Moscow also treats vital navigational corridors, such as the Vilkitsky Strait off the Siberian coast, as domestic internal waterways subject exclusively to Russian jurisdiction rather than international straits that guarantee the right of innocent passage.
Fights over the oceans are not limited to controlling transit routes and shipping lanes. As China has come to dominate and increasingly weaponize the existing global supply of land-based critical minerals, other industrialized nations are desperately exploring the possibility of mining deep ocean seabeds.
Areas such as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the North Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico, the central Indian Ocean basin, and the Penrhyn basin in the South Pacific are studded with trillions of mineral-rich polymetallic nodules containing vital critical minerals. The International Seabed Authority, an agency established under UNCLOS to regulate such activities, has issued dozens of exploratory contracts. These contracts allow governments and private consortia to survey the ocean floor, gather environmental baseline data, and test advanced extraction technologies. However, the body currently forbids commercial-scale mining because its member states cannot agree on comprehensive environmental standards or rigorous enforcement and compliance rules.
Nevertheless, the race for underwater critical minerals may soon heat up regardless of institutional paralysis. The United States remains the only major coastal power that has never formally ratified UNCLOS. Unbound by the Seabed Authority’s restrictive rules and driven by an urgent desire to diminish its economic dependence on China while meeting the insatiable global demand for minerals required to fuel artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies, the U.S. government is actively fast-tracking permits for deep-sea mining.
These permits target parts of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone over which the United States already exercises de facto control. Although past U.S. administrations historically adhered to many UNCLOS standards despite never ratifying the treaty, current U.S. regulators are expected to rule within the next year on a growing backlog of commercial deep-sea mining applications, potentially clearing the path for extraction to begin in the near future. Additionally, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which regulates energy and mineral development on the U.S. outer continental shelf, has held lease auctions for large tracts of seabed off American Samoa, opening them up for exploration and potential mining.
If the United States moves forward with commercial mining in these open ocean areas, countries that have signed on to international laws restricting deep-sea extraction—including China, India, and Russia—will likely cry foul. Although Beijing and Moscow routinely disregard other core laws of the sea when it suits their geopolitical interests, they will undoubtedly point to unilateral U.S. mining operations as a convenient justification to launch their own unregulated extraction campaigns.
As with the broader erosion of the rules-based international order, ocean governance will not collapse all at once. Great powers still derive tangible benefits from certain foundational guidelines, such as the multilateral regulation of commercial fisheries, even if they stand to gain from calculated disorder in other areas. Rather, the system is likely to die a death of a thousand cuts.
Each broken precedent makes the next violation easier to ignore, normalize, or justify. Coastal powers will increasingly come to believe that the oceans are simply there for the taking. That dangerous lesson will not stay confined to charging ship tolls or claiming mineral-rich seabeds.
Sovereign states will inevitably assert direct ownership over lucrative fishing grounds, tamper with vital undersea cables with impunity, and potentially conquer, blockade, or besiege isolated islands. The gradual erosion of global ocean governance could pave the way for China to successfully blockade Taiwan, for Russia to strangle Norway’s strategic Svalbard archipelago, or for the United States to assert absolute maritime control around Greenland.
The breakdown of the international maritime order could also spur a dangerous new territorial scramble for Antarctica. During the height of the Cold War, the great powers signed a landmark treaty that effectively froze territorial claims to the frozen continent, designating it exclusively as a site for peaceful scientific exploration and international cooperation.
Today, however, that treaty looks increasingly fragile. China is rapidly expanding its polar icebreaker fleet and constructing advanced research stations on Antarctica that U.S. and European observers worry possess dual-use military capabilities, a practice strictly banned under the treaty. Furthermore, China and Russia have teamed up diplomatically to repeatedly delay the establishment of protected marine areas in Antarctic waters, clearing the way for both nations to aggressively expand their krill fishing operations.
Accelerating ice melt and technological advancements could also open the continent up to long-prohibited mining activities. If a high-stakes geopolitical contest for the South Pole breaks out, a host of competing countries could reassert dormant territorial claims and race to construct satellite tracking stations across Antarctica for intelligence gathering, advanced surveillance, and other military purposes.
In a world defined by contested oceans, international trade and commerce would inevitably slow down as cargo ships are forced to zigzag across circuitous routes and pay mounting fees at unpredictable transit points. Manufactured goods would become significantly more expensive, while global supply chains would grow increasingly volatile and prone to sudden disruption. Rogue actors and opportunistic governments would gain the leverage to hold up critical resources or food supplies for immediate political and economic gain.
The oceans would be completely divvied up into exclusive national territories. In the wrong hands, marine ecosystems and vital fisheries would face grave and lasting environmental damage.
The eventual conquest of the oceans could ultimately unfold much like the historical conquest of land, with the most militarily powerful countries—or those that simply arrive first—gaining permanent ownership over finite resources. The sheer number of geopolitical flash points would multiply exponentially as governments rushed to grab their share of the seas and protect their dubious claims through armed force.
It took centuries of bloody conflict and arduous state-building for global land borders to become relatively stable. Replaying that volatile process across the world’s oceans would be extraordinarily dangerous and unpredictable. Vast tracts of the oceans would change hands repeatedly as global powers rise and fall and as marine technologies evolve, creating entirely new winners and losers in a high-stakes maritime scramble.
The countries of the world once chose to govern the oceans together for the collective benefit of humanity. But the future threatens to see major states duking it out on the open water to secure their own exclusive share of the seas, marking a tragic turning point for the planet’s biggest and most vital global commons.
