The Inupiats were hoist with the petard of the State Department at the International Whaling Commissioning (IWC) annual meeting in Shimonoseki last week. Instead of being granted continued authority to hunt bowhead whales, they fell victim to a useless policy cooked up on C Street in Washington, DC.

The bureaucrats who run U.S. policy at the IWC have taken a distinctly arrogant and un-American approach to the international management of whales.

Most notably, they have resisted implementing a new management system for hunting whales ever since a conservative catch formula was belatedly agreed in 1994. The Revised Management System (RMS) still languishes in Never Never Land, despite being exactly the type of science-based platform favored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for all other marine resources.

Secondly, the State Department has worked with a peculiar array of animal rights groups and anti-whaling countries to prevent the IWC from running in the way it was originally conceived. It has deliberately set about obfuscating and delaying, blithely using a narrowing majority to repeatedly stymie the sustainable use of whales, and drawing the wrath of whaling countries like Japan and Norway.

This policy has put the U.S. in bed with a British Fisheries Minister who once congratulated the communist regime in Nicaragua for expelling the U.S. Ambassador. Meanwhile, fundamentalist campaigners are pocketing around $1 billion per year from "save the whale" symbolism.

By being unreasonable and intransigent, the U.S. has sacrificed moral authority and undermined the cause of international governance. In Shimonoseki, Iceland accused the State Department of waging a "dirty tricks campaign" that prevented it from joining the IWC, while a group of 11 other countries branded the U.S. and its anti-whaling partners an "Axis of Intolerance". In return for all this agitation, the U.S. has gained precisely nothing.

It is odd that the C Street strategists have constantly singled out the U.S.’s strongest Pacific ally, Japan, for this seemingly arbitrary beating. Asserting their prejudices through the rigged and dysfunctional IWC, the bureaucrats have presumed to know best how to manage whales in Japan’s coastal waters. For no good reason, they have denied a small band of foreigners the ability to continue their whale hunting, a tradition that can be traced back 5,000 years to the Jamon period.

Four Japanese communities, with similar social, cultural, dietary and spiritual characteristics as the Inupiat, wanted to catch 50 minke whales annually out of a local stock of 25,000. The Inupiat claim was for up to 67 bowhead whales per year from a stock of around 9,000. Fairness dictates that both quotas should have been permitted since both could have been managed in a demonstrably sustainable manner.

But the State Department’s arrogance went further. The bureaucrats calculated that Japan would not only take the punishment, lectures and insults, but would, at the same time, willingly support the right of U.S. citizens to maintain their own whale hunting traditions.

This Laurel and Hardy approach to negotiation failed when the Japanese finally fought back, complaining of double standards. They used their minority influence to stymie the U.S. Call it revenge, call it politics, but this one didn’t come out of left field. Japan had only one course available to it.

The U.S. now faces an uncomfortable choice of abiding by the decision or breaking the IWC’s rules. The fact that it has regularly threatened Japan with trade sanctions for complying with these same rules (engaging in scientific research whaling) hardly helps.

The Inupiat are now left to pay the penalty for eight years foolhardy politicking. Let us hope the sentence is short. Given that no one at the IWC actually wants to damage the Inupiat, the hope must be that whaling traditions can actually be strengthened by a new international consensus respected by all countries.

Of course, that will also require a little more foresight from Washington. The silver lining for the Inupiat may be that the arrogance and ineptitude of the State Department on whaling issues has at last been publicly exposed.