Yet it offers little prospect of dissuading Beijing from pursuing its far-reaching territorial ambitions in one of the world’s most important waterways.
Advertisement
A US defense official told CNN that the destroyer USS Lassen “conducted a transit” within 12 nautical miles of Subi Reef in the Spratly Islands on Tuesday morning local time.
Additional patrols could follow in coming weeks, the official said.
A few US officials have said that the plan for patrols was aimed in part at testing Mr. Xi’s statement on militarization.
“The USA move, if carried out, will leave China no choice but to beef up its defense capabilities”, Xinhua wrote.
Refusing to acknowledge China’s sovereignty claims over artificially created islands in the area, the United States Navy (USN) will pierce into the twelve-nautical-mile radius of Beijing-occupied land features.
In May, a U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon surveillance aircraft flew near Fiery Cross Reef but stayed outside the 12-mile limit.
Washington has repeatedly said it does not recognize Chinese claims to territorial waters around the artificial islands. A recent editorial by the official Xinhua News Agency, suggested that the Chinese government might escalate its approach if the USA began sailing patrols near the islands. For the last three decades, those kinds of operations have been formally carried out under the Pentagon’s Freedom of Navigation program.
DELVE DEEPER: Have the US Navy’s super aircraft carriers already been sunk?
Within the Chinese military’s “environment of bravado”, the actions of rogue pilots can be hard to rein in, said Denny Roy, an expert on the Chinese military at the East-West Center in Hawaii. Unlike other maritime superpowers throughout history, from the Netherlands and Britain in early modernity to the United States today, China is treating adjacent waters as an extension of its continental territory, its national “blue soil.” Subi and Mischief are actually “low-tide elevations”, or features that are normally underwater and only appear at low tide.
And to the delight of its Asian allies, particularly the Philippines and Japan, the Obama administration is finally poised to draw a line in the sand, challenging China’s great wall of sand in one of the most vital Sea Lines of Communications (SLOCs) on earth.
United States warships have not entered the area since China began constructing the island bases in late 2013. “And there’s no exception to that, whether it’s the Arctic or the sea lanes that fuel worldwide commerce widely around the world, or the South China Sea”.
But US military officials said that the two maneuvers were not comparable, citing global maritime laws that allow passage such as the Chinese transit near Alaska if there was no other passageway for a ship to reach its destination.
China has utilised its coast guard in the area in an effort to underline the political message that it considers at least 80 per cent of the South China Sea to be its sovereign territory, subject to its domestic laws.
“This idea of what we call freedom of navigation operations is routine”. Beijing says the islands are for both military and nonmilitary use, including to house fishermen. The USA has long maintained that it is free to sail among the Spratly Islands. Similarly, in 1988, USA efforts to ensure freedom of navigation inside the Black Sea, not far from the Crimean Peninsula, led to a showdown with the Soviet navy, which rammed a pair of US vessels. China interrogated and detained the 24 crew members for more than a week, sparking the biggest crisis in bilateral relations in more than a decade.
Advertisement
The Chinese Embassy in Washington, responding to the naval movement, said the concept of freedom of navigation should not be used as excuse for muscle-flexing. Under such circumstances, the patrol carries with it a risk of aggravating tensions between the two countries.
