A FORMER senator, assistant defense secretary and secretary of the navy said on Thursday the Philippines and the United States must work together to resist any notion that “economic growth justifies territorial expansion,” referring to Beijing’s moves in the South China Sea (SCS).
Speaking before the Rotary Club of Manila, ex-Sen. James H. Webb Jr. said “it’s necessary to confront this kind of aggression or it will grow,” referring to last week’s harassment by Chinese warships of a US Navy vessel in the SCS.
According to a Bloomberg report, the US accused China’s navy of “unsafe and unprofessional” conduct near an occupied reef in the South China Sea after a Chinese destroyer maneuvered near the bow of the USS Decatur, an Aegis-class destroyer based in San Diego.
“Territorial expansion is not a natural result of economic growth,” the highly decorated Vietnam War veteran said, adding the US has shown that over and over again since World War II, “it has been a stabilizing force out here.”
Webb said that, despite the criticisms that the US did not do much in the past to stop China’s moves in the South China Sea, which it claims in near entirety despite the claims by five nations including the Philippines, “it’s still the only deterrent to expansion in the region.”
Replying to a question from the audience after his talk, Webb conceded that, indeed, Washington has been criticized for seeming to have taken too long to move decisively to stop the incremental Chinese military buildup since it started setting up in the mid-1990s so-called fishermen’s shelters that became the nucleus of a now-sprawling regime of
reclaimed islands sitting alongside reefs and shoals that are within the exclusive economic zone of other countries such as the Philippines.
But, Webb stressed he was among the first to issue warnings in Washington about the apparent Chinese buildup, adding that in this, his prime Filipino counterpart was the late lawmaker and national security expert Roilo Golez, like him a graduate of the US naval academy.
Citing the long historical relations between the Philippines and the US, Webb cited the vital need “for us to continue to keep these relations in order to help our stability in this part of the world.”
“Since World War II, the most vital stabilizing factor in this part of the world has been the willingness of the US to provide that stability as a counterpoint, whatever happens to the rest of the power competition in the region,” the former senator from Virginia added.
The competition Webb was referring to is the “geographic and strategic interests of Russia, Japan and China intersecting” in East Asia, at the Korean Peninsula.
They tend to look South, meaning, the fast-growing region of Southeast Asia, where four Asean members (the Philippines, Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam and Malaysia) have claims in the SCS.
“You can see it in history, over and over again, it’s a cycle of power dominance,” he noted.
He said in 1987 the Soviet Union was in the SCS. In 1997 the former USSR “was in decline and the Chinese were on the move.”
He recalled how, during a dialogue with fellow Annapolis alumnus and his good friend Golez, the duo determined—looking at a map of the region—“how the Chinese had decided that if they erected tents as protective cover for Chinese fishing boats, they will justify taking control of some parts of the Spratly islands.”
“Over the last 20 years, you can look at the Spratlys, you can look at the Paracels at the coast of Vietnam and you can even look at the Senkaku [Diaoyu in Chinese], island between Taiwan and Okinawa and see the same pattern.”
Since 20 years ago, Webb, the author of 10 books that include six best-selling novels, notably Fields of Fire, said that China had been adopting the “salami” tactics of careful slicing of islands and moving forward.
Alarmed by these developments, he said that in 2012, while he was still a member of the Senate, “China had created a new prefecture, Sansha, that reports directly to Beijing.”
He said from then on, China had claimed the SCS as “its territory, over 2 million square kilometers of the sea, [actually it’s 3 million sq km ] in the SCS all the way down to Singapore.” This claimed territory is the so-called nine-dash line, which has been declared illegal, in a historic decision, by the International Tribunal in The Hague.
He said the near-miss confrontation between a Chinese warship and an American vessel conducting freedom of navigation operations (Fonop) in international waters could be likened to international aggression.
Image credits: Nonie Reyes