How China Plans to Dominate the South China Sea: Copy Great Britain

Jarrett Stepman

Security, Asia

History could help Beijing.

A storm is gathering in the South China Sea, and it seems inevitable there will be a showdown between China and the United States over this vital global trade route. But the conflict is not just about power—it’s about the ideas that the two nations see as the heart of the heart of the international system they wish to uphold.

China has frequently tested American presidents over what it can get away within this crucial waterway, and President Donald Trump will likely be on the receiving end of the same treatment. China continues to build island garrisons in what are considered international waters, and it is unclear whether the United States will take action to prevent this buildup. But China’s aggressive actions are more than just a rising nation flexing its strength. It is an open challenge to the American idea of free and open trading routes.

To understand why this conflict is such a crucial test for the United States, Americans should be mindful of one of the great, if almost entirely forgotten, conflicts of the seventeenth century. While British dominance on the high seas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is more well known, few today remember when it was the Dutch, not the British, who had the world’s greatest maritime empire.

A tiny, continental European nation, the Netherlands rose to become a global hegemon in the seventeenth century through its ability to harness finance capitalism and free trade before their competitors. Their policy was guided by the doctrines of Hugo Grotius’s influential book Mare Liberum, whose title means “the free seas.” This was the belief that the world’s oceans belonged to all of humanity, owned by no single nation.

Grotius wrote that the oceans are the “common property of all” and that no sovereign has a right to “take” them for exclusive use.

And while this vast network of trade brought great prosperity to the Dutch and other nations, not everyone was happy with the lay of the land—or, rather, the sea.

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