Introduction

Asia is in transition like no other continent on Earth. Home to China (perceived as the next challenger to American hegemony) and rising powers from India to Indonesia, it hosts some of the world's fastest-growing economies, as well as its largest population of young people, with almost two out of every three people between 15–24 years of age living in Asia.1 Furthermore, this continent has the greatest numbers of men under arms and an increasing share of the world's defence spending. As the global balance of power shifts eastwards, so too does the centre of gravity of the world's security and prosperity challenges.2 And at the heart of this new centre in the east is the sea.

The influence of sea power on history has long been studied, not least by the nineteenth-century naval professor and geostrategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, who emphasised the importance of sea power on the long-term success of a country's international relations.3 More recently, maritime history professor Geoffrey Till has suggested four key and interdependent attributes of sea power: the sea as a medium for trade; the sea as a resource, in terms of what lies within, as well as underneath, its waters; the sea as a medium for informational and cultural exchange; and finally, but perhaps most importantly, the sea as a medium for dominion.4 The South China Sea, which lies at the nexus of Southeast and Northeast Asia – at the meeting point of global sea routes – and offers the shortest route between the Indian and the Western Pacific Oceans, exemplifies all of these attributes.

This sea carries more than half of the world's annual merchant-fleet tonnage and a third of all maritime traffic.5 A growing dynamic of intra-regional as well as inter-regional trade ensures a regular flow of raw materials and commodities across its waters, enveloping both Southeast and Northeast Asia in concerns over sea lines of communications (SLOCs) within these waters. In total, around US$5.3trillion in trade flows through the region around the South China Sea each year, with one-fifth of this being US commerce.6 A vital part of this maritime traffic is the passage of hydrocarbons to a resourcehungry east. Around 80% of China's crude-oil imports, about 66% of South Korea's energy supplies and nearly 60% of Japan's and Taiwan's arrive via this sea.7 Whilst the Middle East continues to be the main supplier of these resources, an increasing percentage is also arriving from Africa, thereby further expanding the web of parties with a stake in maritime security in the South China Sea.

Rapid industrialisation, changing dietary requirements (in the form of increased demand for fish), and impressive year-on-year growth rates have all played their part in boosting maritime trade and merchant shipping within the region. There has been growing demand for dry-bulk goods, such as grains, as well as for break-bulk goods, such as iron ore for construction. Some of the world's biggest and busiest container ports, from Singapore to Hong Kong, are located around this sea, as several countries in the region have emerged as leading maritime nations with growing merchant fleets and world class ports.8

Within the South China Sea lie hundreds of small islands, atolls, rocks and reefs, only a small proportion of which are above water at high tide and which collectively form the focus for an intricate series of overlapping sovereignty disputes.9 Indeed, even the different names used within the region for the sea itself, and the respective features therein, offer a repeated reminder of the complexity of these disputes. Although, for practical reasons, only the internationally recognised terminology for the South China Sea and its islands and groupings are used in this book, disagreements on these terminologies should at least be noted. For example, the South China Sea is known in China as the South Sea, but in Vietnam as the East Sea and in the Philippines as the West Philippine Sea.

Disputes and disagreements: from regional to global

Amongst this plethora of features scattered throughout the sea are four island groupings claimed, to varying extents, by six separate claimants as follows:

•	the Paracel Islands in the northwest, occupied by China, but claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan;
•	the Pratas Islands in the northeast, occupied by Taiwan, but claimed by China;
•	the Spratly Islands in the southeast, occupied in part by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines, but claimed in their entirety by China, Taiwan and Vietnam and in part by Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei;
•	Macclesfield Bank/Scarborough Reef in the central and east-central sea, unoccupied, but both Macclesfield Bank and Scarborough Reef are claimed by China and Taiwan, whilst Scarborough Reef is also claimed by the Philippines.

As the next chapter explains, these claims – where they are clarified and expounded – are often grounded in a confusing, inconsistent, yet ruthlessly pragmatic mixture of international law and historic rights.

Alongside these overlapping territorial disputes concerning small patches of land runs a related dispute over the maritime boundaries generated by these assorted features under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).10 The intersecting nature of claims to sovereignty over land in the South China Sea have inevitably given rise to substantive conflicts also over maritime claims to Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs). Under UNCLOS, different features generate dramatically different maritime zones, depending on whether they are defined as islands or something less substantial, such as rocks or low-tide elevations. Yet the precise classifications of the multitude of features sprawling across this sea are yet to be determined. Moreover, the prescription of maritime boundaries is further complicated by disputes over the drawing of baselines from which these maritime zones are then measured. This is ordinarily done from the low-water line along the coast, but, under UNCLOS, states can apply straight baselines where the coast is deeply indented or has a fringe of islands. They can also make applications for the recognition of an extended continental shelf, which then expands a state's resource rights from the standard 200 nautical miles from its baseline for sea and subsoil rights to up to 350 nautical miles from its baseline for subsoil rights alone. These straight baselines, as well as applications for extended continental shelves, are the subject of further contestation and controversy.

Finally, separate from the dispute between the six claimants on territorial sovereignty and maritime rights comes the debate – fronted by the US and China in the context of the South China Sea, but of relevance to a far broader audience – on what activities are permitted by one nation under the ‘freedom of navigation’ guarantee of UNCLOS within the EEZ of another nation. In particular, the focus is on what military activities, if any, can legally be carried out by one nation within the EEZ of another. The US has led the way in arguing that UNCLOS Article 58 allows states to enjoy unqualified freedom of navigation and overflight within an EEZ, including the right to conduct military activities such as surveillance and reconnaissance. China's interpretation, however, seems to be less liberal. It argues that such military activities are precluded without prior permission from the state to which the EEZ belongs, pointing to UNCLOS's requirement for ‘due regard’ to be paid to the rights of the state to whom the EEZ belongs.11 So when, in March 2009, China responded forcefully to the USNS Impeccable's trawling of an acoustic device, known as a towed-array sonar, within China's EEZ, it became the public face of a longer-running dispute over what was, or was not, legal activity within an EEZ. At least from China's perspective, the freedom to spy from the sea within another country's EEZ is not enshrined in international maritime law.

This Impeccable incident (explained in more detail in the next chapter) marked something of a turning point in the attention paid to the evolving security dynamics of the South China Sea in general, and to its sovereignty disputes in particular. Prior to this incident, in recent years the subject had been more the domain of the dedicated regional specialist than the global security generalist. Although rival claims over the disputed islands had escalated into armed conflict and spilt blood in the past, much of the decade prior to the Impeccable incident had been largely characterised by stagnation in terms of dispute prosecution. Indeed, the last significant military clash in the South China Sea took place in 1988, between Chinese and Vietnamese naval forces at Johnson Reef. But following the launch of China's charm offensive in Southeast Asia – which really began to pay dividends with China's 1997 decision not to devalue the yuan during the Asian financial crisis – regional dynamics improved remarkably. The signing in 2002 of a Declaration of Conduct in the South China Sea (DoC) between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), aimed at the responsible management of conflicting sovereignty disputes within the sea, reflected as much as dictated these more positive dynamics. And whilst it may soon have become clear that the DoC was failing to deliver and that the rhetoric of cooperation did not match the reality of competition, these disputes still continued to attract relatively little attention from beyond the immediate region. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq helped ensure that the focus of international attention lay elsewhere. When Southeast Asian officials murmured quietly, but repeatedly, to their Western counterparts about their concerns over the consequences of the perceived neglect of the region, the South China Sea was never far from their thoughts.

Yet as the decade wore on, the rapid progress of China's military modernisation became more apparent whilst the ultimate intentions behind the development of these capabilities became no less opaque. Longer-standing concerns over the impact of China's rise on the balance of power and regional order in East and Southeast Asia were brought more sharply into focus, both in the region and beyond. One reflection of these underlying concerns, and a factor that this book will go on to explore in more detail, has been the increasing militarisation of the South China Sea. For example, since the mid-2000s, China has built a major naval base on Hainan Island that is also likely to serve as a base, or at least key logistics node, for its future aircraft carrier(s) and as host for its most modern nuclearpowered attack and ballistic-missile submarines. Meanwhile, the harassment of US military vessels and US energy companies operating within the sea also helped ensure the return of the disputes to the global stage. And whilst economic indicators reveal a more integrated region than ever before, there has been a noticeable failure in the development of any parallel and similarly paced improvement in security relations. Indeed, if anything, the economic exposure of smaller and mediumsized powers in the region to the might of Chinese markets has only served to exacerbate feelings of insecurity about relations with their giant cousin.

Beijing sets the tone

With 14 neighbours on land, eight at sea and the forwarddeployed presence of the US to negotiate, China's regional environment is nothing if not complex. Meanwhile, with approximately half of China's total shoreline running adjacent to the South China Sea, the political, military, economic and resource interests of both Beijing and its relevant coastal provinces in this sea are both logical and well founded. For its part, China has long protested that its economic rise need not be accompanied by a parallel impact on the political order. It has, observers are repeatedly told, no hegemonic ambitions. Nevertheless, as China's economic interests have expanded so, inevitably, have its national interests and its global reach. Within the region, China is simply becoming too much of a presence not to be having an impact on the evolving political and security order. With its increased influence, Beijing appears to have grown more confident in both its ability and desire to be the protector of its own security interests. As President Hu Jintao opened the 18th Party Congress in November 2012, he argued for China's development ‘into a maritime power’, which would be ‘resolute’ in its safeguarding of China's maritime rights and interests.12

It is, therefore, to China that this book deliberately first turns in analysing the management the South China Sea disputes and their impact on the emerging regional order. It does so with the argument that, as the militarily and economically most capable of the claimant powers, Beijing bears something of a burden of responsibility in setting the tone and nature of dispute management in the South China Sea, and so, also, the balance between cooperation and competition in the region more generally.

Yet there are other dynamics at work in the South China Sea beyond the complicated geography of China's rise. In more general terms, the impact of globalisation and the shift in the relative balance of power that is resulting from the region's changing geoeconomics, coupled with the insecurity these changes are causing, would, in any case, be helping to force these disputes on to the international agenda.

Perhaps understandably, Beijing has little desire to see the South China Sea disputes take geopolitical centrestage. Its diverse interests are better met through a quieter regional programme of bilateral diplomacy. So, while the US Quadrennial Defence Review of February 2010 reminded readers of US national-security interests in freedom of navigation within the global commons, referring to this sea as the ‘connective tissue of the international system’,13 and Indian Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna cited the particular strategic and economic significance of the South China Sea as rendering it ‘the property of the world’, China has steadfastly objected to the attentions of ‘outside’ powers.14 As one commentary in the Communist Party's Global Times responded to Krishna's comments: ‘other countries can't denote one country's territory as global property’.15 Yet Beijing's conservative attempts to push back against the realities of today's international interests and strategic concerns in the South China Sea are proving at best unproductive and, ultimately, as this book argues, even counterproductive. Whether Beijing likes it or not, the challenges posed by the management of security issues in the South China Sea have, to take a Chinese phrase, ‘gone global’.16

Southeast Asian states matter too

Yet as these disputes have gone global, so too often have Southeast Asian nations found themselves treated as the field for this new-found geopolitical competition surrounding the South China Sea, rather than players in their own right, with the capabilities and policies to impact actively on the evolution of these concerns. This is perhaps in part because a lot of the recent literature on the South China Sea has been in the form of op-eds, or perhaps only paper length. Meanwhile, more detailed studies concerned with the strategic implications of the South China Sea disputes have tended to approach the question from a US perspective – considering what US interests are at stake and what US policies should be followed.17 This book is aimed, in part, at addressing this gap.

Despite the limitations of ASEAN (from which this book does not shy away), Southeast Asian nations have the potential to be, and in some cases already are, active catalysts, rather than passive recipients, of US–China security dynamics in the crucible of the South China Sea. They are the ones who will need to find imaginative ways to hold the door open for US security engagement in the region whilst they simultaneously look to strengthen their economic engagement with China and to hedge against a possible diminution of US influence in Asia with a cautious and, for the moment, largely symbolic security dialogue of their own with China.

Meanwhile, the ability of the region to develop its own effective regional security architecture and to manage the disputes in the South China Sea will be closely interlinked for some time to come. Success in one will feed into, and play off, success in the other. Alternatively, failure in one will have ominous consequences for the other. At present, Southeast Asia has a host of overlapping regional security organisations and, at least in theory therefore, a host of forums in which to discuss the South China Sea disputes. There is, for example, the broadbased membership of the ASEAN Regional Forum, which has traditionally taken the lead on maritime security issues. There is also the slightly more selective 18–member East Asia Summit (EAS), where the US in particular has been pushing for greater discussion of the South China Sea. Then there is ASEAN itself, which has traditionally been somewhat more hesitant in risking debate, and therefore disagreement, on the question of the disputes. Whilst some iterations of some of these institutions have been making some progress in taking a more active role in dispute management in recent years, as this book makes clear, their record to date is modest at best.

However, the advantages for the region in finding a way to lead in the brokering of these disputes, as opposed to simply following the dynamics set by others, are clear. Ultimately the smaller and medium-sized powers of Southeast Asia have a great deal to lose from a breakdown in US–China relations that would force them to choose between a US-centric model and a China-centric model for the region. Interestingly though, such countries could also fear losing out from a US–China condominium, which, in a G2 world in Asia at least, would carve out respective spheres of influence with minimal input from the smaller and mediumsized powers affected. Such a deal would likely involve tacit acknowledgement of the South China Sea as China's sphere of influence in return for Chinese restraint leading into the Western Pacific. As this book will go on to explore, managing the balance between these two polar alternatives can occasionally lead to elements of schizophrenia in Southeast Asian approaches to third-party engagement in the South China Sea.

The US as monitor and arbiter

Naturally, as a ‘resident power’ in the Asia-Pacific, the US has also been paying close attention to these disputes.18 Yet, its strategic room for manoeuvre in the South China Sea flows to a large extent from the landscape as defined by both China and Southeast Asia. The US needs close and cooperative partners in Southeast Asia, who remain supportive and interested in sustaining the US's leading role in the region and who stand ready to do more where necessary and possible, in particular in the light of obvious US budgetary constraints. Local attitudes to such requirements will inevitably evolve, informed, at least in part, by Chinese actions and activities in the region. US diplomacy will need to recognise that Washington's role as the primary provider of maritime public security goods in the region needs Southeast Asian approval, and so diplomacy will need to work hard at shaping and managing, with subtlety, perceptions that Southeast Asian states ‘need’ US support. Meanwhile, as frustrating as the US might find ongoing questioning of its long-term commitment to the region in the face of repeated rhetorical assurances to this effect, it will have to show consistency in matching actions with words. It should, for example, continue to ‘show up’ even as and when the agenda looks light on substance, settling for influence through engagement rather than through calculated distance.

The South China Sea will have a central role to play in the three-way probing of intent and ambition between China, the US and Southeast Asia within the context of an emerging regional order. Yet the stage management for dispute handling is becoming more rather than less complicated. There are simply more messages to send. The US, for its part, seeks to reassure China that it's Asia ‘pivot’ is not all about China, and that its re-energised engagement in the region is fully compatible with the rise of China. Alongside this, it seeks to remind China that its actions in the South China Sea remain under scrutiny and that its rise cannot come at the expense of the US position in the region. Meanwhile, the US looks to reassure partners in Southeast Asia that it remains a reliable partner, committed for the long term. But it also has to guard against any danger that US partners in the region – for example its treaty ally, the Philippines – could feel emboldened by US support to the point that they would countenance a reckless and unnecessary provocation.

Prospects and implications

As agendas surrounding the South China Sea become more crowded, so the prospects for dispute resolution continue to look bleak. The problems are too complex; the stakes are too high. There are too many overlapping claims by too many rival claimants of too many small maritime features, all within a sea that is host to useful reserves of untapped resources and is understood to be of particular geopolitical significance.

Although there are neutral forums to which mutually consenting parties can take their territorial and maritime disputes, the geopolitical implications of these disputes make international legal processes unlikely to be their ultimate determinant. It is, in practice, improbable that claimants will mutually agree to pass off decisions of such perceived significance to external arbitration. The attempt by the Philippines in January 2013 to refer China to an arbitral tribunal over the status of Scarborough Reef seems doomed to fail in legal terms (if not, importantly, in diplomatic terms too) as, when China ratified UNCLOS, it chose to opt out of Article 298 which provides for compulsory dispute settlement under the treaty.19 In this regard, China's actions are no more ‘assertive’ than others, including Russia, France, Canada and South Korea, who have chosen to do likewise. Indeed, should the US ever follow suit with its own ratification of UNCLOS, it is highly likely that it too would take the same opt-out. Whilst the key legal aspects of these disputes are therefore explained in the next chapter and expounded further in Appendix 1, this book is deliberately not a legal treatise, focused on what should be the case in the South China Sea, but rather a political examination of what is going on and what the implications of these activities and tensions could be. Due respect is therefore paid to the fundamental centrality of international law in dispute management and resolution, but recognition is also given to the broader realities of the geopolitical and geoeconomic context within which this dispute management is situated.

Indeed, with little prospect of an ultimate resolution in sight, it looks likely that the process of dispute management will matter almost as much as the eventual outcome. How China handles these disputes with its militarily and economically more vulnerable neighbours will offer potential clues as to what sort of regional power it is intent on becoming. For example, some have argued that the South China Sea will become for China in the twenty-first century what the Greater Caribbean was for an emerging US in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. In other words, ascendancy in the South China Sea could become the key for eventual Chinese dominance within the Eastern Hemisphere in a way that American ascendancy in the Caribbean Basin provided the foothold for turn-of-the-century American dominance over the Western Hemisphere. As Chinese military modernisation advances, and the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) in particular is seen as preparing to challenge the status quo in maritime Asia, how will China handle the understandable concern this is causing in the region and beyond? And how will ASEAN states respond? Can they confound the sceptics and muster sufficient unity to become an influential regional security organisation for this issue, despite the differences between the four claimants as well as between these four and the remaining six non-claimants? Or will ASEAN's efforts be insufficient to persuade an ever more powerful China to choose to behave with gallant restraint?

Although there are those who have offered a more optimistic assessment of how a less Westphalian, less state-centric, twentyfirst-century political model might work to dampen the strategic value attached to the South China Sea, the concern remains that too many trends are pointing in the direction of further instability.20 There will be more pressure on increasingly-scarce fishing resources and more pressure to claim precious hydrocarbons lying under the regional sea. Even during a global economic downturn, the strategic importance of seaborne trade and in particular of imported energy resources has not faded. Meanwhile, paramilitaries are expanding but the writing of rules of engagement and the setting of mechanisms for their control by the central authorities aren't always keeping up. Incidents at sea, between fishermen and fishery enforcement vessels, and, more worryingly, between rival paramilitaries and militaries are already too common and look set only to increase.

Talk of a ‘strategic window of opportunity’ is therefore beginning to abound. In Southeast Asia, this window of opportunity refers to restraining China whilst the US is still engaged in the region and before the relative balance of power has swung too far in China's favour. In China, this window of opportunity refers to a time when China has economic leverage and a competent military in reserve, but before unfavourable domestic economic indicators, such as its ageing population or fragilities in its significant shadow banking sector, might begin to sap away at this advantage.

The South China Sea and the regional disorder

After a decade of relative neglect by all but a handful of regional security experts, the disputes in the South China Sea are once again, rightly, attracting the attention of the global security community. This book aims to offer an overview and analysis of the key issues to that interested but non-specialist community, casting these disputes within the broader context of the strategic competition that is unfolding in Southeast Asia and offering a substantive examination of the role of Southeast Asian nations themselves. It also hopes to engage the specialist community – who have long appreciated the strategic importance of the South China Sea but who have watched the waves of tension and resulting attention come and go before – on why this time might be different. The trends are worrying, the stakes are higher, and boundaries are being tested and defined, both literally and figuratively. The moves being made now matter for the precedents they are setting and the learning experiences they are providing. The canvas is not just regional, but global. If the Obama administration was to wish to find a ‘pivot’ within its rebalance to Asia, it needs look no further than the South China Sea.21

In considering this global backdrop, some have gone so far as to label the South China Sea as the ‘future of conflict’ in the twenty-first century; others meanwhile have argued that the flurry of media attention that this sea has commanded is disproportionate to the strategic challenge these disputes actually pose.22 Although the authors of this book would not rule out escalation from individual incident to diplomatic and military crisis by accident rather than design, they have not spent their time researching and writing on this topic because they believe that large-scale bloodshed in the South China Sea is imminent. Indeed one point of intellectual curiosity for the South China Sea disputes is precisely that the challenges are more subtle than this.

Ultimately, the story of overlapping sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea is more than the story of who owns which islands. It is about how these disputes are managed, and in due course resolved. Will fundamental norms of international law and international relations prevail or will the increasing reserves of Chinese military and economic prowess prove more relevant? Might China's challenge to existing maritime norms, and in particular its interpretation of the implications of the Law of the Sea for the prohibition of foreign military activities in EEZs, begin to create a ‘hairline fracture’ in the legal framework and/or global order?23

The story of the South China Sea is also about domestic political will to manage rising popular nationalism and about international political will to find peaceful paths to inclusive security structures in Asia, with room for both the rising and the risen. And, perhaps most interestingly, it is about the impact of these shifting sands on the plethora of small and mediumsized actors in Southeast Asia and the emerging regional order that is being shaped therein. The story affects claimants and non-claimants, regional powers and extra-regional powers. It involves state actors, from capitals to their provinces, and it involves non-state actors including fishermen, oil companies, and even pirates.

The disputes that surround the South China Sea matter, then, not because they may yet prove to be a game changer in Asia – although they might. They matter because they are themselves reflective of the changing game in Asia.

Notes

According to UN figures, 62% of the world's 15–24-year-olds live in Asia. Saira Syed, ‘As Asia Booms, what is Cost of Success for its Young’, BBC News, 7 November 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15532821.

Kishore Mahbubahni may label this shift to an Asian hemisphere as ‘irresistible’ but there are plenty of domestic challenges and regional distrust which could yet seriously unseat this perceived momentum. Kishore Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (New York: Public Affairs, 2008).

Alfred Mahan, The Influence of Seapower on History, 1660–1783 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Geoffrey Till, Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Taylor and Francis, 2009).

Robert Kaplan, ‘The Vietnam Solution’, The Atlantic, June 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/thevietnam-solution/308969/.

Admiral Robert Willard, Testimony to the Senate Armed Service Committee, February 2012.

Ibid.

For more details, see: Nazery Khalid, ‘South China Sea: Platform for Prosperity or Arena for Altercation?’, http://southchinaseastudies.org.

This is important as a permanent presence above the high-water mark is a key component for qualification as an island, and therefore the ability to command an EEZ of 200nm.

Note however that UNCLOS has no provisions on how to determine sovereignty over offshore islands. For the full text of UNCLOS, see: http://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/unclos_e.pdf.

UNCLOS, Article 58.

‘Hu Jintao at 18th CPC National Congress Urges PRC to become “Maritime Power”’, AFP, 8 November 2012.

US Quadrennial Defence Review Report, February 2010, p. 8, http://www.defense.gov/qdr/qdr%20as%20of%2026jan10%200700.pdf.

Krishna was reacting to the suggestion by a leading Chinese commentator that India was risking heavy political and economic consequences by pursuing oil and gas exploration in the region in partnership with Vietnam. ‘South China Sea is the Property of the World: Krishna’, Hindustan Times, 6 April 2012, http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/NewDelhi/SouthChina-Sea-is-property-of-worldKrishna/Article1-836372.aspx.

Ju Hailong, ‘India Playing Long Game in South China Sea’, Global Times, 9 April 2012, http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/703944/India-playing-longgame-in-South-China-Sea.aspx.

The ‘go global’ strategy was a campaign initiated by the Chinese government before the turn of the millennium to encourage Chinese companies to invest overseas. The aims include securing access to resources, gaining know-how and building brand recognition.

See, for example, this excellent edited volume of essays: Patrick Cronin (ed.), Cooperation from Strength: The United States, China, and the South China Sea (Washington DC: CNAS, January 2012). Available at: http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_CooperationFromStrength_Cronin_1.pdf.

Speech by Robert Gates, IISS Shangri-La Dialogue, 30 May 2009. Available at: http://www.iiss.org/conferences/the-shangri-ladialogue/shangri-la-dialogue-2009/plenary-session-speeches-2009/first-plenary-session/dr-robert-gates/.

Although some legal disputes relating to the interpretation or application of the provisions of UNCLOS appear still to be subject to the compulsory binding dispute settlement under Part XV.

For one example of a broadly positive assessment of these trends, and the cooperative impact of globalisation and overlapping economic interests, see: Till, ‘The South China Sea: An International History’, paper presented to the conference ‘The South China Sea: Towards a Cooperative Management Regime’, RSIS, Singapore, 16–17 May 2007. The full conference report is available at: http://www.rsis.edu.sg/publications/conference_reports/South_China_Sea_Report.pdf.

Retired US Navy Admiral Patrick Walsh suggested as much when he labelled the South China Sea a ‘strategic pivot’ in his interview with a Japanese newspaper: Yoichi Kato, ‘Patrick Walsh: South China Sea could be a New “Strategic Pivot”’, Asahi Shimbun, 21 March 2012, http://ajw.asahi.com/article/asia/china/AJ201203210024.

Kaplan argues that this is ‘not necessarily war, not necessarily an outbreak of military hostilities, but a lot of jockeying for position, a lot of brinksmanship, a lot of to-ing and fro-ing of warships’. Kaplan, ‘The South China Sea is the Future of Conflict’, Foreign Policy, September–October 2012. Meanwhile, Brendan Taylor argues that the South China Sea is a ‘strategic backwater’ rather than a potential flashpoint of any consequence, in contrast, for example, to the nuclear undertones to instability on the Korean Peninsula or the Taiwan Strait. Taylor, ‘Storm in a Teacup over South China Sea’, The Australian, 11 May 2012, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/world-commentary/stormin-teacup-over-south-china-sea/story-e6frg6ux-1226352425072.

Peter Dutton, ‘Cracks in the Global Foundation: International Law and Instability in the South China Sea’, in Cronin (ed.), Cooperation from Strength, pp. 69–81.