The US Navy this week finally made good on its promise to challenge Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. By sending an American warship within 12 miles of an artificial island that China has constructed, Washington underscored that it does not recognise Chinese claims to territorial waters lying thousands of miles from its mainland. Beijing’s reaction to the voyage of the USS Lassen was shrill — accusing the US of acting illegally and urging it to refrain from further “dangerous” and “provocative” actions.
Any hint of military conflict between the two largest economies in the world, both of them nuclear-armed, needs to be taken seriously. Both sides have a responsibility to proceed with appropriate caution. But it is the US that seems to have international law and precedent on its side, in challenging the idea that the construction of artificial islands can create new territorial waters. By contrast, as it pushes its claims in the South China Sea through an island-building programme, rather than through the international legal system, Beijing is in danger of making a strategic mistake that could disrupt the peaceful trading environment that has been so crucial to its own rise.
True, some of America’s allies are worried that Washington is being needlessly provocative. One argument is that there is no evidence that China intends to use its maritime claims to disrupt freedom of navigation in the Pacific. Another is that, as an emerging superpower, China will naturally seek to establish a zone of influence in its immediate neighbourhood — and that resistance is pointless and dangerous.