"I want to be very clear: The United States' defense commitment to the Philippines is ironclad," President Joe Biden declared on October 25 in his initial statement at his joint press conference with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. "Any attack on the Filipino aircraft, vessels, or armed forces will invoke our Mutual Defense Treaty with the Philippines."
Chinese vessels rammed two Philippine boats on October 22, at Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea. China claims the feature, which is in the Exclusive Economic Zone of the Philippines and is more than four times farther from China's Hainan Island than it is to the Philippine island of Palawan.
Beijing's claim to Second Thomas is without merit. For its part, the Philippines marked its claim to the shoal by grounding a World War II-era ship there, the Sierra Madre, and deploying marines onboard. Periodically, China interferes with Philippine resupply missions, as it did on Sunday.
The ramming incidents follow other hostile Chinese actions, such as the use of water cannons against Philippine resupply boats at Second Thomas in August and September. Biden's warning that he would oppose Chinese aggression comes not a moment too soon.
Beijing escalated its actions at the shoal after repeated State Department warnings that the United States was prepared to use force to stop Chinese aggression there and at the nearby Scarborough Shoal.
But America's deterrence of China is failing, and it's not hard to see why. Despite treaty obligations, the U.S. has failed to protect the Philippines at crucial times, most notably at Scarborough in 2012.
Beijing's infamous "cow's tongue," now defined by ten dashes on official maps, encloses about 85 percent of the South China Sea. China maintains that it has sovereignty over every feature inside the dashes as well as all of the enclosed waters. The Chinese proclaim all of those waters to be "blue national soil."
The Philippines detained Chinese poachers in early 2012 around Scarborough, and China's vessels then swarmed the feature, which is just 124 nautical miles from the main Philippine island of Luzon and about 550 nautical miles from China's Hainan.
In June of that year, Washington brokered an agreement for both sides to withdraw their craft, but only Manila complied, and Beijing has been in firm control ever since. Despite the audacious Chinese seizure, the Obama administration decided to let the matter drop. As a "senior U.S. military official" told the Washington Post at the time, "I don't think that we'd allow the U.S. to get dragged into a conflict over fish or over a rock."
Yet the failure to protect the Philippines had consequences. America empowered the most belligerent elements in the Chinese political system by showing everybody else in Beijing that aggression worked.
Within months of taking control of Scarborough, an emboldened China rapidly stepped up incursions around the Senkakus; continued pressure in the South China Sea, especially at Second Thomas Shoal; and began to reclaim features in the Spratly chain, in the southern portion of the South China Sea, turning them into military bases.
The Obama administration's foreign policy team was headed by then-Vice President Joe Biden, who failed to support our ally after the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague handed down a landmark decision in Philippines vs. China in July 2016. The decision invalidated Beijing's then nine-dash line and almost all of its claims.
The Philippines brought the action in 2013, shortly after the Chinese had seized Scarborough. Although then-Secretary of State John Kerry did say Beijing should accept the 2016 decision, he did not lean on China to do so. Instead, he said the United States would not take sides and pressured Manila to come to terms with China, backing the Beijing position on starting negotiations. Kerry, in short, failed to uphold the centuries-old American policy of defending the global commons.
America's weak posture led to a near-collapse of relations with Manila. An already anti-American politician, Rodrigo Duterte, became president in 2016 and, pointing to Washington's failure to act on Scarborough, tried to compromise his country's South China Sea claims. Fortunately, his successor, Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., has reasserted Philippine rights.
The Biden administration, through State Department warnings and the President's comments on the 25th, is trying to reestablish deterrence. The most dangerous moments in history are when countries attempt to do that.
Britain and France desperately tried to reestablish deterrence in late summer of 1939 when they warned Berlin that they would go to war if Germany invaded Poland. Then, German leaders did not believe the British and the French would in fact fight because they had failed to make good on previous warnings.
Now, the United States has only risky options to deter China in the South China Sea. "Once a country loses credibility and prestige, it must fall back on military force to achieve its aims," Gregory Copley, the president of the International Strategic Studies Association and editor-in-chief of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, told me this week. "The U.S. has lost both around the world."
It's apparent that Xi Jinping thinks that he can get away with provoking an incident at Second Thomas Shoal.
And now the world is at a pivotal moment after Biden's ringing declaration on defending the Philippines. If Beijing backs off, peace in the South China Sea is possible. If, however, China keeps pressing with belligerent tactics, it will be obvious that America can no longer deter China, a sign that there will be war in East Asia.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @GordonGChang.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Nikkei Editorial
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
visit website
