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| Chinazi Is Trying to Be a Bad Neighbor, But the U.S. Won't Let It | |||
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Chinazi Is Trying to Be a Bad Neighbor, But the U.S. Won't Let It
Understanding the stand-off in the Spratly Sea.  Imagine you live in a large suburban pre-planned neighborhood. You know the type I am talking about, with a nice semi-grid layout of streets, not a whole lot of trees, and about 300 kids running around in every direction. The yards do not have fences, and the only time you even casually think about your exact property line is on lawn-mowing day. The backyards of you and your neighbors to the left and right and on the street behind you are, essentially, one gigantic collective so far as the kids are concerned. In the fall it is a football field marked by sweatshirts, in the spring a baseball diamond with tacked-down paper plates for bases. Then one day one of your neighbors erects a fence around his own yard. Fine, that is his right. But later he starts putting up some fence posts out into the middle of that open area, the ill-defined one where all the kids play. He puts signs on these posts, announcing his intention to enclose all of the ground included within the area of the posts, since he claims that each of these poles he put in the ground is now part of his property. He cites, as his rationale, that since his was the first house in the neighborhood, built before any of the others, that this is his "historical" backyard and all he is doing is re-asserting his traditional rights of ownership. That is pretty much what China has done in the South China Sea. Over the course of the past couple of decades, the Chinese decided that there were significant natural resources under those waters and set about staking their claim. The region, known as the Spratly Sea, is a nasty area for shipping and can be quite dangerous to transit due to the many islets, reefs, and rocks throughout the area. But it is a "common area," even if it has been claimed by five different nations including Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, China, and Taiwan.  China's technique has been to turn several of what were formerly submerged-at-all-but-low-tide areas into brand new islands. Dredging sand up from the bottom and essentially creating new land where there was none before, and then saying, "These islands, and ALL THE SURROUNDING AREA, are now part of our territory." This, of course, does not sit well with the rest of the world. Japan and Korea, for example, absolutely depend upon safe and clear transit through that region for almost all of their oil and a huge amount of their trade. But there is not a whole lot that the others in the region can do about it… It is not like Vietnam and the Philippines have major naval forces that can step in to at least slow down their massive neighbor's land grab. Enter America. You may have caught the news last week about how one of our ships, the destroyer USS Lassen, "passed within 12 miles" of one of these new Chinese "islands." The range is significant because 12 miles is the distance used when claiming the waters around your actual sovereign territory. The problem for the Chinese, of course, is that they are on the wrong side of the law. International treaties and law firmly establishes the fact that you are not allowed to claim "new" land as "sovereign." So the U.S. was doing what nobody else could: steaming through what everyone else on the planet agrees is international water, regardless of what the Chinese say. We did the same thing in the air three days ago. In a press conference at the Pentagon yesterday, the Department of Defense announced that a flight of two B-52s, flying out of Guam, flew in the general area of several of these Chinese-made islets. Not over them, mind you, and not even within 12 miles—just through the area. The purpose, in the air as it was on the surface of the sea, was to firmly establish the rights of international flight over international territory. This was not like what the Russians did a couple of weeks ago, buzzing one of our carriers well out to sea in an effort to make themselves look relevant. This was a flight to prove a principle. In other words, we took a walk through that common-backyard area, where all the neighbors agree the kids should be able to run free. The big guy, the unfriendly neighbor who put up the posts, was not happy. He stood in his backyard and harrumphed quite a lot. We walked between the posts and across the whole area, because we could. The question, of course, is how many times we can do that before the big grumpy neighbor starts putting nails in the grass or stringing some barbed wire out there. Hopefully, we are thinking about that now. Our other neighbors are depending upon us. As always I can be reached at R_Bateman_LTC@Hotmail.com Source: www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a39695/china-us-spratly-sea/ ----------------------------- | ||||||||||||||||
 Nov.14.2015 08:41 am
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