During his current visit to Southeast Asia for regional summits, President Obama should make clear that Chinese coercion to revise Asia’s established order will not succeed on his watch, and deploy more elements of America’s diplomatic and military toolkit to match his words with action.
After years of lobbying by the American military to undertake freedom-of-navigation operations within what China claims to be its territorial waters, the White House finally consented in October to a symbolic show of force that saw a U.S. destroyer sail within 12 miles of a Chinese construction on a reef in the South China Sea. But even that deployment sent mixed messages to both Beijing and America’s Asian allies, as reports circulate that the U.S. Navy invoked “innocent passage,” tacitly recognizing China’s sovereignty over waters around its artificial islets. Such a softly-softly approach is unlikely to alter Beijing’s game plan.
In fact, China has more to lose in any military confrontation than does the United States. America is richer, more powerful, has more allies, and enjoys a more resilient political regime than that monopolized by the Chinese Communist Party. President Xi Jinping must know that a foreign conflict could unleash the kind of nationalism within China that could ultimately target his regime itself; after all, this is how previous dynasties have fallen.
China’s strategy to date — building artificial structures and claiming the surrounding waters as national territory — has been to salami-slice. Beijing has secured incremental gains below the threshold of any actual conflict, while Washington is distracted elsewhere.
It is time for America to call China’s bluff with a more robust and proactive strategy to deter further attempts to redraw the map of Asia. Rather than ceding the initiative to Beijing in the South China Sea through a reactive and purely localized policy, the Obama administration needs to demonstrate that continued military aggression in maritime Asia could endanger China’s wider interests.
One-third of global trade flows through the South China Sea. Control over it would not only threaten East Asia’s economic lifeline; it would position Chinese naval and air power at the mouth of the Indian Ocean. To prevent Chinese revisionism from upending the region’s delicate balance of power, the U.S. and its allies must raise the costs and call into question the benefits of further Chinese encroachments on Asia’s existing territorial order.
Diplomacy can set the stage for this. In 2010, Chinese leaders were shocked when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined with counterparts from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to criticize China’s conduct in the South China Sea and assert an American interest in the peaceful resolution of conflicts there. The Philippines has filed a case in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague against China’s assertions of sovereignty over its South China Sea territories, and Indonesia is now threatening to do the same over the Chinese threat to the Natuna Islands. Japanese diplomats have worked concertedly to help ASEAN states develop a common position in support of freedom of navigation and other principles of maritime international law. American diplomacy can do more to encourage these trends, reunifying ASEAN around the principle that Asia’s maritime disputes cannot be resolved through force and developing a robust plan of action to enforce that norm.
In the economic realm, Indonesian President Joko Widodo wants his country to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership alongside ASEAN members Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Brunei. Japan, Australia, and New Zealand are TPP signatories; South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan have expressed interest in joining the club. Enacting TPP, which will reinforce an open Asia-Pacific order in which goods, services, and capital flow freely across the region, is a useful counterpoint to China’s efforts to raise barriers to cooperation by militarizing the trade superhighways of Asia’s maritime commons.
Soft power aside, the primary instrument for defending Asia’s fragile status quo must be American military strength. The United States must be more creative with its superior military toolkit in defending the existing liberal order.
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