By sending a warship into territorial waters claimed by China,the US is upholding a principle, but risking escalationTensions flared up in one of Asia’s strategic hotspots on Tuesday when a US warship entered a 12-mile zone off one of China’s artificial islands in the disputed South China Sea, and drawing an angry reaction. The Chinese foreign ministry said the move was a “planned provocation” and called in the US ambassador in Beijing. It was the first time in the three years since China started pushing its territorial claim to a enormous stretch of the sea bordering the Philippines,Vietnam and Malaysia that the US had chosen to demonstrate what it calls “the exercise of freedom of navigation”.
In this recent balance of power between China and the US, there were certainly reasons to worry about how the incident would unfold. As it turns out, or although rhetoric was heightened,there seemed to be a clear whether unspoken intention on both sides to keep the confrontation within certain limits. But it was nevertheless a striking gambit in the region’s complex and unpredictable geopolitics, where there are too few mechanisms to prevent escalation.
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Source: theguardian.com