U.S.-China Fight over Fishing Is Really about World Domination

That’s why, at the Paris negotiation to end the Revolutionary War in 1783, future president John Adams insisted that Great Britain recognize the right of Americans to fish the North Atlantic. Its rich waters were full of cod and mackerel, but that’s not all: The fishing rights Adams won in 1783 extended the young country’s presence well into the sea.

Because American fishing rights were recognized alongside American statehood, my research shows, generations of U.S. diplomats associated the two. In 1797, Secretary of State Timothy Pickering called American fisheries “the fairest fruits of independence.”

Even so, for decades after independence, the U.S. and Great Britain quarreled over international fishing, leading to many new and renegotiated treaties. At each turn, the Americans uniformly defended their right to fish the North Atlantic, even threatening war to do so.

By the 1860s, international fishing had become a key component of America’s newly expansionist foreign policy. Between 1850 and 1898, the U.S. annexed numerous overseas territories, among them Alaska, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines. Today this empire gives both American fishing vessels and the U.S. military a global reach.

Secretary of State William Henry Seward, who purchased Alaska and its rich North Pacific waters under Andrew Johnson in 1867, also tried unsuccessfully to buy Greenland and Iceland, hoping to further extend American fishing claims across the North Atlantic. During archival research I learned that Seward’s like-minded successor, Hamilton Fish, toyed with the idea of purchasing the Canary Islands, near northwest Africa, as a naval depot and a base for American fishermen.

Cold War Fish
For a time around the turn of the 20th century, fishing took a back seat to military might in the U.S.‘s international power plays.

After World War II, though, Washington again turned to marine resources to serve its foreign policy agenda. This time the government used what I call “fish diplomacy” to help build a more America-friendly world order.

American diplomats of the 1940s used the notion of “maximum sustainable yield” – that is, the idea that there is a level of fishing that maximizes the number of fish caught without damaging the long-term health of fisheries – to expand American maritime influence.

The idea was more political tool than scientific discovery, as historian Carmel Finley has thoroughly explored. But the U.S. used this faux sustainability argument to pass laws and agreements that limited foreign incursions into American waters while giving American fishermen freer reign over the world’s oceans.

Citing maximum sustainable yield, the Truman administration declared conservation zones to protect certain fisheries in 1945. This move essentially barred Japanese salmon fishermen from Alaska’s Bristol Bay. Just a few years later the State Department cited maximum sustainable yield to argue against restricting U.S. tuna fishing in Latin American waters.

As the Cold War developed in the 1950s, fish diplomacy helped the U.S. shore up allies to counter the Soviet Union.

Washington gave generous subsidies to expand the fishing fleets of various countries – most notably Japan, whose war-ravaged economy was revived in part by the U.S. boat-building subsidies that resurrected its own once vital empire-building fishing industry. The U.S. also lowered tariffs for strategically located fishing nations like Iceland, making their main export, cod, cheaper for Americans to buy.

Of course, the U.S. also fought communism with mutual defense alliances, arms sales to friendly nations and direct military interventions. But fishery politics was part of its Cold War plan.

This history helps explain why the U.S. now sees China’s enormous fishing fleet and international trawling as threat. In sending its fishermen far and wide, Beijing has, wittingly or not, followed America’s lead.

Blake Earle is Assistant Professor of History, Texas A&M University. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.