All of these issues with China recently have gotten me to thinking about the nature of “international waters.”
Clearly, the US Navy has no issues with sailing our fleet anywhere on the oceans of the world. We’ll sail right into the international waters of the Persian Gulf, so we can launch our Tomahawk cruise missiles or carrier based planes in the service of our national interest.
Conversely, though, I am sure we are much more protective of our home shores. If China put a destroyer to sea with their version of the Tomahawk or a Sea-SCUD and claimed it was “on patrol”, I bet good money it would never get within firing range of our coast. We’d board it, chase it off or even sink it.
BUT, would we have a legal leg to stand on? As I envision international law, we’d have to wait until it either was in the act of shooting or entered territorial waters.
International waters are what, 12 mile off coast? Our ears would perk up if the thing got that close, for sure. We would likely send several boats out to check up on them, the news would report it, it would quickly blow way out of proportion, etc. etc.
Then Jesse Jackson would try to go out there and board the damn thing.
We would never board it or sink it if it did not enter our waters. But we would probably try to block it from advancing any further.
But yeah, we’d pretty much freak out if they did that. But I predict we are going to be seeing such cat and mouse games like this for some time to come. Not entirely Cold War, but you never know.
Maybe heavy metal will make a comeback, after all?
Territorial waters extend 12 miles offshore. A country is free to determine who can be in that area and for what reason, more or less. There are also “exclusive economic zones” that extend (last time I checked) a full two hundred miles offshore, IIRC. This is territory in which a country can claim and regulate exclusive rights to mine, drill, fish, etc. But they can’t legally stop you from just passing through, doing research, or anything else that isn’t a theft of economic potential.
I am under the impression that if a plane or ship is in trouble, the “community of nations” frowns severely on a country’s being overly posessive of emergency facilities. Of course, that may not be generally true in the case of spy planes.
At any rate, we can pretty sure that throughout the cold war, the Russians had missile subs planted offshore well within our territorial waters. Possibly even within some of our major harbors - sneaky things, subs. No one raised too much fuss; after all, we had subs snuggling the Russian coast, too. Besides, what would be the point? People would panic, it would be hard to prove, and even if a particular vessel were chased off they’d just go to back to doing it again anyway when the heat died down.
We - and everyone else - do it with planes, too. Remember the Cuban missile crisis? We spotted the missiles from a U2 spyplane flying over Cuba, clearly a violation of their airspace. Boohoo.
Besides, the Chinese government admitted that the collision in this recent case took place in international airspace. It was only after the plane was damaged and had to make an emergancy landing that it violated Chinese airspace.
Also, the United States has a policy that if an unidentified vessel enters this area (if they’re running silent, don’t identify themselves via radio or transponder, etc.), they’re treated as hostile, and our forces respond as such.
I’ve thought about this some more, and decided that there are probably three categories of countries for this situation.
Countries we trust. If the British Navy sailed a destroyer within firing distance of our shores, we wouldn’t even blink.
Countries we respect. This would be countries like China, Russia and the USSR when it existed. If they sailed within firing distance of our shores, we might be concerned, would probably shadow them with our own ships but would assume their leaders realize the consequences of any action would be too dire for both sides.
Countries of concern. Countries which, rightly or wrongly, we consider to be too unstable to be concerned about retribution. If North Korea sailed a vessel into firing range of LA, we would claim to have evidence of “hostile intent”, board it, find or manufacture more evidence and then either return or confiscate it depending on the amount of evidence found. Iran, Iraq, Libya and others would fall into this category too.
