The Caspian question: trade, sovereignty, and the law of waters

The Washington Examiner reports that the Caspian Sea — covering some 143,000 square miles, larger than Germany — is fast becoming one of the most consequential trade arteries on the planet. The story frames this as a shadow conflict, with competing powers maneuvering for advantage across a body of water whose legal status remains, by my inference from the lead, genuinely contested. That framing should alarm anyone who has spent time negotiating the instruments by which nations resolve such contests without resort to arms.

The first question a diplomat must ask is not who is winning but what framework governs. In my own experience — negotiating the Treaty of Paris, and later the instrument that would bear my name with Britain — I learned that the hardest quarrels are those where the parties have not agreed even on what rules apply. The Caspian's status as a lake rather than a sea is not a matter of geography alone; it determines whether the Law of the Sea, as embodied in the multilateral conventions I could not have known but whose shape I understand, applies at all. I am told that the five littoral states — Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan — concluded a convention on the Caspian's legal status in 2018. Whether that convention is durable, and whether its terms are being honored, is precisely the question that should drive policy. I mark that detail as inference, not recollection.

Free navigation of shared waters has always been, in my considered view, a national interest worth defending by law rather than by maneuver. When I pressed for American navigation rights on the Mississippi in the 1780s — and was prepared, briefly and controversially, to suspend them for a Spanish treaty that served other interests — I was accused of trading a present right for a distant advantage. The lesson I drew was not that navigation rights are negotiable trinkets; it is that their value must be weighed with precision, and that any suspension of them must be bounded by clear language and a clear term. Ambiguity in such instruments is the seed of the next conflict.

The Washington Examiner's framing of a "shadow war" deserves scrutiny. Shadow conflicts are, by definition, those prosecuted outside the acknowledged frameworks of law and treaty. They are attractive to governments that wish to claim advantage without incurring the obligations that a formal posture would impose. They are also, in my experience, the most difficult to resolve — because the parties have not put their intentions in writing, and written intentions are the only ones a neutral arbitrator can weigh. When great powers compete across a body of water whose governance is unresolved or fragile, the temptation to act informally is precisely the temptation that produces the crises everyone later professes to have wished to avoid.

What should be done? Three things, stated plainly. First, the United States should press for clarity on what the 2018 Caspian convention actually requires of its signatories, and hold those signatories — including any with whom we have commercial or security arrangements — to their stated obligations. Second, any American engagement in or around the Caspian, whether through sanctions, naval logistics, or proxy support (I infer these possibilities from the "shadow war" framing), should be grounded in explicit legal authority, publicly acknowledged, and subject to legislative oversight. The treaty power exists so that the nation speaks with one considered voice; shadow maneuvers make that voice incoherent. Third, the administration should resist the temptation to treat this as a theater for demonstrating resolve. Resolve demonstrated through careful legal construction lasts; resolve demonstrated through improvised pressure evaporates when the pressure does. The Caspian will outlast any particular administration. The agreements made about it should be written as if they, too, must last.