Our top Asian allies may soon find themselves in an epic battle with China. Do our presidential front-runners care?
If this week is any indication, the brewing battle in the South China Sea will be high on the next president’s agenda. Yet, not a word about it in a long CNN debate Thursday between the two Democrats in the race, and GOPers haven’t paid much attention either.
Beijing is taking over reefs and atolls that its neighbors — Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and the Philippines — claim as their own, turning them into fortified islands. At this rate the South China Sea will soon be a Chinese lake.
As Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said, China’s actions “are causing anxiety and raising tensions in the area.”
America has a big stake in this: Some $5 trillion in annual trade and a third of the world’s maritime traffic sail those waters, and China may soon become the arbiter of it all.
To deter China, Carter announced new US military deployment in the Philippines, and a joint naval exercise concluded there this week. Yet, fearing Beijing’s ire, President Obama won’t explicitly invoke our defense treaty with Manila or say it covers the Philippines’ Scarborough Shoal, parts of which China has taken over already.
Anyway, a show of force no longer instills fear. Fairly or not, the world has come to believe Obama will always shy away from military confrontation.
What will our four top presidential wannabes do about China?
Foreign-policy novices Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump talk about curbing Asian trade but less about China’s military provocations.
“China continues to grow militarily, and we must work with the international community to deter foreign support for China’s military buildup” Sanders says. He’d also unite the world in limiting arms sales to China.
Reality check: International community? Manila asked a tribunal in The Hague to mediate its territorial disputes with China, but Beijing simply refuses to abide by its ruling. Arms sales? These days China makes (and increasingly exports) most of its own weapon systems.
Trump would “strengthen the US military and deploying [sic] it appropriately in the East and South China Seas” so as to “discourage Chinese adventurism.”
Reality check: Other than veteran affairs, Trump is fuzzy about Pentagon budgets, so why expect him to boost our military and deter China?
He’s also lax about defense treaties, and would rather have Japan and South Korea beef up their own defenses, including with nukes. Are nukes his best answer? Yikes.
Ted Cruz plays the provocateur, threatening to “carpet bomb” ISIS and “make the desert glow” in Syria. Such language will instill fear in Beijing’s military planners.
Reality check: Attacks from thousands of feet up in the sky are easy, if not always politically correct. Cruz’s rhetoric is far more restrained when it comes to actually placing boots on the ground.
And remember, his big pushback against the Chinese was to name the area in front of Beijing’s embassy in Washington “Liu Xiaobo Plaza,” in honor of a celebrated Chinese dissident. Yet even that symbolic gesture went nowhere.
l As first lady, Hillary Clinton scolded China’s human and women’s rights. As secretary of state, she said defending our allies in the South China Sea is in America’s “national interest.” So is Hillary the interventionist in the bunch?
Reality check: Hillary can turn on a dime when political expediency calls. She coined Obama’s “pivot to Asia” policy, but now opposes the president’s crown achievement under that policy: the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Polls will push her away from South China Sea military intervention as well.
Bottom line: The best chance of reining in China — and a world full of opportunistic regimes — is through credible military deterrence. Under Obama, that option is off the table. Will our next president put it back? Based on the candidates’ words and deeds, there’s little sign of that so far.
