For the past twenty years, power at the International Whaling Commission has resided with a small number of non-whaling countries and their collaborators in the animal rights and animal welfare movement. They have progressively and purposely changed the institution while at the same time preventing every whaling country except Norway from undertaking commercial whaling.

Once nations had been recruited to join the IWC in the 1980s, in an innovative approach that secured a three-quarters majority, a series of proposals were passed without the required scientific justification, all running counter to the founding convention itself. The moratorium, together with whale sanctuaries, the anti-whalers believed, would end all whaling forever. To further undermine efforts to resume commercial whaling, they then refused to establish the science-based management system specified by the founding Convention. The Revised Management Procedure (RMP) was successfully delayed until 1994 and the Revised Management Scheme (RMS) remains in the lurch with no major progress to report over the last ten years.

The next step was to undermine the institutions of the IWC by attempting to politicize the Scientific Committee and, when that didn’t work completely, establishing a Conservation Committee.

With the Conservation Committee still unsure of its purpose, New Zealand has now jumped in and proposed the final stage of the process, changing the Convention itself. The non-whaling countries want the power to stop lawful, conservative and carefully managed harvests of all whale species, whatever their level of abundance, and to impose national dietary preferences on other countries.

What the anti-whaling movement failed to anticipate is the wider affect this proposal would have.

First, no country is obliged to remain a member of the IWC. Even if the convention was changed, the whaling countries would find it easy to walk out of an institution whose purpose had been so completely and utterly altered. While non-whaling countries have been able to coerce whaling countries within the IWC, they have no power over non-signatories. And not even New Zealand is proposing – yet – a “you cannot leave’ amendment.

Second, while New Zealand’s proposal will almost certainly fail to secure the necessary votes in Ulsan, it serves to dramatically expose the ultimate objective of the non-whaling countries. This is no news to countries like Japan, Norway and Iceland, but the proposal is now out there for everybody too see, even those who haven’t been paying much attention in the past. The proposal removes any illusion that the non-whaling countries really do want to agree an RMS. Everybody knows it is a sham.

It would be easy to chide New Zealand for wearing its heart on its sleeve but the end for the IWC was inevitable anyway. New Zealand has just speeded the process a little. The “delay game” lasted for twenty years and is now all but over. We are now playing the “end game”.

How, and how quickly, the IWC finally collapses probably will be strongly influenced by events at Ulsan. An RMS will not be agreed – the likelihood was characterized by the U.S. Commissioner last month as “as near impossible as I can predict” – and so the IWC will begin to unravel and the anti-whalers will be left to spin the idea that its demise was nothing to do with their actions and that others – guess who? – are to blame.

In any event, the progression to change the IWC will shortly reach its natural conclusion: disintegration.