Few foreign-policy challenges confronting the Biden administration are more daunting than China. With recent headlines drawn toward trade wars, repression in Hong Kong, COVID-19 conspiracy theories, the intimidation of Taiwan, concentration camps in Xinjiang, and the China-India border crisis, it’s easy to forget that the South China Sea, despite being quieter than it was in the mid-2010s, remains one of the most controversial and volatile disputes in U.S.-China relations. The two countries’ differences over freedom of navigation in the vital waterway constitute the only bilateral dispute that has repeatedly produced hostile or dangerous encounters between Chinese and U.S. military platforms in close proximity with escalation risks.
Over the past decade, a series of provocative Chinese claims and actions in the South China Sea have opened a gaping geopolitical fault line with the United States, including its unlawful nine-dash line claim, its occupation of the disputed Scarborough Shoal, its creation and militarization of seven artificial islands in the Spratlys, and its use of a vast maritime militia to bully and coerce its neighbors. But it is Beijing’s attempts to restrict freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, particularly for U.S. warships, that has generated the most concern in Washington and provoked the most robust policy response.
