The US Navy announced Tuesday that the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group has entered the South China Sea for “routine operations” amid a standoff between Chinese maritime militias and the Philippines. China’s provocation comes as Russia has ramped up its forces near Ukraine. The Biden administration may be getting an early test as to whether its model of liberal multilateralism can deter revisionist forces pushing against American interests.
The Philippines began raising the alarm last month about Chinese militia boats, at one point totaling 220, occupying the Whitsun Reef west of the archipelago. The naval equivalent of Russia’s “ little green men, ” China’s military-affiliated flotillas, can masquerade as fishing fleets to give Beijing plausible denial while entrenched in disputed waters.
An analysis by two investigators at the US Naval War College last week found “no evidence of fishing in these laser-focused operations, but any indication of trolling for territorial claims.”
For more than a decade, China has been aggressively committed to establishing dominance in the waters around the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and Taiwan, building military installations and harassing other countries’ commercial ships. In 2016, an international court said China was breaking the law in the South China Sea. The Trump administration last summer sanctioned companies involved in the construction of illegal islands there.
China appeared to be slowing its military build-up in the islands, but it can now resume. It appears determined to dominate the waterways of Southeast Asia, which, among other things, would put it in a stronger position to invade Taiwan. To slow or reverse the process, coordination is needed with “the Quad” – Japan, Australia and India – as well as with Southeast Asian countries whose sovereignty is directly violated by the raids. Vietnam was one of the most outspoken Southeast Asian countries to denounce China’s maritime adventurism.