Assistant
Secretary of State Danny Russel spoke at the CSIS South China Sea Conference on
July 21, 2015. He made news by declaring that the United States is not
neutral in some issues pertaining to the South China Sea.
The
money quote came in reply to a question from Wu Shicun, the PRC representative
at the conference:
On the
first issue of neutrality, I appreciate the opportunity to clear up what seems
to be an almost ineradicable perception of the Chinese. We are not neutral
when it comes to adherence to international law. We will come down forcefully on the side of the rules.
Cue the triumphant hooting from the China hawks, who were well
represented at the conference and urging the United States to “draw a line in
the sea”. And squealing from the PRC that the United States had abandoned
its “honest broker” stance, which dated back to the Potsdam Declaration and
presented US military force in Asia as the only viable peacekeeping alternative
to Japanese re-militarization.
Although the tottering “honest broker” zombie took another hit at the
hands of Assistant Secretary Russel, it had been staggering to its grave ever
since President Obama and Hillary Clinton opted for “PRC rollback” after the
strategic drift and distraction of the George W. Bush years, and received its
death blow as the US and Shinzo Abe repositioned Japan’s military away from
self-defense and toward a power projection role in Asia as America’s ally.
The US FP commentariat is optimistic that the Philippine arbitration
case against the Nine Dash Line will succeed, the PRC’s outsized claims in the
SCS will be declared illegal, and the 200 nautical mile EEZs of the various
claimants will govern who can fish and drill where. Shedding the 9DL
incubus is of particular importance to the Philippines, since exploitation of
the Reed (Recto) Bank gas field inside the claimed Philippine EEZ (and inside
the 9DL) is seen as a matter of near-existential economic and fiscal
importance.
UNCLOS has no enforcement mechanism. So if the PRC tries to
obstruct Philippine operations at Reed Bank and the Philippines lacks the
military muscle to protect its rigs and vessels, somebody’s got to step up.
That somebody, Russel indicated, is the United States. China hawks
hope this means something like interposing US naval vessels to block whatever
ships the PRC sends to Reed Bank make trouble.
However, the US enthusiasm for playing enforcer on behalf of a treaty it
didn’t even ratify (UNCLOS) for the sake of a second-tier ally (the Philippines)
against Asia’s dominant power (PRC) probably has less to do with international
law, justice, and fairness that it does with the US determination to maintain a
major presence in the South China Sea in order to detect, track, neutralize,
and, as needed, destroy the nascent local PRC strategic nuclear sub presence.
The PRC already operated a strategic nuclear submarine base near Qingdao
at Jianggezhuang. It built a bigger and better one — in that it would be
able to handle newer, bigger, subs that presumably could eventually be armed
with missiles capable of striking the US mainland from afar—on Hainan Island
near Yulin.
The US has devoted considerable military and diplomatic effort to
improving its capabilities to monitor current and potential submarine
operations out of Yulin. For good reason.
The South China Sea is an interesting and problematic arena for
anti-submarine operations because of its complex topography. Therefore I
must, in the most deferential manner, question Howard French’s recent statement
in the Guardian that PRC island building at Fiery Cross Reef is scary
“because of the depths of its surrounding waters, which afford Chinese
submarines far greater stealth in evading acoustic and other forms of active
tracking by the US military.”
If the Federation of American Scientists’ report
is correct, the situation is pretty much the opposite:
Of course, if the water is so shallow the submarine can’t submerge fully
it will limit operations, but deep water is – contrary to popular perception –
not necessarily an advantage. Military submarines generally are not designed to
dive deeper than 400-600 meters, so great ocean depth may be of little value.
The U.S. navy has several decades of experience in trailing Soviet SSBNs in the
open oceans; shallow waters are much more challenging. And the South China Sea
is a busy area for U.S. attack submarines, which have unconstrained access to
the waters off Hainan Island.
So there you have it, folks. A dodgy neighborhood with lots of
hidey-holes and shallow waters and thermal layers that complicate the sonar
ping-ping and depth-charge bang-bang and also, potentially, offering “home
court advantage” to the PRC as it develops island bases to enhance and extend
its own search (and, in case of war, destroy) operations—intensive mapping and
monitoring, maritime sweeps, surveillance flights, buoy drops, big, permanent,
passive arrays, what have you—throughout the SCS against US attack submarines
attempting to track down the PRC “boomers”.
So maybe the PRC—which presumably picked up a few tips from ex-Soviet
submariners—decided to put its new base in Hainan for a good reason.
In the current atmosphere of antagonism, concern that PRC
island-building activity will hobble US ASW measures becomes a critical
geostrategic issue.
However, the “strategic anxiety” knife cuts both ways.
If, as I think is pretty clearly the case, the PRC sees the US interest
in the SCS as not only mischievous and downright hostile to the PRC, but also a
key element in its full-spectrum effort to neutralize the PRC’s sea-based
nuclear deterrent, the PRC will happily accept heightened local tensions as a
cost of its national security business.
In a case of exquisite and almost perfect symbolism, Assistant Secretary
Russel misunderstood, either inadvertently or by design, the key question for
the PRC in the South China Sea, at least from the military security point of
view: would the US try to stop the PRC island buildout, an activity which
bolsters the PRC’s ASW capability and which, it is absolutely clear — at least
to people who listened to the question — the PRC has no intention of stopping?
Wu Shicun: As I know China won’t, you know, stop construction work in
those island … reclaimend [sic]islands …What would be US actions if China won’t
follow US requirement as you just mentioned to stop construction works…and does
US State Department share the same status in this regard with the Pentagon?
Russel: You raise a very important second question. Which is, what
if China agreed that in the interests of regional stability and harmony it
would enter into a reciprocal freeze, a moratorium where neither China nor
Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, any claimant undertook large-scale
construction, upgrades, or certainly militarization. What would our
reaction be, what would we do?
I can think of few other steps that China could take that would do more
to create a conducive…an atmosphere in the United States conducive to progress
in the US-China relationships. I think the concerns generated by the
tensions and the disputes and the behavior in the South China Sea have raised
real concerns and real questions in the minds of so many American
citizens. These are questions that would be answered in a very reassuring
and persuasive way if China in this sensitive area of the South China Sea
exercised the forbearance, the generosity of spirit and the good strategic
judgment, show restraint and created the space for and time both for a code of
conduct that I think we all would like to see completed before the end of this
year and a process that would lead to the end of the underlying disputes.
Consider Professor Wu’s question unanswered. Or maybe not.
With the United States and its allies promising a military envelopment
of the South China Sea, I don’t think the PRC is going to take Russel’s unctuous
suggestion of a freeze seriously as a US negotiating point. More likely,
Russel’s dodging the island-building ultimatum question indicates to the PRC
that, no, the United States is not currently prepared to wipe these islands off
the map, yes, the PRC can keep building, and the military cat-and-mouse in the
South China Sea will continue indefinitely.
In fact, a scenario that hasn’t received a lot of airing anywhere as far
as I can tell is the possibility that the PRC, on the grounds of its national
security interest, will withdraw from UNCLOS if the arbitration doesn’t go its
way. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the withdrawal threat has been
discretely brandished before the arbitrators, to encourage them to think twice
about the consequences to the universality and validity of the UNCLOS regime
itself if they are too eager to claim jurisdiction and get into China’s grill.
In that case, the US would be placed in the somewhat difficult position
of excoriating the PRC for exercising a cherished US prerogative: opting out of
inconvenient international obligations, not just UNCLOS, which it signed but
never ratified, but also the International Criminal Court, which it signed,
ratified, and then withdrew from under President G.W. Bush.
Based on precedent, the PRC might be loath to formally withdraw from the
treaty and flirt with the international pariah status it occupied from 1949
until the 1970s; but I think it’s quite likely that, even if the PRC stays in
UNCLOS, it will be increasingly inclined to honor the treaty’s obligations “in
the breach” and assert the right to interpret its spirit as it sees fit.
Just like the US does.
Which means, perhaps, that the PRC will declare that Japan’s dramatic
island building and EEZ grab at Okinotorishima is
more of a guiding precedent for Chinese claims for Fiery Cross than whatever
the handwringers at the UNCLOS arbitration panel seek to impose.
And if the United States proves especially sedulous in supporting the
Philippines’ efforts to drill at Reed Bank without PRC buy-in and
participation, expect the PRC island campaign—and the headaches for US
anti-submarine-warfare strategy—to increase.
Peter Lee runs the China Matters blog. He writes on the intersection of US policy
with Asian and world affairs.
No comments:
Post a Comment