Abstract
On October 27, 2015 China hawks got what they had long demanded: a US Navy Freedom of Navigation operation (aka FONOP) within 12 nautical miles of Subi Reef, one of China’s manmade islands in the South China Sea.
But it turns out that wasn’t enough!
China hawk joy was transformed into widely-advertised disappointment that the vaunted FONOP had allegedly been an anodyne “innocent passage” (i.e. a use of a foreign country’s territorial waters for prompt passage as permitted by international law) by the guided missile destroyer USS Lassen, a timorous transit that failed to repudiate the PRC’s unreasonable claims in the South China Sea based on the fallacy of the Nine Dash Line and the chicanery of its island-building program.
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