Pushback in the South China Sea

YURIKO KOIKE, the former national security advisor of Japan speculates that the recent trip to Asia of the US Secretary of State had the potential of triggering a diplomatic revolution a la the 1971 Kissinger visit to Mao's China with the US unwilling to accept China's push for regional hegemony in the hydrocarbon-rich waters of the South China Sea. In an opinion piece in the Taipei Times, "US takes a stand against a shifting geopolitical landscape", she states that the US not only reaffirmed its commitment to security in Asia and the eastern Pacific but also exposed the dichotomy in China's policies of hegemonic behavior versus its mantra of 'peaceful rise' and gave pause to Chinese leadership that their country's overall international role was being tested primarily in Asia.

Pax Americana along the South China Sea

ROBERT KAPLAN, fellow at the Center for a New American Security states that the China's advantageous hub-like geography abutting Central Asia, South-East Asia and East Asia has been mostly overlooked in any analysis of Chinese economic dynamism or strategic assertiveness and although its seaboard was as extensive as its continental interior, it faced a far tougher proposition at sea. In an op-ed in The New York Times, "The Geography of Chinese Power", he opines that a Chinese absorption of Taiwan would be considered a failure of U.S. power by the states in the Pacific and a strengthened U.S. air and sea presence in Oceania presented a compromise between resisting a Greater China at all costs and assenting to a future in which the Chinese Navy policed the first island chain.