The answer is clear due to two reasons. First, the USA cannot lose an economic war with China. And second, the USA cannot win a naval war with China.
Is the U.S., preoccupied with a pandemic and a depression that medical crisis created, prepared for a collision with China over Beijing’s claims to the rocks, reefs and resources of the South China Sea?
For that is what Mike Pompeo appeared to threaten this week.
“The world will not allow Beijing to treat the South China Sea as its maritime empire,” thundered the secretary of state.
“America stands with our Southeast Asian allies and partners in protecting their sovereign rights to offshore resources … and (we) reject any push to impose ‘might makes right’ in the South China Sea.”
Thus did Pompeo put Beijing on notice that the U.S. does not recognize its claim to 90{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d} of the South China Sea or to any exclusive Chinese right to its fishing grounds or oil and gas resources.
Rather, in a policy shift, the U.S. now recognizes the rival claims of Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and the Philippines.
To signal the seriousness of Pompeo’s stand, the U.S. sent the USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz carrier battle groups through the South China Sea. And, this week, the guided-missile destroyer USS Ralph Johnson sailed close by the Spratly Islands.
But what do Mike Pompeo’s tough words truly mean?
While we have recognized the claims of the other littoral states of the South China Sea, does Pompeo mean America will use its naval power to defend their claims should China use force against the vessels of those five nations?
Does it mean that if Manila, our lone treaty ally in these disputes, uses force to reclaim what we see as its lawful rights in the South China Sea, the U.S. Navy will fight the Chinese navy to validate Manila’s claims?
Has Pompeo drawn a red line, which Beijing has been told not to cross at risk of war with the United States?
If so, does anyone in Washington think the Chinese are going to give up their claims to the entire South China Sea or retreat from reasserting those claims because the U.S. now rejects them?
Consider what happened to the people of Hong Kong when they thought they had the world’s democracies at their back.
For a year, they marched and protested for greater political freedom with some believing they might win independence.
But when Beijing had had enough, it trashed the Basic Law under which Hong Kong had been ceded back to China and began a crackdown.
The democracies protested and imposed economic sanctions. But the bottom line is that Hong Kong’s people not only failed to enlarge the sphere of freedom they had, but also they are losing much of what they had.
The U.S. Navy currently can’t stay out of the way of cargo containers or park a ship in port without setting it on fire. It’s not going to win a naval war against anyone, let alone a nation with considerably more manufacturing capacity than it has.
Remember, in the industrial age, war isn’t about how many tanks, ships, and planes you have, but how many you can manufacture. The USA can’t beat China at sea for the same reason that Japan couldn’t beat the USA. The fact that drones and hypersonic missiles make ships much more sinkable now than in recent decades only underlines the importance of manufacturing capacity.
If the USA is concerned about the the threat posed by China, they should probably worry more about Vancouver and the Ivy League than the South China Sea.