Are the U.S. and China Headed Towards a Naval War in Asia?

Dave Majumdar

South China Sea, East China Sea, Asia-Pacific

"China’s actions show that it see us as a strategic competitor. "

The United States does not have a coherent strategy to deal with a rising People’s Republic of China in the Western Pacific. Nor do foreign policy experts specializing in the Asia-Pacific region have a concrete set of ideas to coax an increasingly assertive Beijing into accepting the U.S.-led post-Second World War liberal-institutional world order or to reassert Washington’s dominance in the region.

It is becoming increasingly clear that China hopes to chart its own course independent of the existing Western frameworks as Beijing reaffirms its claims to the South China Sea and continues to build artificial islands in the region, but how policymakers in Washington will deal with the issue is an open question.

“U.S. policy has failed spectacularly,” Seth Cropsey, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told a small lunch gathering at the Center for the National Interest—which is the foreign policy think-tank that publishes The National Interest—on Sept. 28. “China’s actions show that it see us as a strategic competitor. We choose to see China as a large market that can be cajoled and persuaded into joining us as a defender of international security and economic security. U.S. policy makers hope that the large volume of trade between China and the U.S. and the accompanying economic progress in the former would remold Chinese rulers to look, think and act more like us. The evidence does not support this hope.”

But while the Chinese see the United States as a strategic competitor, experts agree that a military confrontation is not a foregone conclusion. Beijing hopes that it can force the United States to de facto accept the South China Sea as its territory. “I don’t think conflict—naval or otherwise—between the U.S. and China is inevitable,” Cropsey said. “More likely is that China will continue its effort to turn the international waters of the East and South China Sea into territorial waters.”

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