n full view of the international community, China is working overtime to expand its fortifications in the South China Sea. Vigorous protests by other littoral states around the disputed waters are not deterring, or even slowing down, China's relentless campaign to extend its southern sea border.
Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Taiwan and the Philippines have all loudly objected to China's action. Among them, the Philippines has the strongest legal basis. In 2016 it won a ruling from the UN Arbitral Tribunal on the Law of the Sea recognizing its 200-mile exclusive economic zone along the country's western seaboard.
Predictably, China does not honor the ruling. It had boycotted the Tribunal's proceedings as early as 2013.
There is no practical way to enforce the ruling. The Tribunal is the adjudicating arm of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), an international treaty to which China is not a signatory. None of the signatories, all liliputian states with no blue water navies, has the power to make China comply.
This revives an old debate on whether of not "international law" is true law. The essence of law is that all those subject to it surrender their right to a central power that can impose sanctions. This works well in a homogeneous society, where a citizenry submits to a central terror called the State. The principles of government are a direct application of the social contract theory.
But this mechanism runs into trouble when the subjects of law are themselves states, and the central authority nothing but a secretriat--all just particles of the states they represent. Then you have a "central authority" that is weaker than even the individual client states comprising its constituency.
In general, that is also the defect of the United Nations. Envisioned as a superbody that can whip belligerent states into line, in reality it is hostage to the whims and caprice of the powerful Security Council. This supergang of the world's superpowers, in turn, makes the General Assembly nothing but a noisy rubberstamp. The routinely notable achievement of the UN has been to bully the governments of small states when they threaten the interests of the world's superpowers. There is even a more cynical view that the UN body is but a venue for horsetrading among the superpowers, with the smaller states of the rest of the world being the medium of exchange.
We are no longer living in the age of maritime discovery. Every square inch of this planet has been mapped and claimed by the sovereignty of states. There are no more unclaimed territories anywhere. This makes discovery and occupation of frontierlands not just obsolete but non-existent modes of drawing territorial boundaries. At the same time, uniform technology has made many nations' armies practically equal in capability. Any marked difference in war capability between two militaries, is likely to be between neighboring states. Even a strong army in one hemisphere is not going to deploy forces to subjugate a weaker army in the other hemisphere. The few small wars raging in sporadic conflict theaters of the world today are notably wars of annexation--far from the colossal campaigns for colonization of the last century.
With international borders now set permanently all around the globe, wars for territory are a thing of the past. More than that, expansionism is no longer possible. Even with paramount force, a conquering state will not only have to contend with the defense put up by the state it is trying to engulf. It must also earn recognition of its prize from the international community which would predictably frown upon any unilateral action that threatens the peace among nations.
In 2019, US President Donald Trump broached the preposterous idea of the United States launching a bid to buy Greenland. The idea is eclipsed for its asinine achievement only by Trump's ensuing antic of cancelling a meeting with Denmark's prime minister who had politely derided the idea. More than the cerebral emptiness of Trump, what this showed was the utter impossibility today for a nation even as powerful as the United States to increase territory even by the transactional approach. Greenland is clearly unattainable because it is inhabited territory. You can buy land but not people, not in the post-Slave Trade dispensation.
More than anything, this is what emboldens China in its accelerated artificial island creation program in the South China Sea. After all, the controversial waters are already named after it, studding it with islands only seems par for the course. It is not displacing large human settlements--because there are none--the habitable islands that will eventually host living communities are precisely under construction.
This is significant in one other sense. Without people in these aborning original landmasses, there cannot be a dire alarm against China exporting communism, or any other ideology. This was the clarion call in the heels of the Chinese Cultural revolution from 1966 to 1976. The West obsessed with the fear of seeing fledgling southeast Asian states in China's frontyard fall to communism. First North Vietnam, North Korea and then their corresponding South counterparts--and eventually all neighboring countries around China would fall to communism like dominos.
This "Domino Theory" was all the justification the US needed to sponsor the Vietnam war, as hawks in the US Congress led by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy trafficked in anti-communism hysteria back home.
Arguably, political awareness as well as disorientation in the US today are as closely similar as they can be to what they were in 1966. The most engaging issues are the same: racial inequality, holocaust revisitations, deep partisan divisions and popular preoccupation with conspiracy theories. Donald Trump has even rediscovered the undying sellability of the socialist scare. Will these conditions guarantee that China's march to consolidate its "Nine Dash Line" extended boundary will meet counterbalancing check from the US a second time?
No. First of all, American foreign policy under Donald Trump is not propelled by ideology. The only idea he seems to espouse is self-survival and he is open to any practical philosophy that leverages his campaign to remain in the Whitehouse. Up to now, I still can't reconcile how he tries to scare Americans about the reinvasion of the American political landcape by socialism, while bragging at the same time that he and North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un are "in love."
Mostly, all that Trump is trying to show off is his ability to perform cheap stunts generally considered difficult to do--like posing for photo-ops with the reclusive leaders of hermit states, legendary Cold War spy kings like Vladimir Putin, or hyper-aloof Saudi royalty. There is no cohesive philosophy underlying his actions other than what would impress a global audience. His "America First" slogan is a poor attempt to redefine America's Manifest Destiny core principle by adding the dollar sign on either end of it. Whereas the American government and society once considered it the national mission to promote and defend democracy around the world, now it must do so mindful of the costs of such undertaking and avoiding it anytime the calculations show no tangible returns from its investment.
The South China Sea dispute is a perfect example. In the Trumpian philosophy, there is nothing to be gained from standing in the way of China asserting its dominance in the part of the world where it is unchallenged to begin with. Some misty-eyed US nationalists hearkening back to the age of Manifest Destiny might demand that China continue to respect "freedom of navigation" in the high seas. But China has the most to gain in promoting traffic through its blue waterways. Its export trade and importation of oil depend on transit through secure sea lanes. The only vessels fussing about "freedom of navigation" are US warships--en route to where? America has no more significant extraterritorial interests in Asia. Its aircraft carrier battle groups pursue missions that mostly involve sitting anchored in the midst of troubled waters to serve as relics of US military intimidation. Even in the unlikely event of a military conflict developing between US and China, China is more likely to lure floating US war materiel into the ambush zone rather than keeping them out of it.
Containing China's expansionism requires for a venue a war theater outside of Chinese sovereignty--like another Vietnam. Carpet-bombing Hanoi was meant to send the signal to communist China to stay out of Saigon. The existence of a proxy client-state is essential for hitting Chinese interest without hitting China itself. In the present dispute, America finds itself in the unfamiliar situation of being armed to the teeth with no enemy to attack. There is no Vietnam nearby.
Besides, it is not territorial expansionism but economic multilateralism led by China that presents the most serious existentialist threat to the US today. Tariff wars are the modern-day equivalent of military showdowns, economic sanctions the virtual expression of naval blockades. There will still be wars among states in the modern era, but these will be over mutual efforts to cripple one another's ability to carry out the lifeblood activities within their own economies.
Donald Trump tried his hand at playing "wartime President" with the war against COVID-19. He learned that as in any war, it is the soldiers who fight them who are hailed as heroes, not the presidents who command them. Frontliners and first responders became the toast of grateful celebrations by the American press. That robbed Donald Trump of media exposure, and he hated being relegated to the background.
Even if China were to construct an entire new continent in the South China Sea, Trump knows fighting a war over it is bad TV. He could barely manage the interminable wars in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan despite the fact that these conflicts strike a very effective panic chord in conservative America: the agenda to roll back Islamic extremism. A hawkish president can always beat the war drums to the staccato strokes of Islamophobia, but if he starts dropping bombs on Chinese zen Buddhists, peace icons of popular culture, his popularity rate would drop even faster than the bombs. Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon
NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:
Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON
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