"How Much Risk Should The United States Run In The South China Sea?" - By CWP Alum Taylor Fravel
How strenuously, and at what risk, should the United States resist China's efforts to dominate the South China Sea? An identification of three options along a continuum—from increased resistance to China's assertive policies on one end to a partial South China Sea retrenchment on the other, with current U.S. policy in the middle—captures the choices facing the United States. An analysis of China's claims and behavior in the South China Sea and of the threat that China poses to U.S. interests concludes that the United States' best option is to maintain its current level of resistance to China's efforts to dominate the South China Sea. China has been cautious in pursuing its goals, which makes the risks of current policy acceptable. Because U.S. security interests are quite limited, a significantly firmer policy, which would generate an increased risk of a high-intensity war with China, is unwarranted. If future China's actions indicate its determination has significantly increased, the United State should, reluctantly, end its military resistance to Chinese pursuit of peacetime control of the South China Sea and adopt a policy of partial South China Sea retrenchment.
China's assertiveness in the South China Sea poses an especially vexing set of policy choices for the United States. For decades, the South China Sea disputes appeared to be limited to small islets, rocks, and reefs claimed by several countries. These small bits of land were a source of international concern because they fueled a number of limited conflicts, but they were themselves of little material value or strategic importance.
Now, however, China appears to want to control a vast body of water in a critical region of the world. Around 2008, China started adopting more assertive policies in the South China Sea. Since then, it has seized control of Scarborough Shoal, built artificial islands in the Spratly Islands and constructed large military bases on three of them, and rejected an international tribunal ruling that invalidated Chinese claims to historic rights within the “nine-dash line.” More recently, China has harassed and intimidated Vietnamese and Malaysian vessels within their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs). Taken together, China's actions suggest that it is intent on dominating the South China Sea.
M. Taylor Fravel, & Charles L. Glaser Author and Article Information International Security (2022) 47 (2): 88–134. https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00443
M. Taylor Fravel is the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Taylor studies international relations, with a focus on international security, China, and East Asia. His books include Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes, (Princeton University Press, 2008) and Active Defense: China's Military Strategy Since 1949 (Princeton University Press, 2019). His other publications have appeared in International Security, Foreign Affairs, Security Studies, International Studies Review, The China Quarterly, The Washington Quarterly, Journal of Strategic Studies, Armed Forces & Society, Current History, Asian Survey, Asian Security, China Leadership Monitor, and Contemporary Southeast Asia.
Taylor is a graduate of Middlebury College and Stanford University, where he received his PhD. He also has graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. In 2016, he was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation. Taylor has been a member of the board of directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and serves as the Principal Investigator for the Maritime Awareness Project.
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