Jim Webb, a Democratic presidential candidate and former U.S. senator from Virginia, is urging the Obama administration to confront China about its military expansion in the South China Sea amid concerns raised by U.S. allies.
Webb said on Thursday that “we have to draw a line with China” in response to its aggressive efforts to seize disputed territories in the Asia-Pacific. U.S. officials say China has now constructed more than 3,000 acres of manmade islands in the Spratlys, which were previously just a chain of submerged reefs and rocks. U.S. allies in the region, including Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam, all claim parts of the Spratlys.
Beijing is also adding military barracks, airfields, and artillery pieces to the artificial islands, raising the risk of conflict in waters that serve as an important transit area for international trade.
The Obama administration has previously failed to deter China from expanding its military ambitions in the region, Webb said.
“[The Chinese military] will create issues of sovereignty, mark their spots, and the United States would kind of defer and sort of call them tactical spats rather than clearly strategic sovereignty issues,” he said at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“And now is the time. We have to draw a line with China in terms of the Spratlys and keep a hold of the positive relationships that have come out of this.”
Webb, who is also a former secretary of the Navy and assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, noted that China first declared its intentions in 2012 when it established a prefecture-level government in Sansha, an island city in the South China Sea. The Obama administration has said it does not take a position on sovereignty disputes in the region.
“To take no position on an issue that relates to these sovereignty issues is to take a position,” Webb said. “It is to accede, because China insists on bilateral solutions to these problems and they will always intimidate the smaller countries.”
Failing to challenge China in the South China Sea would also threaten other significant territories in the Asia-Pacific, Webb said. Beijing and U.S. ally Japan remain embroiled in a territorial dispute over the Senkaku islands, located in the East China Sea near U.S. military bases on Okinawa.
“To yield on the Senkakus eventually would be to call into question the sovereignty of Okinawa,” he said. “That’s just the way that it works.”
“When you have an expansionist nation that is not accepting international law in these things, you have to do something about it, and we’re the country that does,” he added.
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