openpolitics.com

It’s quite an impressive feat of engineering, but no one paid much attention until just a few months ago, and when they did it wasn’t the structures but their strategic significance that grabbed attention. The startling aerial photos of new military bases being created out of dredged sand conveyed, more concretely than anything else, the image of China’s power on the march.

This increased focus did not happen by accident. Since earlier this year Washington has mounted a deliberate campaign of drawing attention to what China has been doing in these waters. The aim has been specifically to stoke fears about China’s growing power, and encourage other governments to support the US in pushing back against it.

.. China’s strategy is based on the fact that because the US is an outside power its leadership in Asia depends on formal and informal alliances with countries in the region. Beijing appears to have decided that the best way to undermine US leadership is to weaken those alliances. By applying carefully graduated degrees of pressure to US-aligned countries like Japan and the Philippines over long-running territorial disputes, China is trying to show that the US is no longer willing to confront China on their behalf.

.. If a conflict flared today, the US would no longer score a rapid and decisive victory. It would most likely face either a costly and humiliating stalemate or a dangerous escalation towards a bigger conflict.

..  The simple facts of geography mean that primacy in Asia means more to China, so it is more willing to accept the costs and risks of confrontation. China assumes the US understands this. The problem is that American policymakers, even now, do not agree. They still think that if the US stands firm China will back off and go back to accepting US leadership in Asia.

.. Five months later, China launched the first of its direct challenges to US resolve in the East China and South China seas. It used armed ships to muscle the Philippines out of disputed waters around the Scarborough Shoal, which had traditionally been under Philippine control.

.. The island-building program is clearly intended as an intimidating display of China’s growing wealth and power, which is hardly likely to win it any friends. But that does not make it as plainly wrong as Washington would wish.

.. The reality is that the US can do nothing to stop China building islands or turning them into military bases unless it is willing to take the kind of decisive action that would most probably lead to a military clash, risking escalation to a wider war.

..  From one side he would be told that the US simply had no choice but to support Japan even if that meant war with China, because to do anything less would be to abandon US leadership in Asia.

.. The US seeks to remain the primary power in Asia, and China seeks to replace it.

.. They say that the US should accept that escalating strategic rivalry with China is inescapable, and should commit itself to do whatever it takes to confront and contain this new rival, just as it did with the Soviet Union, and hopefully with the same result.

.. The second group of new ideas heads in the opposite direction. A number of experts argue that Washington should try to avoid escalating rivalry with China, by sitting down with Beijing to negotiate agreements on the many issues of contention between them.

.. Channelling John Howard’s promise to Beijing 19 years ago, Abbott declared that our US alliance “is not directed against anyone”.