ACCORDING to the US Navy Times, the US navy sent a small armada into the South China Sea. But it went nowhere near the disputed islands there, even if that is the suggestion. If the flotilla did that, then a naval cruise in light winds under sunny skies would mean something.
But since it merely crossed the sea but steered clear off the reefs that China has weaponized into an unsinkable carrier group, with military-grade runways and missile-defense hardware, the cruise was just routine, as the US commander candidly called it; something that’s been done for decades and which China never tried to stop all that time.
That the routine was safely repeated merely to show a belief in freedom of navigation only shows the belief is shared by China, which has not stopped the shipping of any nation from cruising in what it believes are also its waters. So the cruise-by merely proves what China does not dispute—that all ships are welcome to pass through China’s sea.
However, by saying that “with the full carrier strike group the US navy is showing the scope of its interests,” which is just freedom of navigation, the US navy, likewise, shows what is outside the scope of its interest—which are territorial disputes in what cartography has always called the South China Sea.
With regard to territorial disputes, the cruise only shows that when it comes to territorial disputes, we can look only to ourselves and to China; certainly not to Asean, which is a military joke. Therefore, it behooves us to follow the last sage counsel of George Washington to his countrymen when he left office, to avoid entangling alliances with foreign countries, especially with those that oppressed China in the past, that murdered its people, plundered its wealth and isolated it so that it could not achieve economic development the way the Soviet Union did to such an astonishing extent and with such mind-boggling speed that it out-produced Nazi Germany in arms manufacturing by the second year of the German invasion of rodina, as the Soviets called their motherland.
Any rate, protected by the stopping power of the very sea that China claims, we don’t need allies, especially such soft ones close by. As for the US naval cruise demonstrating “a worldwide capability to project power,” that simply isn’t true. The stopping power of the wide Pacific protects America from invasion but it also stops a sustained projection of power on America’s part across that ocean, what more into the South China Sea. The dog closest to the bone of contention is the power that gets to keep it.