By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.
In its eagerness to avoid offending the Chinese, is the administration giving them a green light in the disputed South China Sea? This afternoon, on the eve of his departure for the Philippines and India, Defense Secretary Ash Carter carefully tiptoed around ongoing Chinese national security provocations. Several experts I spoke to were not reassured.
Carter took pains in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations to appear even-handed, to the point of suggesting moral equivalence between giant, assertive China and its smaller, nervous neighbors. “China is one of many claimants to various features throughout the region, many of which have taken steps which we oppose, namely militarization, but over last year the scale and scope of China’s [activities] have outstripped anybody else’s,” Carter said when the Council on Foreign Relations moderator, Mary McInnis Boies, pressed him after his prepared remarks. “It won’t affect our operations, but it disquiets the region.”
Our response in the South China Sea has been criticized as weak, noted the moderator, with only two Freedom of Navigation Operations sailing through Chinese-claimed waters in recent years. And those were limited themselves to “innocent passage” rather than military activity. What signal did those FONOPS send?
“Their purpose isn’t to signal. Their purpose is they’ve been going on for decades now,” said Carter. (He neglected to mention the US ceased Freedom of Navigation Operations within the crucial 12-mile limit of Chinese-claimed territory for three years and only resumed after a congressional outcry). “The basic point here is the United States here and everywhere around the world — whether it’s the Arctic, whether it’s the Horn of Africa — we, along with virtually everyone else, insist on freedom of navigation within international law.”
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