Leveraging U.S. Military Power in South China Sea
The South China Sea is the nexus of numerous disputes among China and its Southeast Asian neighbors, including Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan and Indonesia, and involving extra-regional powers like Japan and the United States. These range from territorial disputes over rocks and islands to conflicts over maritime rights to rich fishing grounds, vast hydrocarbon reserves, and critical global shipping routes. Most dangerous, however, is the degree to which these disputes have been imbued with the Great Power anxieties between the United States and China.
Mollifying Sino-U.S. competition is a precondition for progress on any of these disputes. The United States should leverage the prospect of new military balancing capabilities to establish an accommodation with China that forestalls additional and potentially destabilizing militarization in the South China Sea, helping solidify the territorial status quo as de facto dispute settlement. While imperfect, this is the most promising opportunity to ensure that competition between the United States, China, and other claimants does not escalate into military conflict.
For China, this accommodation means freezing the militarization of its island bases, especially in the Spratly Islands. China’s extraordinary island-building projects over the past four years give it the capacity to base significant over-lapping force projection capabilities: fighter jets, bombers, and batteries of air defense, anti-ship, and long-range strike missiles. But crucially, China has not deployed any of these force projection assets to its Spratly Island bases yet.
For the United States, this requires a pledge to keep capabilities it is developing to contain China’s power projection assets out of the Western Pacific, where China would feel compelled to counter them. Concepts like the U.S. Army’s Multi-Domain Battle and the U.S. Marine Corps’ Littoral Operations in Contested Environment and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations are designed to exert sea and air control from remote bases. Expeditionary missile batteries and sensors deployed to the islands and archipelagos of U.S. allies and partners in the Western Pacific could effectively contain the Chinese Navy and Air Force behind the First Island Chain, and potentially contribute to a blockade of air and seaborne commerce to and from China. As these concepts are still in development, the United States must prioritize turning them into deployable capabilities and thus a credible offer in return for China’s militarization freeze.
Understanding how such a resolution could be achieved requires recognizing the essential role that U.S. military presence has played in diplomatic progress in the South China Sea over the last twenty years. The U.S. presence in the South China Sea began expanding in the late 1990s after China seized Mischief Reeffrom the Philippines in 1995, and since then the region’s territorial disputes have largely frozen — settled for practical purposes if not legal ones.
Most critically, it was U.S. military presence that motivated China to participate in talks with the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) out of a desire to limit additional U.S. involvement in the region. However, further progress has been painfully slow. Negotiations over a binding Code of Conduct between China and ASEAN, which aims to prevent disputes amongst South China Sea claimants from boiling over into open conflict, is now the region’s longest-running diplomatic effort. The recent Sino-ASEAN endorsement of a framework for negotiations was little more than a restatement of a joint declaration from 2002.
