OF ANY REGION surrounding China, the SCS is currently one of the most dangerous, with practically every single one of China's neighbors in that region experiencing outstanding maritime boundary disputes with Beijing of some type. This is a far cry from Washington's 19 December 1944 assessment in its CAC-301 study that these islands “will be of no vital interest, strategically or economically, to any single country or territory.” In fact, Washington does not really care which Southeast Asian nation controls the islands in the SCS, so long as trade, oil extraction, and navigation throughout the region is not negatively impacted.

During the past decade, numerous books have been published proclaiming China to be the world's newest superpower, destined to surpass the United States. But few of these books discuss the geographic limits to China's great power ambitions, in particular the thousands of islands off its shores that constrain its exercise of sea power. While not a near neighbor of China, and also not a member of ASEAN, the United States is a Pacific nation and so is highly interested in continued global commerce and freedom of navigation. Its primary goal would be to act as a maritime arbiter to help keep the peace in the SCS.

In July 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced at an ARF meeting in Hanoi that the United States would be “rebalancing” its military forces to Asia. Later, this policy became known as the “pivot to Asia.” In the past, the U.S. government has attempted to set itself up as a non-partisan arbiter in East Asia to help resolve outstanding problems between China and other Asian parties, such as Taiwan, but when it comes to the SCS Beijing has largely rejected U.S. efforts. As a result of these unresolved SCS disputes, the challenges facing the U.S. government, the U.S. military forces, and especially the U.S. Navy, are particularly complex, and could become even more so in the waters off China in the coming years.

THE STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE OF THE WATERS OFF CHINA

The division of China in 1949 was not as surprising as the dividing line along the Taiwan Strait. China's split largely fit within the framework of the Cold War, in which Germany was divided into a communist East and democratic West Germany, and both Korea and Vietnam were split into a communist North and a nominally democratic South.