Cooling Off the South China Sea

On Oct. 27 the simmering waters of the South China Sea came to a slow boil. A U.S. Navy destroyer, the USS Lassen, conducted a freedom-of-navigation cruise within 12 nautical miles of a Chinese-built artificial island in the Spratly archipelago. The Chinese government vowed to “firmly react to this deliberate provocation.” There’s a scenario in which gunboat diplomacy degenerates into outright hostilities. Ships bump, planes collide, shots are fired. Sailors and airmen die. Carefully cultivated diplomatic relations unravel, and commerce and investment between the world’s two biggest economies break down. This conflict doesn’t have to end badly, though. Even without a full agreement, it should be possible to downgrade the South China Sea from a casus belli into just one irritant in a typically complex great-power relationship. Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, has consulted in the past for the State and Defense Departments. “I’m not optimistic it can be solved,” she says, “but I’m optimistic it can be managed.” To defuse tensions without simply folding, the U.S. needs to take advantage of a quality that until now has been China’s province: ambiguity. For years, the Chinese have been deliberately vague about their claims in the South China Sea even while building what one American general calls a “Great Wall of Sand” on contested islets, shoals, and reefs. Its famous “nine-dash line” that extends from the mainland like a fat tongue truly does look dashed off. China has never made clear whether it’s claiming all the waters of the South China Sea or just the land features within it. See full text here.