Signage outside the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, US, on Monday, March 3, 2025. The Trump administration fired hundreds of employees at the top US agency overseeing weather prediction and climate research, raising concerns about the nation’s preparedness amid wildfire and tornado warnings. Credit – Daniel Heuer—Bloomberg/Getty Images
In late April, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order that many international onlookers viewed as a startling provocation: he directed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to expedite its process for issuing commercial deep sea mining permits in areas beyond U.S. jurisdiction.
This was hardly Trump’s first time making brazen claims with respect to lands beyond U.S. borders. The president’s unilateral declaration of U.S. authority over the mineral-rich stretches of the international seabed comes in the wake of inflammatory statements about annexing or controlling foreign territory—from Canada to Greenland to the Panama Canal.
Trump’s offshore minerals order makes no direct territorial claims. But in asserting U.S. authority to regulate commercial seabed mining on the high seas, Trump seeks to bypass an international regulatory regime many decades in the making. In so doing, he threatens to destabilize international oceans governance. History suggests the move may prove counterproductive, undermining concrete American interests in the name of rushing into a speculative new extractive frontier.
Scientists first discovered deep sea deposits of manganese, copper, cobalt, and nickel in the form of potato-sized nodules in the 1870s. Yet, for nearly a century, the mining industry took little notice. Seabed nodules were located at profound depth and pressure; extracting them was therefore a complex and capital-intensive process. Interest in commercial recovery began only in the 1960s, when Space Age technologies and Cold War resource anxieties made deep sea nodule harvesting seem both possible and worth the effort.
After World War II, a wave of decolonization across Africa, Asia, and the Pacific impeded the Western powers’ access to resources once under colonial control. Mining boosters argued that the deep sea could provide a crucial alternative to terrestrial mineral markets controlled by potentially unfriendly postcolonial governments. With mining now technically feasible, the U.S. and other industrialized nations rushed to explore these vast, untapped mineral reserves.
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The desire of industrialized nations to take advantage of this new mineral frontier prompted questions about whether countries could help themselves to these resources on a first-come, first-served basis, or whether ownership rights belonged to the international community writ large.
In 1970, the U.N. General Assembly adopted the latter position, declaring that the international seabed and its vast mineral wealth represented “the common heritage of mankind.” Developing nations saw deep sea nodule fields as a source of vast wealth that could be distributed to benefit poor and “geographically-disadvantaged” nations.
The U.S. balked. The Nixon, Ford, and Carter Administrations pushed back against the attempt by developing countries to impose onerous regulatory and redistributive provisions on deep sea mining.
Even so, the U.S. expressed a commitment to multilateralism and to the development of a comprehensive ocean governance agreement. In 1974, when a mining CEO wrote to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger asking for U.S. recognition of his company’s claim to a stretch of seabed in the middle of the Pacific, the State Department refused. The U.S., the Department explained, supported the creation of an international legal regime and would not issue any unilateral recognition of mineral rights in international waters.
But by the late 1970s, as negotiations over a treaty dragged on, Congress grew receptive to industry lobbyists seeking legislation that would protect their investments in mining sites beyond U.S. maritime jurisdiction.
In 1980, lawmakers passed the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act (DSHMRA). This obscure law vested NOAA with the authority to issue permits for mining beyond American jurisdiction until an international regime was put in place. Its drafters intended the law to be an interim measure, one that would soon be superseded by an international treaty.
But in 1981, the Reagan Administration upended what were known as the law of the sea negotiations and withdrew U.S. support for the draft treaty over disputes about the deep sea mining provisions. The conservative administration saw the centralized management of seabed mining and associated redistributive principles as problematically socialist and anti-industry.
This objection didn’t prevent negotiators from completing the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) the following year. However, the U.S. became one of only four nations to vote against the adoption of the treaty.
President Bill Clinton eventually signed the UNCLOS implementing agreement in 1994, when the treaty entered into force. But Congress never ratified it, despite the U.N. General Assembly approving changes that directly addressed the U.S.’ deep sea mining concerns.
In the three decades since, leaders across the aisle have argued that not signing onto the treaty was a mistake. The U.S. views most treaty provisions as customary international law, and thus effectively legally binding. But as a non-party, it has been sidelined when it comes to multilateral negotiations over U.S. claims to the extended continental shelf in the oil-rich Arctic. Additionally, the U.S. has had no direct voice in negotiations over the international seabed mining regime.
Even so, until the 2010s, the fact that the Deep Sea Hard Mineral Resources Act remained on the books mattered little in practice. While it authorized the U.S. to unilaterally issue licenses to mine the international seabed area, no major confrontations occurred because nobody really wanted to mine the seabed anymore. Commodity prices had fallen and companies discovered that many initial estimates regarding deep sea mining costs and profitability had been overly optimistic. By the mid 1980s, the companies that had pushed for the DSHMRA no longer saw deep sea mining as particularly commercially attractive.
Then came the so-called “clean energy transition.” By the mid-2010s, it was clear that the trend toward electric vehicles and other renewables would drive enduring demand for batteries. This spurred renewed interest in deep sea nodules, which contain the nickel, copper, and cobalt required for lithium-ion battery production.
Interest in—and opposition to—deep sea mining surged in the early 2020s after the government of Nauru triggered a legal provision demanding that the ISA finalize a regulatory regime and allow commercial-scale mining to move forward after decades of limited “exploratory” ventures.
Read More: The Economics of Deep-Sea Mining Don’t Add Up
Scientists, conservation organizations, and a growing cohort of national governments responded by calling for a moratorium on deep sea mining, in light of significant risks posed to marine ecosystems and insufficient knowledge of how mining might impact deep sea environments.
This controversy has delayed the finalization of regulations that would permit commercial mining to move forward. These delays at the ISA, in turn, have frustrated corporate actors, like The Metals Company (TMC), which are keen to commence commercial-scale operations in international waters.
Enter Trump. American efforts to unilaterally assert regulatory authority over areas of seabed claimed by the international community are not new. But Trump’s executive order is particularly inflammatory as he doubles down on a U.S. position that many across the political spectrum view as outdated, despite growing international alarm over the potential adverse impacts of mining.
Unlike in 1980, when the DSHMRA was first promulgated, there is now a treaty regime in force with respect to the international seabed that enjoys nearly universal acceptance. The ISA is working to finalize a regulatory regime that will govern if and how such mining should go forward.
The most charitable interpretation of Trump’s order would be to view it as a helpful prod to ISA negotiators to come quickly to an agreement and to get an international regulatory regime off the ground.
But the move can also be seen as yet another tack away from internationalism, and an indication of ultimately self-defeating contempt for international norms and institutions. By showing disregard for the international regime governing the seabed, the U.S. provides moral cover for other countries—including adversaries—to do the same.
Moreover, the “untapped wealth” of the seabed has always been a somewhat chimerical notion, with states tending to overestimate the value of these resources while underestimating costs associated with their extraction. At best, the benefits of deep sea mining are speculative.
Trump runs the risk of duplicating the mistakes of the Reagan Administration, which jeopardized the negotiation of a wide-ranging international treaty vital to U.S. national interests, like freedom of navigation, in an effort to cater to private industry actors who quickly abandoned deep seabed mining projects as economic conditions shifted.
History suggests that prioritizing a speculative new extractive frontier over international ocean governance institutions could end up doing far more harm to American interests than good.
Sonya Schoenberger is a PhD Candidate in History at Stanford University, where she researches decolonization and marine resource governance in Oceania.
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