A 2016 photo shows Chinese vessels dredging sand on Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands. U.S. NAVY/REUTERS



Tension rising



As China continues to develop reefs in disputed waters, the U.S. is talking tough, reports Paul Koring. Obama’s ‘pivot’ to the Pacific intends to test Beijing’s contested claims



President Barack Obama’s much-hyped “pivot” to the Pacific, supposedly shifting U.S. foreign policy and military focus away from the Middle East to face the emerging strategic challenges posed by China, has, so far, not amounted to much: a few hundred Marines stationed in Australia, ramped-up military exercises with the Philippines, more bombers deployed to Guam.

History of conflict Wang Wei daringly jockeyed his Chinese warplane close to the lumbering U.S. spy plane high above the South China Sea in disputed air space. He had done it before, once flying so close that the Americans could read his e-mail address on the jeering sign he held up. This time, the high-stakes game of intercept and scare went badly wrong. The sleek Chinese Shenyang J-8 slammed into the big, four-engined U.S. Navy P-3, crippling both aircraft. Commander Wang’s cockpit was crushed as it smashed into the far larger U.S. aircraft and the Shenyang plummeted into a death spiral. On board the stricken U.S. spy plane, its 24-year-old pilot, Lieutenant Shane Olson, managed to regain control of the upside-down and diving EP-3. He ordered the crew of 23 to start destroying highly classified signals interception electronics and headed for an emergency landing at a military airfield on China’s Hainan Island. There, the tense standoff in April, 2001, became the first grave crisis for newly elected President George W. Bush and soured Sino-American relations for years including a complete break in military exchanges. High-risk confrontations continue, both at sea and in the air. In March, 2009, Chinese warships and fighter-bombers repeatedly closed in on the U.S. spy ship Impeccable about 110 kilometres off Hainan in what the Pentagon called aggressive harassment. Last August, another Chinese warplane veered less than 10 metres from a U.S. Navy P-8 spy plane. Both nations keep raising the stakes and the risk of military confrontation. In 2013, China declared exclusive control over airspace above the uninhabited Diaoyu Islands – long contested and known in Japan as Senkaku. Days later, President Barack Obama’s response was to send not a vulnerable intelligence gathering aircraft, but a pair of huge B-52 bomberson an unannounced, no-permission-sought sortie, directly through the heart of Beijing’s latest East China Sea claim. Mr. Obama upped the ante again this month, saying the treaty binding the United States to go to war to defend Japan “covers all territories under Japan’s administration, including the Senkaku Islands.”

But in recent months, Mr. Obama has seemed willing to go beyond rhetoric and symbolism. He has rallied China’s regional rivals, reaffirmed the United States’ hard pledges to defend Pacific allies and started to paint some red lines in the seas Beijing regards as its own.

U.S. warships and aircraft may soon be crisscrossing the South China Sea, deliberately ignoring the 12-nautical-mile lines that could be claimed as territorial waters should Beijing attempt to assert full sovereignty over the islands it is creating from reefs and rocks, according to senior defence officials.

Predictably, Beijing has responded with its own tough talk.

“Freedom of navigation certainly does not mean that foreign military ships and aircraft can enter another country’s territorial waters or airspace at will,” Hua Chunying, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, said in response to reports that Defence Secretary Ash Carter had ordered up options for sending U.S. warships and aircraft into the area.

Testing Beijing’s tenuous and contested claim to the South China Sea seems precisely what Mr. Obama intends to do. He has dispatched Secretary of State John Kerry to Beijing this weekend where the message is expected to be unambiguous, that the United States won’t accept Chinese maritime expansionism. Whether the President is willing to back up the reddish lines in the sea with the military might of the world’s sole remaining superpower remains uncertain.

Mr. Obama has accused China’s Communist regime of bullying in the South China Sea. “Rather than resolve these issues through normal international dispute settlements, they are flexing their muscles,” he said, adding: “That’s the wrong way to go about it.”

The President has lined up China’s major regional rivals.

Recent satellite images show China has begun building its first airstrip in contested territory in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. CSIS/AMTI/DigitalGlobe/Reuters

After a lavish visit to India in January, Mr. Obama and his host, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, issued a joint statement pointedly challenging Beijing’s maritime grab. “Regional prosperity depends on security. We affirm the importance of safeguarding maritime security and ensuring freedom of navigation and over flight throughout the region, especially in the South China Sea,” it said.

Mr. Obama upped the stakes last month when the leader of China’s other regional rival, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, came to Washington. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Mr. Abe in the Rose Garden, Mr. Obama pledged that the U.S. defence pact with Japan covered even tiny islets in the East China Sea. And he issued a more general warning about Beijing’s broader sea claims.

“There are some real tensions that have arisen with China around its approach to maritime issues and its claims,” Mr. Obama said.

For years, the Pentagon has sent one of its mighty naval battle groups – a nuclear-powered carrier backed by up to a dozen guided missile cruisers, destroyers and frigates – into the South China Sea usually once a year.

Upping the pace of those forays along with more frequent joint military exercises with allies, such as the Philippines, in the South China Sea offers one way of challenging Beijing’s strategy of incremental sovereignty.

Last month, U.S. Marines stormed ashore alongside Filipino troops in a mock invasion dubbed Balikatan, which means “shoulder-to-shoulder” in Tagalog; it was the largest joint military exercises in at least 15 years.

The message was clearly directed at Beijing.

“The U.S. is committed to its alliance … and the U.S. will defend the important principles of freedom of navigation in the air and the sea,” said U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg as 15,000 U.S. and Filipino soldiers, sailors and airmen launched Balikatan.

China’s huge island-building campaign has imparted a new sense of urgency. “We must do something quickly lest the massive reclamation results in the de facto control by China of the South China Sea,” Philippine Foreign Secretary Albert Ferreros del Rosario told Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Top U.S. military commanders are also urging smaller Asian nations to step up.

In what may prove to be a far more controversial move, Washington is also urging non-allied Asian nations, like Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei, to collectively assert freedom of navigation of the seas and – in effect – challenge Beijing with joint naval patrols in the South China Sea.

In March, Vice-Admiral Robert Thomas, commander of all U.S. naval forces in the Western Pacific, told a gathering of the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations leaders that joint maritime patrols in the South China Sea would have the backing of the U.S. Navy.

“If ASEAN members were to take the lead in organizing something along those lines, trust me, the U.S. 7th Fleet would be ready to support.” Admiral Thomas said.