The Poseidon Project by David Bosco

Author:David Bosco
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Crossing Lines to Make a Point

In March 1986, the US cruiser Ticonderoga and two destroyers operating in the Mediterranean steered south, in the direction of the Libyan coast. The ships soon crossed a point in the sea that Libya’s ruler, Moammar Gaddafi, had deemed the “line of death.” Libya was attempting to enforce a baseline that extended almost 300 miles, from one end of the Gulf of Sidra to the other. Gaddafi’s government claimed that all waters to the landward side of the line were internal, within which no foreign ship had the right to navigate without explicit permission. The claim was excessive by almost any reading of international law, and the US Navy was intent on challenging it.

As US aircraft watched from above, the navy vessels readied themselves for a Libyan military reaction to their foray. It was not long in coming. The Libyan military launched several missiles toward the US ships, although none reached their target. Later in the day, Libyan fighter aircraft flew close to US planes, and several Libyan vessels headed out to challenge the Americans, drawing return fire. US aircraft sank two patrol craft and badly damaged another. By the end of the altercation, several dozen Libyan sailors had been killed.28

The US Navy’s planned incursion into the Gulf of Sidra was part of a broader program. In 1979, even as the negotiations on the Convention were approaching their final phase, the administration of Jimmy Carter (a former naval officer) announced what it titled a “Freedom of Navigation” program. The new policy stipulated that the United States would routinely challenge maritime claims that it deemed “excessive.”29 Objections would first come through diplomatic channels, but the Carter administration made clear that the US Navy would be involved as well if states persisted in their claims. Nor would only US adversaries be the subjects of these freedom of navigation operations, which came to be known as FONOPs.

Two years after the Gulf of Sidra episode, the Black Sea hosted a naval confrontation with even higher stakes. The Soviet Union, which had decades before declared a territorial sea of 12 miles, had no issue with the Convention’s framework of maritime zones. The Soviets did have a particular—although certainly not unique—interpretation of “innocent passage.” To the United States, that venerable doctrine meant that all vessels, including warships, could pass through another country’s territorial waters unannounced, so long as they did not engage in prohibited actions, such as weapons training and intelligence gathering. But the Soviets insisted on advance notice when foreign warships planned to transit their waters and required that foreign military vessels employ only designated lanes within the territorial sea. In the Black Sea, the Soviets had not even created those designated lanes, an omission implying that they did not permit innocent passage at all.

To challenge that interpretation, the United States dispatched the cruiser Yorktown and the destroyer Caron to the Black Sea in February 1988. On February 12, while on a straight-line route, the US ships briefly sailed within 12 miles of the Soviet coast.

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