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The TPP, it’s worth remembering, was Hillary Clinton’s grand idea, back when she was U.S. secretary of state. It was to be an important pillar in the Obama administration’s vaunted “pivot” to Asia, itself intended to check the rise of China and the resurgence of a territorially aggressive Russia, while acknowledging the growing demographic and economic might of other Pacific nations. But successive memos about the great pivot appear to have reached neither Beijing nor Moscow.

The former has lately been harrying its neighbours in the South China Sea with supposedly innocent incursions of fishing boats, backed up by the Chinese coast guard, backed up by the Chinese navy, in a too-coincidental-to-be-coincidental echo of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s phony-war-that-is-not-phony invasion of Crimea in 2014.

Last week, it was 100 Chinese boats in Malaysian waters. Next week, it will be the Philippines, Taiwan or Brunei. In every case, China is leveraging influence on multiple fronts, including economic. Its apparent objective is to create a new status quo in the South China Sea that effectively pushes the U.S. Navy, and by extension the free passage of trade and international shipping, eastward into the Pacific.

The East China Sea, for the time being, is relatively quiet, despite China’s continuing claims to ownership of the Japan-held Senkaku Islands, southwest of Okinawa. But a deeply worried Japan is shoring up its defences in the region. Last week the Japanese military established a radar station and small base on Yonaguni Island, 150 kilometres south of the Senkakus. North of Japan’s main islands, meantime, Russia signaled last week it intends to build a naval base in the Kurils, which it took from Japan at the end of the Second World War. Tokyo has lodged a diplomatic protest. Diplomacy with Beijing to resolve the Senkaku dispute continues.