It’s official: America has a China-containment policy – Institute for Maritime and Ocean Affairs

Actually, that was a title of a piece I wrote in July 2010, before island-building, before the Senkaku crises, before the rare earths brouhaha, even before Hillary Clinton declared that the US had a “national interest” in freedom of navigation in the South China Sea at the 2010 ASEAN foreign ministers’ conference in Hanoi and formally kicked off the “pivot.”

I offer it as a reminder to the indignant commentators who declare we’re just out in the South China Sea responding to the PRC threat, a theme sounded in an op-ed in The Australian by the Lowy Institute’s Alan Dupont:

Fairfax columnist Hugh White, for example, believes US policy makers have long believed that the territorial disputes in the South China Sea are a strategic opportunity rather than a problem for the US, allowing them to “cast Beijing as a bullying and aggressive rising power and themselves as the indispensable guardians of regional order and international law”.

These portrayals misrepresent the main causes of the rising tensions in the South China Sea and the issues at stake for Australia and the region.

The genesis of the current imbroglio was Beijing’s 2012 decision to prioritise the South China Sea and initiate an extensive, unprecedented land reclamation program on disputed islands that it occupied or planned to occupy.

That’s leaving out a big chunk of history, much of the stuff Hillary Clinton was involved in before she left office. I think history will judge Hugh White’s focus on US maneuvers to exploit the PRC vulnerability in the South China Sea as the driver of the crisis more favorably than Dupont’s “everything was going great until those darn Chinese starting kicking up trouble.”