Arbitration suit a colossal US-PH blunder

Second of Three Parts

CONTRARY to the massive US propaganda, the arbitration suit that the Philippines undertook against China in 2012 led to the militarization of the South China Sea, making our part of the world a powder keg that could make it a nuclear battleground for the two superpowers.

The indisputable fact, ignored by anti-China apologists, is this: As soon as the suit was filed on Jan. 22, 2013, the Chinese used this as a justification to their citizens and the world to transform their seven reefs in the Spratlys into artificial islands on which they built ports, airstrips and other facilities they could turn — or have already secretly turned — into armed military bases, which would be staging grounds to recover Taiwan or fight the US for whatever reason in the South China Sea.

In fact, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in 2014 said China would be willing to halt its island-building in the Spratlys if the Philippines dropped the suit that it initiated the previous year. The Aquino III government — or the US — said “no.”

Indeed, China had occupied these six reefs since late 1988 and Mischief Reef since 1994. These were actually the worst “properties’ in the Spratlys, since these were all reefs, not islands, which were occupied much earlier by the Philippines (mostly in the early 1970s) and Vietnam in early 1988. Except for Mischief Reef, where barracks for a small contingent of troops were built in 1994, China had not made any move to even reclaim land on even a modest scale to make them into islands.

The Chinese also complied with the Declaration on the Code of Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (COC) signed with all 10 Asean members in November 2002. The code stipulated that the claimant countries “would resolve their territorial and jurisdictional dispute in the South China Sea through friendly consultations and negotiations by sovereign states directly concerned.” The COC also specified that “the Parties undertake to exercise self-restraint in the conduct of activities that would complicate or escalate disputes and affect peace and stability.”

Belligerent 

China viewed the Philippines’ filing of the arbitration suit in 2013 as violating the COC and even interpreted it as a belligerent act. That gave China the justification to transform what before were its puny reefs into huge fortifications. 

The US under Obama, actually the brains behind the arbitration suit, vastly underestimated the Chinese response to the suit, which it thought could be a huge propaganda tack to portray China as not respecting the international rule of law. The US didn’t even have the imagination, or the strategic thinking, to think that China could embark on such a massive infrastructure project in an area risky to navigate through because of its shifting sands at the bottom and its unpredictable squalls.

Based on land reclamation costs in recent years — and in coastal areas — the 12.9 square kilometers that China reclaimed from 2013 to 2014 cost $27.6 billion, a mammoth expense for China, representing 12 percent of its defense budget, or the cost of two Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. But achieving nearly impossible feats has been a Maoist dogma in the Chinese Communist Party, derived from ancient Chinese mythology: “The Foolish Old Man” fable about the old man who removed a mountain shovel by shovel for decades until his death.

The US could just watch helplessly as the Chinese built up their artificial islands into massive fortresses and totally changed the theater for war in the South China Sea. The US and the other countries in the region didn’t even file formal diplomatic protests against the Chinese move, as they knew full well that China could, by international law, do anything they wanted in their sovereign territories. (Indeed, the US had conducted and exploded 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, with 23 at Bikini and 44 at Enewetak in the 1950s, forcing the inhabitants to move elsewhere.)

Effectivites

While officially Vietnam and the Philippines still claim these reefs, the fact that China has controlled completely six of these for 24 years, and Mischief Reef for 18 years, bolsters its claim invoking the international principle “historical consolidation of title through effective control” (effectivites), which has been used in many cases of territorial disputes.

China justified the huge cost of reclamation to its citizens by claiming that creating the artificial islands was a successful tactic of “establishing facts on the ground,” rather than merely talking about it. The Israelis had used this tactic when they built Jewish settlements in the Golan Heights and West Bank that they grabbed after defeating the Arabs in the Six-Day War of 1976, thereby making it almost impossible for Egypt and Syria to reclaim these lands now.

The Chinese also calculated that transforming their reefs into islands would make moot and academic one of the arbitration suit’s claims that reefs and rocks that become submerged at high tide — which had been mostly what the Chinese had occupied since 1988 — cannot claim territorial waters.

The Americans thought the Chinese didn’t have the technology nor the resources to undertake the biggest and most expensive land reclamation project in history. The Americans apparently forgot that the defense of territory is at the very top of the Chinese state’s priority, that they are willing to put so much resources into defending it.

‘Island builder’

China even specially designed and built for its reclamation project the biggest dredger ships in the world, with its newest one, a deep-sea dredger dubbed the “island-builder,” capable of gathering 6,000 cubic meters of sand per hour from the sea.

From the smallest “landowner” in the Spratlys having the worst “properties,” i.e., reefs, China has become the biggest landowner with 1,300 hectares, triple the total area held by the other claimants. 

Chinese generals must have been ecstatic that the arbitration suit led to the building of their huge fortifications on reclaimed islands. The seven reefs before were mere observation posts.

With their artificial islands built in reaction to the arbitration suit, the People’s Liberation Army Navy has managed to project their naval power deep into the South China Sea. This has made it possible for them to routinely patrol even the coastal areas of the Philippines, to refuel and be resupplied by the seven fortifications in their Nánshā archipelago.

The US retaliated by getting the Philippines to agree in April 2014 (six months after China started building its artificial islands) to an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) that allows the US military to use Filipino camps and other facilities as their “rotational base” to install their weapons and other war materiel as well as combat troops whenever America says war is imminent. From just five such “EDCA” sites under the agreement with the Aquino III administration, President Marcos Jr. gave the US five more sites, several of which were obviously intended for a war with the US over Taiwan. One is on Balabac island, with the US message being that missiles installed or to be installed here will be aimed at the Chinese fortifications in the Spratlys, just 350 kilometers away.

Militarized

Under the Aquino and Marcos administrations, and triggered by the arbitration suit, the South China Sea has been militarized, to the entire world’s woe: Our country has become one huge American aircraft carrier ranged against the seven smaller Chinese “aircraft carriers,” that are their artificial islands. A miscalculation, message misinterpreted could make our part of the world a nuclear battlefield.

And to think that the arbitration suit yielded absolutely nothing for us except its use as a propaganda tool by the Americans. Anti-China propagandists keep claiming that the suit’s ruling invalidated China’s sovereignty claims in the South China Sea. This, however, as I have explained in so many columns and in my book “Debacle,” is a blatant lie, as UN Convention on the Law of the Sea has totally no authority to rule on territorial claims, only on whether a country’s maritime areas (such as its exclusive economic zones) comply with the treaty’s definitions.

China’s claim is not that it has an EEZ that encompasses the Spratlys. It claims that Spratlys is part of its sovereign territory, an “outlying archipelago” which, even if far from its mainland, is its long-established territory, in the same manner as the US owns the Hawaiian islands, France its New Caledonia, and Britain, its Falkland Islands.

*Debacle: The Aquino regime’s Scarborough fiasco and the South China Sea arbitration deception, available at amazon.com, Fully Booked, and at https://ift.tt/lbYKOS5. The book cites all of the sources for its arguments.

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Arbitration suit a colossal US-PH blunder
Source: Breaking News PH