South China Sea dispute exposes soft Australia

The tensions in the South China Sea seem to have finally pierced Australian political consciousness. Prime Minister Tony Abbott declared last Thursday, 'We take no sides in the many territorial disputes in that region but we deplore any unilateral alteration of the status quo'.

Except the status quo changed years ago, when China claimed the entire South China Sea in 1992 based on its so-called nine-dash line.  

The move destabilised multilateral settlements from the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which provides for exclusive economic zones from the coastal baseline. Despite a 2002 code of conduct with ASEAN, there have been confrontations between Chinese vessels and that of other countries in the past five years, disrupting fishing livelihoods in Vietnam and the Philippines.

China has also been creating 'facts on the ground' over the past 18 months to bolster its claim, establishing five military outposts in the Spratlys and building artificial islands. Under UNCLOS, artificial structures on elevations and rocks otherwise submerged at high tide do not constitute sovereignty and are not entitled to maritime zones or airspace.

In other words, while our foreign policy and security rhetoric has tended further afield — Iraq, Syria and Ukraine — the escalation of conflict closer to home has passed without discussion, its intricacies confined within thinktanks and foreign news desks. This has come at the expense of an authoritative engagement with sensitive regional issues, something that is becoming a permanent feature of our foreign policy.

It reflects our habit of ceding initiative to the United States, as well as a reluctance not seen elsewhere to confront illegitimate moves to assert sovereignty. Our politicians may now be vocal, but they are yet to venture further than expressions of neutrality and assertions of international law, which in fact has been flouted in various ways in recent times, not least by Australia.

Few Australians are likely to have pondered the stakes in the north: what it means for China to assert strategic control over international airspace and waters, including potential resource extraction in the South China Sea; how expansionism would affect the dynamics of power not just in East Asia; the extent to which the involvement of the United States and Russia (which itself summarily annexed Crimea last year) will pull allies into the dispute; and whether we have properly canvassed our own options, given this brinkmanship involving our most significant trading partners.

The deterioration in diplomatic language on both sides of the Pacific gives us a sense of the situation. Daniel Russel, the senior US diplomat in East Asia, has been acerbic. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May, he remarked, 'No matter how much sand you pile on a reef in the South China Sea, you can't manufacture sovereignty.'

He was similarly blunt after an incident in which Chinese Navy personnel radioed warnings for an American surveillance plane to leave despite being in international airspace: 'Nobody in their right mind is going to try to stop the US Navy from operating. That would not be a good bet.'

The reaction from China has been equally terse. At a recent forum in Singapore, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said, 'The United States disregards history, legal principles and the facts. China's sovereignty and relevant rights were established a long time ago in the South China Sea.'

There is no doubt that nationalist fervour in China supports this framing; any moves beyond rhetoric by the US, Australia or the G7 are regarded with great animosity as containment.

The trajectory of this conflict does not look good. There is no reason to believe that the United States would relinquish its position as an Asia-Pacific security power. There is also no reason to believe that China would slow or halt its island-building and militarisation of the South China Sea. It has refused to participate in legal avenues, particularly the UN arbitration sought by the Philippines.

The high degree of unpredictability is a feature of the tensions; it is impossible to draw a credible analysis of the outcomes. No one wants to be drawn into war, but no one wants a new unilateralist world order, either. Against this ponderous milieu, it is a pity — given its location and heft — that Australia has again been exposed as a lightweight.

Fatima Measham is a Eureka Street consulting editor. She tweets @foomeister and blogs at This is Complicated.