IN 2009, approximately half of the world's 259 unresolved boundary disputes (out of 427 total) involved disputed islands. China has tense relations in the SCS with each maritime nation in the region, serious enough to be compared to the “ongoing tensions between Israel and Palestine.” At one point in May 2013, the Philippine Secretary of Defense even warned China that the Philippines will ‘‘fight for what is ours up to the last soldier standing.” Many battles in the SCS have already been fought over apparently insignificant reefs, rocks, and small islands. Relevant strategic lessons can be learned by examining the type and intensity of China's maritime conflicts with its neighbors, successful and unsuccessful efforts to delimit official borders, and possible areas where future maritime disputes might arise (see Map 14 below).

The most important question in the Spratly islands dispute concerns China's future strategy: Will China choose conflict or compromise? The determining factor is likely to be China's pragmatic calculation of the risks and gains involved in a military show-down with Vietnam, the Philippines, and other smaller Southeast Asian states over the SCS. Should war erupt, all of East Asia could well be impacted, since “close to 70% of South Korea's energy imports, approximately three-fifths of Japan's and Taiwan's oil shipments, and nearly four-fifths of China's energy supplies are brought from the Indian Ocean into the Straits of Malacca and pass directly to the South China Sea.”

The U.S. government, and in particular the U.S. Navy, has an important role in helping to resolve these outstanding problems, as it pivots to Asia. The U.S. government must be ready for China to choose among four alternative strategies discussed below: 1) an indirect strategy; 2) an unilateral maritime strategy; 3) a bilateral strategy; and 4) a multilateral strategy. Possible courses of action will be developed for each of these alternatives.

THE SCS VALUE AS A SLOG

Without a doubt, the SCS's greatest value is as an economic highway. Approximately 6% of the world's entire wealth, a quarter of its total trade, and almost a third of U.S. trade, relies on keeping this SLOG open and safe for commercial shipping. The Gross World Product in 2012 was estimated at almost $72 trillion, and a quarter of this is in goods and services, which hit an estimated world trade of almost $18 trillion in 2013.