The challenges of the troubled waters of the South China Sea

China and US deepen their differences and this week tensions have risen in the disputed South China Sea. The US Seventh Fleet announced Tuesday that the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group had entered the area for “routine operations.” This is the second time this year that this fleet, also made up of the guided-missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill, destroyer Squadron 23 and guided-missile destroyer USS Russell, has entered these controversial waters. Two days later he was joined by two other amphibious assault ships.

“It’s great to be back in the South China Sea for assure our allies and partners that we remain committed to the freedom of the seasRear Admiral Doug Verissimo, one of the 7th Fleet commanders, said in a statement.

United States: “We remain committed to the freedom of the seas”

“Throughout the strike group’s deployment, we have demonstrated our commitment to rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific region by operating with our friends from Australia, India, Japan, Malaysia and South Korea. We look forward to continuing to sail alongside all those who adhere to our collective vision for security and stability in one of the most important regions of the world, ”added Verissimo.

In this way, Washington made it clear to Beijing who its allies are and that together with them is ready to defend the independence of Taiwan, the Sino-West island, where the nationalist forces defeated by the Communist Red Army took refuge in 1949. Now, China is testing the waters take back power on her.

On March 25, President Joe Biden gave his first White House press conference. There, he said, when asked about the threat from China: “[Nuestros] children and grandchildren will do their doctoral thesis on if autocracy or democracy triumph, because that’s what’s at stake, not just China ”. And he insisted: “It is a battle between the usefulness of 21st century democracies and autocracies. You will see that in Russia we no longer speak of communism: it is an autocracy … This is what is at stake: we must show that democracy works ”.

For the United States, this “new battle” reflects what happened in Europe after WWII with the creation of NATO to “contain” the Soviet Union. Washington research a new alliance containing China. At the same conference, Biden asserted that China has a goal, the legitimacy of which he does not dispute, which is to become the first country in the world, the richest and the most powerful, but added: will not produce during my presidency, because in the United States, it will continue to grow and expand ”. This is precisely what we aspire to with a new alliance of democracies in Asia (called The Quad, The Quartet), which, led by Washington, includes Australia, India and Japan, thus reproducing another cold war, this time on the western periphery of the Pacific.

Joe Biden: “It’s a battle between the usefulness of 21st century democracies and autocracies”

One indication of this situation arose on March 22, when a US spy plane approached China’s coastal defenses dangerously before retreating, something that had never happened before. For its part, China has also increased critical military flights near Japan and Taiwan. At the Pentagon, it seems that they start to forget the “war on terror” and they are preparing for a possible confrontation with China and Russia, from the Arctic to the China Sea.

It is true that China and the United States do not seek to confront each other militarily and that the two countries have as their primary objective the recovery and growth of their economy. But, in the spirit of the Cold War, both strive to show that they would be ready to go to all extremes so as not to be dominated by the rival. Wars do not always start on a preconceived plan and in history there are many instances in which a country was involved in a war it did not want. China, the United States and also Russia are involved in a dangerous game which can affect the whole world. Verbal provocations, military maneuvers in contested areas and bitter rivalry could lead to a situation as dire as the one that started the fateful World War I that no one wanted and found himself in a carnage rarely seen in history.

The South China Sea is located in the Southeast Asian region and borders southern China. In its waters there are more than 400 islands, reefs and sandbanks, and many archipelagos among which the Spratly and Paracel islands stand out. Now add the man-made islands and military bases that the People’s Republic of China has built over the past five years. The conflict for sovereignty began seventy years ago when, after World War II, the San Francisco Peace Accord of 1951 did not clearly define who the archipelagos correspond to. This omission laid the foundations for the development of successive clashes for the possession of the islands and the adjacent maritime space. There are currently six countries involved in the dispute: China, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei and Taiwan.

China bases its claims on all these waters on historical reasons such as expeditions to the Spratly Islands by the Han dynasty in 110 AD, and by the Ming dynasty between 1403-1433. The ROC government laid the groundwork for its claims when it protested against foreign intrusions on the islands and the French takeover in 1933 and Japanese in 1939, giving their claims legal backing. Since then, conflicts have erupted, such as that between Chinese and South Vietnamese forces in the Paracel Islands in 1974, the dispute between China and Vietnam in 1988, and the controversy that arose in 1995 over the construction of infrastructure by a part of the Chinese Government at Mischief Reef. This reef is located less than 200 nautical miles from the Philippines, and has been claimed by the latter since 1962. In any case, China has succeeded in claiming control over the disputed territories. Although Vietnam occupies 30 islands and reefs, Malaysia controls three and the Philippines occupies ten islands and reefs.

What is at stake in the dispute over the islands are the resources of the area: oil and fish stocks. The South China Sea is estimated to contain 7 billion barrels of oil reserves and approximately 900 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. But the most important is its strategic location. It is the second most important maritime trade route in the world by the flow of goods that cross it to the largest Asian economies. South Korea obtains 65% of world oil imports, Japan and Taiwan 60% and China 80% of its total supply. Thus, the control of the territory crossed by these routes is considered of national interest by the Chinese government and that its claim extends to 90% of the maritime territory.

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