The Arabian Peninsula Country and Sovereignty - Essay Example

Israel remains the only separate country on the Peninsula. The new APC has over 25% of the world’s known oil reserves in its territory. The new country is flexing its muscle and claiming its sovereign rights over the water and in the exclusive zone that overlap into other nation’s areas in the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea into the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. The APC has restricted the use of the airspace it is claiming to all western nations and threatens to shoot down any aircraft whether military or commercial that flies into its airspace.

Further, fearing western satellites spying on its territory from space, the APC claimed territorial sovereignty above its country into space and threatens to shoot down any satellites that fly over its territory. It is unclear if the APC has the technology to fulfill this threat but there are missile exports from Russia and China that may be able to knock out a satellite in orbit. The APC has announced plans to increase its standing army to over 50,000 troops and is beginning construction of a deepwater naval fleet to project its influence in the region. 2.0.

Statement of the Problem Some of the fundamental issues pertaining to the situation are as follows. First, can the APC claim sovereignty after Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria sought to consolidate themselves into a single nation to be known as the APC? Second, what will be scope and limits of the claim on sovereignty if this is the case? Third, up to what extent can the APC claim sovereignty over its airspace and into space?

Finally or fourth, what are the threats posed by the APC on the United States of America? 3.0. Proposed USA Position: Sovereignty and History/Scope in International Law Jean Bodin first systematically analyzed the doctrine of sovereignty in 1576 in the work, Six Livres de la Republique (Shaw, 21). In the Bodin notion of sovereignty, sovereignty is only “subject to the law of God and of nature” as the “state was regarded as above the law” (Shaw, 21). In the age of enlightenment and as the early theories were influenced by the ideas of Thomas Aquinas who maintained that “Natural Law formed part of the law of God, and was the participation by rational creatures in Eternal Law,” the notion of state sovereignty may have been subject to reason or what were considered “reasonable” (Shaw, 22).

Later that time, “elements of both positivism and naturalism” appeared in the work of Vattel (1714-67), a Swiss lawyer, who “introduced the doctrine of the equality of states into international law, declaring that a small republic was no less sovereign than the most powerful kingdom” (Shaw, 26). At the same time, the idea of natural laws gave way to the concept of natural rights (Shaw, 26). Shaw asserted that international law is based on the concept of the state that in turn “lies upon the foundation of sovereignty, which expresses internally the supremacy of government institutions and externally the supremacy of the state as the legal person” (487).

Sovereignty “is founded upon the fact of territory” (Shaw, 487). Thus, according to Shaw, “without territory a legal person cannot be a state” (487). Shaw emphasized, “A state is deemed to exercise exclusive power over its territory” (Shaw, 487). The principle of territorial integrity is the foundation of