By Richard C. Thornton
“Washington should contest China’s claims, both physically and historically.”
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter’s plea to China and the nations surrounding the South China Sea to end island base building will fall on deaf ears for two reasons. First, it is in their respective interests to create facts on the water to establish sovereignty claims and, second, because no one can stop them. The United States explicitly declares that it takes no position on these activities as they relate to sovereignty claims; Washington simply wants to be free to sail in international waters and fly in international air space.
Unfortunately for Washington and Beijing, these two courses – base-building and freedom of navigation are convergent. Sooner rather than later there will be confrontation. Incidents will follow and perhaps proliferate. The Beijing propaganda machine is already demanding that the United States retreat before its too late, that China is determined to establish a blue water presence in the Western Pacific, which it will inevitably dominate.
The U.S. should accept China’s challenge, the sooner the better. If China truly seeks to dominate the Western Pacific, then the United States should contest Beijing’s claims now while China is quite weak in terms of naval power and while the United States still has the relative advantage. The United States should employ a variant of the “Maritime Strategy” used against the Soviet Union in the eighties against China today. Then, the U.S. Navy sailed into so-called Soviet naval redoubts off Murmansk and the Sea of Okhotsk to deny the Soviet navy sanctuary in any conflict. That is what the U.S. Navy must do today against China. It must be made clear that China’s sea bases offer no advantage at all in time of conflict. Perhaps a gunnery demonstration against an uninhabited and unclaimed atoll would be useful. Perhaps a demonstration of the efficacy of fleet ABM capability should be mounted. The objective would be to make public the weaknesses China seeks to hide by its noisy propaganda.
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