Justice & Law Quote by Frank Gaffney

“The most desirable aspects of the Law of the Sea Treaty pertain to navigational rights” is a neat piece of strategic narrowing: it praises the treaty only on the one feature least likely to offend a security-minded audience, then quietly demotes everything else into suspicious clutter. Frank Gaffney, a writer best known for hawkish, nationalist argumentation, isn’t neutrally summarizing policy. He’s performing triage. If the treaty must have virtues, let them be the kind that sound like hard power: ships moving where they want, chokepoints kept open, flags unchallenged.

The intent is to reframe a sprawling international agreement as a single-issue instrument. “Navigational rights” functions as a safe harbor phrase, a proxy for military mobility and commercial leverage. It also implies a contrast: environmental protections, seabed mining regimes, dispute resolution mechanisms, and international institutions are rendered, by omission, as either secondary or actively undesirable. The adjective “most desirable” is doing rhetorical work; it doesn’t argue against the rest outright, it invites the reader to infer that the rest is baggage.

Context matters because the Law of the Sea Treaty has long been a Rorschach test in U.S. politics: for Navy and maritime commerce, it’s a tool to codify freedom of navigation; for skeptics, it’s a sovereignty trap that empowers global bureaucracies. Gaffney’s line exploits that split. It offers conditional approval that sounds pragmatic, while keeping the door open to rejection: take the sailing, leave the governance. The subtext is an old conservative warning in modern policy diction: international law is acceptable only when it operationalizes American movement, not when it constrains American choice.