Obama Wants to Challenge China in the Sea

In January 2009, after the investiture of President Obama, the most “Asian” of presidents ever known to the United States, many observers from Washington D.C.-based think-tanks predicted that the second decade of the twenty-first century would be dominated by a duopoly called “Chinamerica.” Based on a purely economic concept of worldwide power relations, this vision is disintegrating as we speak, hit by the geopolitical realities in Asia. For America, it is one thing to accept the growing economic and financial power of China — and therefore to recognize the G20 as the main forum for discussion of global issues, as well as to favor the developing role of China within the IMF — but it is an entirely different thing to let Beijing take over the political leadership in the Far East. In this region that pulls the world economy, the United States has strong allies. During the month of July, the Obama administration said in so many words that it had no intention of letting them down.

An old ally from the 1950s, South Korea, was, in March, the victim of a military act of provocation orchestrated by the Stalinist regime in place in North Korea, which is considered to be completely insane by China’s leadership but which they refrain from bringing back to reason, despite the considerable means of pressure they have at their disposal. As demonstrated by an international inquiry, Kim Jong-Il’s navy torpedoed, in international waters, a South Korean corvette, thereby killing 46 sailors.

At the beginning of July, the U.S. and South Korean navies held extensive joint naval exercises in the Sea of Japan (east of the Korean peninsula) in order to send a strong message to Pyongyang. The Pyongyang regime immediately cried out in protest, threatening the “imperialists” with nuclear retaliation — threats that the State Department received with poise and indifference. The protests coming from China were, of course, a lot milder but were taken more seriously by U.S. diplomacy.

Power Struggle

At the request of South Korean, anxious to tread carefully with Beijing, the naval exercise didn’t venture into the Yellow Sea, close to Chinese territorial waters. But the vehemence of China’s public declarations provoked a hardening in the attitude of the Pentagon. The United States Navy announced it would proceed “shortly” with a second naval exercise, this time in the international waters of the Yellow Sea.

Over the past few months, the Obama administration has built a sophisticated diplomacy with the aim of putting a stop to China’s hegemonic claims on the Southeast Asian seas through which 50 percent of the world’s maritime tonnage transits each year. It is out of the question for Washington to accept a new Chinese rhetoric of “core interest” in regards to these international waters. The Yellow Sea and the South China Sea are not Tibet!

The U.S. secretary of state insisted on personally attending the ASEAN countries’ forum on regional security that took place in Hanoi on July 23. In front of a Vietnamese delegation unable to hide its satisfaction, Hillary Clinton declared that no nation could claim a specific economic space in the South China Sea under the pretense of military controls of the inhabited coral atolls, the Spratly and Paracel Islands. In 1974, China ousted the South Vietnamese from Paracel. In 1988, it took over by force the archipelago of Spratly, sinking transport ships that had come in support of a Vietnamese landing operation. This miniature naval battle led to a three year cessation of diplomatic relations between the two “brotherly” communist governments of Southeast Asia. In addition to fishing rights in waters with rich fishing grounds, what is at stake here is oil, discovered by American geologists in 1968.

Angered by Hillary Clinton’s speech, Yang Jiechi, the Chinese Foreign Minister, left the forum for an hour. When he returned, he made a deafening speech accusing the United States of instigating an anti-Chinese plot, mocking Vietnam’s “socialism” and, staring directly at Singapore’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, declaring that “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.”

On Tuesday, the Deputy Director of the Information Office of the State Council, Dong Yunhu, declared to the Figaro Newspaper that Americans shouldn’t interfere with maritime conflicts in a region that doesn’t belong to them and to which they had in the past brought only warfare. All conflicts would be resolved with pacifism “between Asians.”

In the 1930s, the Japanese had already declared that the white man had no place in Asia, where they intended to raise, amongst indigenous people, a “sphere of common prosperity.” We know what that nice rhetoric led to…