Abstract
The recent pivot in US foreign policy to the Asia-Pacific region acknowledges new geopolitical realities: the center of the global economy has shifted, and the region is struggling for balance amidst contending powers. The fact that Asia will dominate this century economically is clear—its economies are projected to expand to 37 percent of world GDP in 2014, and the region will top the West in all measures of economic power by 2030. Unfortunately, Asia lacks a comprehensive security arrangement, and nowhere is the need for cooperation and regional stability more pressing than in the South China Sea (SCS). Despite its modest size, the sea is “a mass of connective economic tissue where global sea routes coalesce” around the demographic hub of the twenty-first-century world economy. As Southeast Asian states interact with growing Chinese diplomatic, economic, and military power in the region, the SCS is likely to become a strategic bellwether for continued US leadership in the western Pacific along with unfettered global access to the sea.
A number of issues in the SCS—natural resource development, freedom of navigation, and sovereignty disputes—create a backdrop of strategic regional competition against which the coastal nations, in figure 1 below, must balance a rising Chinese neighbor and a distant US hegemon. Current US strategy for the region is largely rhetorical and unlikely to solve any of the aforementioned core issues. Other than promising future adjustments to force posture, US leaders have not outlined clear, common, regional objectives or shown any interest in trailblazing toward a long-term solution.
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