From Mare Liberum to Make America Great Again: The Neo-Grotian Logic of Seabed Mining

In April 2025, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources, instructing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to fast-track licenses for seabed mining beyond national jurisdiction. The announcement came just weeks after The Metals Company (a Canadian firm long embedded in the International Seabed Authority (ISA) process through Pacific Island sponsorship) signalled its pivot to a unilateral US-based application for a deep-sea mining license. If the formal rhetoric of the order spoke the language of energy dominance and technological leadership, its legal gesture reached further back: a return to the high seas as a domain of open appropriation, a space where jurisdictional constraint gives way to national will.

The international reaction was swift. At the ISA’s 30th session, states invoked customary law, the common heritage of humankind, and the integrity of the global seabed regime. In June 2025, the UN Ocean Conference (UNOC3) opened in Nice with renewed calls for multilateral stewardship and ecological restraint, culminating in the Nice Ocean Action Plan. In the diplomatic choreography of ocean governance, this sequence of moves and countermoves might appear as simply another contest between unilateralism and multilateralism. But the deeper stakes lie elsewhere. Trump’s executive order is not a departure from institutional consensus. It is a reactivation of a much older legal imaginary – one that casts the ocean as a site of liberty, extraction, and sovereign ambition.

This text traces a through-line from Hugo Grotius’ Mare Liberum to Trump’s 2025 order, identifying what might be called a neo-Grotian logic of seabed mining. It argues that the apparent conflict between Trump’s move and the law of the sea regime is, paradoxically, also a moment of legal continuity: a reaffirmation of the law’s long-standing capacity to render the ocean as a space of sacrifice.