What Can and Cannot be Done, Cannot be Undone

Deep seabed mining and the rogue state.

What Can and Cannot Be Done, Cannot Be Undone

The sediment of history accumulates through class struggle, imperial conquest, and the shifting modes of production. The wreckage promoted by U.S. exceptionalism does not erase this sediment—it lies atop it like a hideous flesh, giving the skeleton of history a monstrous form, shaping its contours while masking its deeper truths. This neoliberal flesh is not merely ideological but structural—built into the very institutions that manage global capital and coercion. What has been done in the name of democracy, security, or market liberalization reflects not just policy choices, but the material interests of a ruling class determined to privatize and reproduce its dominance. These are not isolated historical events, but dialectical continuities—manifesting in extraction, debt regimes, militarized borders, and the suppression of autonomous development across the Global South. The aftershocks of empire are not confined to the past; they actively shape the present conditions of underdevelopment and resistance, hanging on to what remains of the global system by its claws.

And so…

The Metals Company (TMC), a Canadian mining company announced its intent to bypass international oversight from the regulatory guidance of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) towards a deregulatory friendly Trump administration by invoking an obscure pre-UNCLOS law—the U.S. Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act (DSHMRA). This is the kind of self-serving jurisdictional opportunism that both erodes the principle of global stewardship, endangering ocean ecosystems, destabilizing planetary life-support systems, deepening the risk of irreversible ecological thresholds, and under the tenure of Trump and Musk, undermines the ethical foundation of multilateral environmental governance.

Simply put, this is a business decision driven by investor desperation. But more deeply, it is a case study in the mechanics of empire: how powerful rogue administrations have sidestepped multilateral norms, retooled outdated legal frameworks, and eroded sovereignty beneath the rhetoric of innovation and progress.

Gerard Barron, the CEO of The Metals Company, represents one of the most reprehensible proponents of opening the deep seabed to commercial mineral extraction, reminding me of Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of the white whale. Unfortunately, his approach is neither unique nor an aberration, but a strategic extension of a broader pattern that seeks legal loopholes and power corridors to advance the interests of extractive capital, prioritizing investor returns over ecological integrity and multilateral governance.

At its core, TMC's pivot to an obscure U.S. Act (1980) is an attempt to unilaterally circumvent the International Seabed Authority (ISA)—the only legitimate global body empowered to regulate mining in international waters. TMC is not content to wait for the ISA’s deliberations, nor to uphold the principles enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to which the U.S. itself is not a signatory. Instead, it reaches for DSHMRA, an old legislative relic that could enable companies to act outside of UNCLOS authority with impunity.

This is not a legal loophole—it is a conscious strategy of destabilization. And it echoes a well-worn pattern: when international law no longer serves U.S. interests or those of capital embedded within its jurisdiction, it is either abandoned, ignored, or unilaterally reinterpreted. In doing so, TMC is not just threatening the ecological sanctity of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. It is replicating a mode of governance where what cannot be done multilaterally is done unilaterally, and what is done in isolation and without consent cannot be undone without consequence.

TMC's alignment with U.S. jurisdiction is not incidental—it is tactical. It is rooted in a long genealogy of impunity: from nuclear testing in the Pacific to the violation of climate treaties, from financial sanctions to regime change operations, from coups to corporations. Each of these acts left not only material wreckage but institutionalized precedent—where actions taken without consent are retrofitted with justification and exceptionalism is laundered through legality.

By attempting to convert the deep sea into a privatized zone of mineral extraction, under the protection of an outdated and contested American law, TMC is not just exploiting nodules—it is testing the limits of planetary governance. It gambles that there is no meaningful global enforcement mechanism to stop them, and that public outcry, like ecological destruction, can be absorbed as a cost of doing business.

In this way, TMC's strategy is not novel. It is a symptom of a deeper pathology—where corporate actors, faced with financial collapse, enlist the shield of sovereign power to bypass international scrutiny. In bypassing the ISA, TMC also bypasses Indigenous voices, Pacific sovereignty, and the emerging calls for a global moratorium on deep-sea mining. It undermines not only legal processes but also moral and ecological thresholds—those invisible but vital lines that, once crossed, cannot be restored.

What TMC is proposing, then, is not simply a mining project—it is a precedent. A test case for a future where international common heritage is parceled off to the highest bidder, under cover of legal exception and economic urgency. And once this is done, once the abyssal plains are torn open and the world’s last untouched ecosystems are compromised, it cannot be undone. No amount of reclamation or remediation can restore the microbial networks, the carbon sinks, the benthic worlds we have yet to understand.

Let us name what cannot be undone.

1. The Originary Sin of Absolute Power

The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not merely a military decision—it marked the dawn of a new era of totalized, asymmetrical violence. It affirmed the United States not only as the dominant force in World War II, overshadowing the decisive role of the Soviet Union, but also positioned it as the unilateral arbiter of peace, shaping postwar negotiations with Japan. More than victory, it asserted a terrifying claim to ultimate power: the role of a sovereign capable of annihilation.n.

2. Sanctions as the Architecture of Empire

The use of sanctions as an extension of U.S. hegemony reveals the structural violence embedded in financial systems. Sanctions imposed unilaterally—without the mandate of international law—have strangled entire populations (Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria), serving as tools of collective punishment rather than diplomacy. This power has historically flowed through the unipolar dominance of the U.S. dollar and SWIFT system—now contested but not yet displaced.

3. Support for Genocide, Occupation, and Apartheid

The unquestioning support for the Israeli state's military occupation and genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people exposes the absolute moral collapse of a nation-state that claims to be a defender of human rights. The complicity is bipartisan, financial, and military, rendering meaningless any invocation of international law from U.S. mouths.

4. The Machinery of Destabilization: Coups, Regime Change, and Psychological Operations

So many… including Iran in 1953, Chile in 1973, Libya in 2013, Ukraine in 2014 to ongoing hybrid wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the United States—often through the intersection of the CIA, Department of Defense, private military contractors, and “democracy promotion” NGOs—has repeatedly overthrown, undermined, and economically sabotaged sovereign governments. This remains not an exception but the operating logic of Pax Americana.

5. Corporate Malfeasance and Legislative Capture

The U.S. Congress has become a theater of influence peddling, beholden not to the public but to corporate lobbyists, military-industrial actors, and financial elites. Between the China Lobby, AIPAC, the Londongrad or, Citizen’s United, Legislation is no longer a deliberative act for the common good, but a monetized process for privatization, deregulation, and deepening inequality.

6. Abandonment of Treaties and International Agreements

From the Kyoto Protocol to the Iran Nuclear Deal, from arms control agreements to climate commitments, the United States has repeatedly walked away or as in the case of the Minsk Agreements influenced foreign governments to walkaway from agreements when it no longer suits its strategic interests. This lack of treaty fidelity erodes trust in international law and institutions, leaving behind a wake of broken promises.

7. Debt as War by Other Means

The $36 trillion U.S. national debt, compounded by stimulus for military expansion, post-2008 bailouts for financial institutions, and spiraling interest payments, does not simply reflect economic mismanagement—it is the ledger of empire. The U.S. continues to leverage its military and financial dominance to extract and borrow with impunity, even as it imposes austerity and debt discipline on others through the IMF and World Bank.

8. Obstruction of Global Multipolarity

The disruption, containment, and obstruction of BRICS+, the Belt and Road Initiative, and alternative financial institutions represent the desperate clinging of a declining hegemon to its singularity. The U.S. strategy is not to “build back a better” world, but to prevent another world from being built.

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These are not merely policies. They are conditions.
And they cannot be undone without moral, political, and structural transformation.

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What Is Just Governance?

Against this landscape of domination, deception, and decay, what does good governance look like? Here, we must return to principles that long predate American empire:

• Kautilya's Arthashastra (3-4 Century BCE), is one of the most comprehensive treatises on statecraft, political economy, and governance from the ancient world. It approaches governance pragmatically, emphasizing that the wellbeing of the people is the foundation of a prosperous and secure state—an idea that strongly resonates with just rule and the moral responsibilities of power. “In the happiness of his subjects lies the king’s happiness; in their welfare his welfare. He shall not consider as good only that which pleases him but treat as beneficial to him whatever pleases his subjects.”
  — Arthashastra, Book I, Chapter 19: Duties of a King

• Mencius (3-4 century BCE), the Confucian philosopher, taught that the legitimacy of rulers depends not on divine right or force, but on benevolence and the well-being of the people. When rulers forget the people, rebellion is not only justified—it is necessary. “If you put in practice a benevolent government, this people will love you and all above them. and will die for their officers.”

  —King Hui of Liang. Part II: Chapter XII. 3.

• St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica (13th century), argued that laws must be just, and serve the common good, not merely the interest of the powerful. An unjust law is not a law at all, but a perversion of law. “Every human law has just so much of the nature of law, as it is derived from the law of nature. But if in any point it deflects from the law of nature, it is no longer a law but a perversion of law.”

  —Summa Theologica, II, Q.95. Art 2.

• Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah (14th century) warned that dynasties and empires decay from within when their leaders abandon public trust and virtue for luxury, corruption, and coercion. Governance must be grounded in asabiyyah—social cohesion and collective solidarity. “When a dynasty reaches the limit of its duration, it turns to a life of ease and tranquility. The strength of the dynasty and its cohorts declines... and the people return to an inferior level. Luxury is the cause of the destruction of the state.”

  —Muqaddimah, Book 1, Chapter V.

• Bernie Sanders (2025) “I think it is very clear that today we have a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, and for the billionaire class.”

  —Where do we go from here?

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So what can be done?

We can build from below.
We can honor treaties and not dissolve them.
We can redistribute instead of exploit.
We can decolonize, demilitarize, and re-spiritualize our governance.
We can listen to the voices the empire tried to erase.

But what has been done—what cannot be undone—must be acknowledged, must be mourned, must be made visible. Only then can the world move beyond it.

And that is the task ahead.