The campaign to "save the whale" has received plenty of publicity over the past twenty years. Yet this attention to whales is likely to be only temporary. It is already clear that whale hunting is a long way from being a priority issue for most Americans, Europeans and Asians. An IFAW poll last June could only claim that 15% of Americans were even aware that Japan is a whaling nation.

Much could happen in the next twenty years. The IWC may paralyze itself out of existence and become little more than a talking shop. Nations may leave and set their own quotas, either individually or as another group of trading nations. Others may choose to follow the path of zero regulation and go about hunting whatever and wherever they wish.

If the IWC can agree the terms of the Revised Management Scheme (RMS), all the great whales will have been protected from over hunting. An RMS is therefore in the interests of all representatives at Shimonoseki. An RMS provides firm assurance that whale species will be comprehensively protected for the foreseeable future.

For today’s anti-whalers, this means accepting the reality that whale species are much more secure within an RMS than being at the mercy of an uncertain future. An RMS will set a new baseline from which nations, hunters and campaigners can continue to deliberate how civilized it is to hunt whales at all, compared to breeding cattle, for human sustenance. Uncertainty is only in the interests of a minority of campaigners who are trying to exploit the fundraising potential of the current status quo.

If the IWC does not get its house in order soon it could prove to be the most powerful catalyst of all for the decline of internationalism. By ignoring the articles of the Convention by which it was established, the IWC has become dysfunctional. By imposing arbitrary and unscientific preferences, in the form of a moratorium and regional sanctuaries, its majority has undermined the fabric of international governance. And because this misrule has been led by world powers such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, the conditions have been created for the waning of authority for all other international institutions.

The irony is that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have fought to create, and then succeeded in influencing, this array of international institutions. They have focused significant resources on lobbying bodies ranging from the IPCC to CITES, acquiring in many cases the power of a state. In the case of the IWC, however, this power has been over-employed and abused and the wider perspective has been largely ignored. Environmental fundamentalism has dominated IWC policies.