RUTHFULLY YOURS

On September 16, Chinese and Philippine vessels collided near Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea.

At the same time, two Chinese Coast Guard ships blasted the BRP Datu Gumbay Paing, a Filipino fisheries ship, with water cannons for almost a half hour. The belligerent action resulted in “significant damage” to the boat and injuries to a Philippine sailor.

The incident occurred six days after China’s State Council announced it was including the shoal, which Manila calls Panatag and Beijing terms Huangyan Dao, in a “national nature reserve.” Both the Philippine and American governments announced their opposition to the Chinese action.

Forget Taiwan. Scarborough Shoal and nearby waters form the most dangerous hotspot in East Asia. China is looking to create a confrontation there.

Beijing claims as “blue national soil” all the shoals, reefs, islands, islets, and other features, as well as all the waters inside its infamous “cow’s tongue,” now defined by ten dashes on official maps. The tongue encloses about 85 percent of the South China Sea.

Scarborough is inside the cow’s tongue even though it is only 124 nautical miles from the main Philippine island of Luzon and about 550 nautical miles from China’s Hainan. As such, the shoal is well within Manila’s exclusive economic zone, the band of international water between 12 and 200 nautical miles from the shoreline where the coastal state has certain economic and other rights against others.

The Philippine claim to Scarborough Shoal is far stronger than China’s. In 2016, an international arbitration panel in The Hague, interpreting the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, invalidated Beijing’s assertion of sovereignty to the South China Sea in general and to Scarborough by implication. China, with virtually no legal support, has consistently maintained that the decision “is illegal, null, and void.”

Manila initiated the arbitration after China seized control of Scarborough in early 2012. Then, Philippine authorities had lawfully detained Chinese poachers, and China’s vessels immediately swarmed the area.

Washington quickly brokered an agreement for both sides to withdraw their craft, but only Manila complied. Beijing has been in firm control of Scarborough ever since. The Obama administration, while Vice President Joe Biden was in charge of foreign policy, did not oppose the audacious Chinese seizure.

“I’m pretty frank with people: I don’t think that we’d allow the U.S. to get dragged into a conflict over fish or over a rock,” a “senior U.S. military official,” speaking to the Washington Post on the condition of anonymity in 2012, said. “Having allies that we have defense treaties with, not allowing them to drag us into a situation over a rock dispute, is something I think we’re pretty all well-aligned on.”

This was not just a “rock dispute.” The shoal is especially strategic: It guards the mouths to both Manila and Subic bays.

Moreover, vital American interests were then, as now, at stake. “The South China Sea is the key waterway that allows American naval forces to transit to and from allied nations in northeast Asia, southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Australia,” James Fanell of the Geneva Center for Security Policy and co-author of Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure told Gatestone. “The lynchpin of control over that body of water today is Scarborough Shoal.”

When Chinese leaders and flag officers saw Washington’s failure to protect a treaty ally in 2012 at Scarborough, they began moving against Second Thomas Shoal and other Philippine reefs and islets in the South China Sea, went after Japan’s islets in the East China Sea, and began reclaiming and militarizing features in the Spratly chain. The Obama team unintentionally legitimized the worst elements in the Chinese political system by showing everybody else that aggression worked.

“The Obama administration’s decision to allow China to take possession of Scarborough from our treaty ally Philippines emboldened China’s Communist Party to take control of the entirety of the South China Sea,” Fanell, also a former U.S. Navy captain who served as director of Intelligence and Information Operations at the U.S. Pacific Fleet, told this site.

Scarborough is now a particularly dangerous spot. On August 11, a Chinese navy destroyer sliced off the bow of a Chinese Coast Guard cutter as both vessels were pursuing a far smaller Philippine Coast Guard boat near that shoal. At least four Chinese Coast Guardsmen lost their lives in the collision.

“The incident was a humiliation for China,” Charles Burton, former Canadian diplomat in Beijing and author of the just-released The Beaver and the Dragon: How China Out-Maneuvered Canada’s Diplomacy, Security, and Sovereignty, told Gatestone. “Beijing is looking for revenge, probably at Scarborough.”

At Scarborough, the Chinese feel they can pick on a weak state and get an easy and casualty-free win, something Xi Jinping may feel he needs at this moment. Taiwan, on the other hand, presents a much harder target.

The U.S. has remained reluctant to confront China in the West Philippine Sea, as Manila calls the contested waterway, yet there has already been a cost, as Fanell details.

“If the war in Ukraine has taught us anything, it is that confronting adversaries at the first point of conflict is important, otherwise the enemy will fill the vacuum,” he noted. “If the U.S. fails to defend our national interests at Scarborough today, we can be sure that America will be facing a violent People’s Liberation Army at Guam, Hawaii, or even our West Coast in the not-too-distant future. The cost of confrontation only goes up over time.”

Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.