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Obama’s Non-Response To China’s Seizure Of US Navy Drone Alarms Allies
By RYAN PICKRELL

Barack Obama’s lack of a response to Chinese provocations in the South China Sea is sending a troubling message to America’s partners in Asia.
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) seized a U.S. Navy unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) operating legally in international waters outside of China’s nine-dashed line, a previously discredited demarcation, Thursday.
The Department of State, as well as the Pentagon, demanded that China return the drone.

China agreed.
The Chinese Ministry of National Defense (MND) blamed the incident on the U.S., accusing the U.S. of spying on China inside China’s waters and inappropriately hyping up the situation.
China warned the U.S. against engaging in surveillance activities in the South China Sea. 

Some Chinese military officials and scholars claim the seizure was intended to teach the U.S. a lesson.
The U.S. issued a formal complaint over the arguably unlawful seizure, but it did not take additional action.
“Diplomatic protests [are] not enough,” asserted Michael Auslin, resident scholar and director of Japanese Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, “A toothless US response will only embolden further belligerence on Beijing’s part.”
The Obama administration failed to respond with strength to an unlawful act of aggression. 

As the U.S. did not take action to protect its own navy, America’s Asian allies and partners may question whether the U.S. will stand by its security agreements.
China has been consistently emboldened by the current administration’s lack of resolve.
Prior to the drone seizure incident, a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) report revealed that China has installed military equipment on all seven of its artificial islands in the Spratly Islands, in clear violation of Xi Jinping’s public promise to Obama that China will not militarize the South China Sea.
“China appears to have built significant point-defense capabilities, in the form of large anti-aircraft guns and probable close-in weapons systems (CIWS), at each of its outposts in the Spratly Islands,” the report explained.
The Chinese government argued that building military installations does not constitute militarization.
“China’s deployment of necessary defense equipment to its own territories has absolutely nothing to do with militarization,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Geng Shuang said in response.
Throughout Obama’s presidency, the U.S. has failed to properly address the growing challenges from China’s maritime militia, a paramilitary force masquerading as civilian fishermen. 

The maritime militia harassed the USNS Impeccable in 2009, shadowed the USS Lassen in 2015, and has been involved in several other incidents.
The lack of response to the seizure of U.S. naval equipment by the Chinese navy is the latest example of inaction. 

U.S. allies are unlikely to find this comforting.
“Allies and observers will find it hard not to conclude this represents another diminishment of American authority in the region,” Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Douglas H. Paal stressed to the New York Times.
“This is China showing that it is in the process of setting the rules in the South China Sea,” Alexander Vuving, an expert on Vietnam and the Asia Pacific at Center for Security Studies explained to NYT reporters. 

“If China can get away with this incident with impunity, this will send a chilling message to countries in the region.”
“We will not allow a shared domain to be closed down unilaterally no matter how many bases are built on artificial features in the South China Sea,” Adm. Harry Harris, head of U.S. Pacific Command, explained at the Lowy Institute Wednesday. 

“We will cooperate when we can but we will be ready to confront when we must.”
“Capability times resolve times signaling equals deterrence,” he said.
“The weak link is resolve,” argued Euan Graham, the director of international security at the Lowy Institute after the drone incident. 

“Capability, yes. Signaling, yes … But, the muted response means the equation falls down on resolve.”

Act of Piracy, Act of War

China Throws Out South China Sea Rule Book
By ANDREW BROWNE

SHANGHAI—In a tweet, Donald Trump called it stealing.
Many Western legal experts agree with him: The interception and capture of a U.S. Navy drone by the crew of a Chinese warship, they say, was tantamount to an act of piracy on the high seas. 

The Pentagon labeled the seizure “unlawful.”
On Tuesday, China handed back the craft, a day after a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman insisted that the sailors were simply gathering unattended property, as one might “pick something up from the street.”
That explanation beggars belief. 

China has crossed a new threshold. 

It once found it necessary to justify its assertive actions in the South China Sea within a broad framework of legality—however flimsy, contrived or contested its formulation of law appeared to the U.S. and its allies.
This, along with its efforts to win over the region with pocketbook diplomacy—free-trade deals, infrastructure investment, low-cost loans and aid packages—distinguished China from Russia, which has openly flouted international norms by invading Georgia and partially dismantling Ukraine.
The finned metal tube was clearly marked. 

Equally obvious, it was under the control of the nearby USNS Bowditch. 

If China can grab a submersible drone, why not interfere with the passage of a ship? 

In these matters, international maritime law does not distinguish between vessel types or sizes.
China has again called into question its own repeated proclamations that it won’t restrict freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.
Step by step, China is walking away from its assurances that it wants a “peaceful rise.” 

Just last year, Xi Jinping pledged not to militarize the seven massive islands China has dredged in the South China Sea, but lately it has positioned antiaircraft weapons on them, according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Perhaps this episode was intended as a Chinese riposte to Mr. Trump. 

In Beijing’s view, he has challenged the underpinnings of the U.S.-China relationship by taking a phone call from Taiwan’s president and questioning its cherished “one-China” principle from his Twitter account. 

And now China is breaking a taboo.
Scooping a submersible drone out of the waves, of course, is not comparable to Vladimir Putin’s naked aggression.
But it’s another move in a dangerous direction. 

In 2001, when a Chinese fighter collided with a U.S. spy plane off Hainan Island and forced it to land, Beijing complained that the plane was conducting illegal close-in surveillance, applying its own minority interpretation of international law.

China returned a U.S. ocean glider similar to one pictured here that it had seized in the South China sea last week. 

This time it hardly bothered with a legal rationale. 

The People’s Daily’s overseas edition claimed the drone was in China’s “jurisdictional waters,” even though the spot falls outside its already extravagant claims to almost the entire South China Sea demarcated by its “nine-dash line.” 

The foreign and defense ministries were vaguer, saying it was in “waters facing China.”
The Foreign Ministry spokeswoman on Tuesday blamed U.S. close-in reconnaissance activities near Chinese territory.
Either way, the entire area is now militarized.
Some Chinese scholars suggest the interception sent a message that China won’t tolerate the increasing use of American drones to snoop on its submarine activity at any distance from its shores.
Adm. Harry Harris, the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, sent a blunt message to Beijing as he announced deployments of F-22 Raptor jets to Australia last week. 

“We will cooperate when we can, but we will be ready to confront when we must,” he said.
China interprets such rhetoric as bluster. 

The nationalist-leaning Global Times, reacting to Mr. Trump’s tweets, warned that if he keeps up his provocations as president, “China will not exercise restraint.”
During the Cold War, rules of the road, diligently adhered to, prevented accidents that might have brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to war. 

China and the U.S. have been working on similar protocols. 

Last week’s apparently calculated act of lawlessness, though, changes the game.
Between Mr. Trump’s courageous approach to China’s sacred cows, and China’s new disdain for legal niceties, expect regular eruptions. 

China is clearly testing U.S. resolve.
A shift in strategy assumes of course that the decision to snatch the drone came from the top rather than a rogue commander.
Xi’s administration has declared “maintaining stability” to be its top task for 2017 as the economy sputters. 

Xi’s navy has just literally and figuratively rocked the boat.

"Son of a Whore"

Beijing Commits Act of War, Obama Does Nothing

By GORDON G. CHANG

Saturday, China’s Defense Ministry said it would hand back to the U.S. Navy an underwater drone one of its boats had seized Thursday in the South China Sea. 

The return, it said, would be made “in an appropriate manner.”
The release of the drone, whenever it occurs, should not be the end of the saga. 

Washington must impose costs on Beijing for what constituted an act of piracy—and an act of war.
Chinese spokesman Yang Yujun said, in the words of the official Xinhua News Agency, that one of its navy’s lifeboats “located an unidentified device” and retrieved it “to prevent the device from causing harm to the safety of navigation and personnel of passing vessels.” 

The Chinese claimed to have “examined the device in a professional and responsible manner.”
In fact, China’s ships had long tailed the USNS Bowditch, an unarmed reconnaissance vessel. 

The crew of the Bowditch, who at the time were trying to retrieve the drone, repeatedly hailed by radio the Chinese sailors, who ignored their calls and, within 500 yards of the American craft, went into the water in a small boat to seize the drone, called a Littoral Battlespace Sensing glider. 

The Chinese by radio told the Bowditch they were keeping the drone.
The intentional taking of what the Defense Department later termed a “sovereign immune vessel” of the United States was an act of war. 

The size of the object for this purpose is not relevant. 

Whether drone or aircraft carrier, the principle is the same.
The seizure is only the latest act in a course of belligerent conduct spanning this century. 

The most notorious incident involved the clipping of the wing of a U.S. Navy EP-3 over the South China Sea on April 1, 2001 by a reckless Chinese pilot. 

After the stricken American plane landed on the Chinese island of Hainan, Beijing imprisoned the crew for 11 days and stripped the plane of its sensitive electronic equipment. 

Chinese leaders, for no apparent reason, required the craft to be chopped up so that it could not be flown away.
In September 2002, China’s media claimed a Chinese fishing boat intentionally rammed the Bowditch in the Yellow Sea to disable its sonar. 

The incident—there may have been no ramming but there was dangerous harassment of the Bowditch—occurred in international water.
In March 2009, Chinese craft tried to sever the towed sonar array from the USNS Impeccable in international water in the South China Sea. 

The Victorious, Impeccable’s sister ship, was subject to extreme harassment in March and May 2009.
There have been numerous Chinese intercepts of U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force planes and vessels since then, including a near collision in December 2013 involving the USS Cowpens, a missile cruiser, in the South China Sea.
This conduct continues because the U.S. does not exact costs on China. 

Worse, American administrations have rewarded Beijing for unjustifiable actions.
The Bush White House, for instance, essentially apologized to China and, on top of that, paid what was effectively a ransom to free the aviators of the EP-3. 

The amount was characterized as a payment for room and board, but the agreement to compensate China, regardless of terminology, was one of the lowest points in America’s history.
The Obama administration, unfortunately, adopted the Bush playbook. 

One month after the Impeccable and Victorious incidents in March 2009, the White House sent the chief of naval operations and a missile destroyer, the Fitzgerald, to China to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese navy. 

One month after that gesture of friendship to Beijing, the Chinese harassed the Victorious again.
Today, Obama cannot even talk about Chinese aggression. 

He did not, for example, mention it in his opening statement at his press conference Friday and did not address it when answering Mark Landler of the New York Times, who raised the drone seizure in his question.
Many, most notably Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, have ridiculed Donald Trump for the misspelling in his Saturday morning tweet on the subject—the president-elect meant “unprecedented” but instead created the word “unpresidented”—but at least he is addressing critical issues. 

That’s important, even if at times Trump misfires, as he did in his Saturday evening tweet suggesting the Chinese could keep the drone.
Trump, even when making mistakes, understands one thing. 

It is wrong for American leaders to pursue policies that ensure Beijing will put America’s men and women in harm’s way in China’s peripheral waters.
And those incidents will get worse. 

The site of Thursday’s drone seizure, about 50 nautical miles northwest of Subic Bay, is critical.
Beijing maintains it has sovereignty over 85 percent of the South China Sea with its infamous “nine-dash line” claim, which was rejected by a July 12 arbitral ruling in The Hague, and it has continued to complain of American surveillance activity inside that now-invalidated perimeter.
Yet the drone incident took place so close to the Philippine shore that it was beyond China’s claimed area. 

In short, there was absolutely no justification for the Chinese navy to grab the drone.
This brazen act suggests two things. 

First, China has become completely lawless. 

That means Washington’s efforts of more than four decades to “enmesh” that country into the international system’s network of treaties, laws, rules, and conventions has completely failed.
Second, Beijing now thinks it can, with impunity, do whatever it wants wherever it wants. 

If it had the power, China would undoubtedly interfere with American shipping as it now does with American military vessels and aircraft.
The goal of Washington policy, therefore, should be to prevent China from ever obtaining that power. And the first step to doing that is start imposing severe diplomatic and economic costs on Beijing for, among other things, interfering with America’s right to sail and fly through the global commons.
Aggressors always urge calm after taking provocative actions, as China is now trying to do. 

This time, Washington should keep the temperature up.