U.S. talks tough on South China Sea

Another Hawaii-based military leader has stepped up the rhetoric against China’s island-building and territorial claims in the South China Sea, this time ahead of what could be a bolder U.S. military demonstration of air and sea navigation rights through the area.

Speaking at the Royal Australian Navy Seapower Conference on Tuesday in Sydney, Adm. Scott Swift, commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, said freedom of navigation and overflight are necessary to protect the “rules-based system” codified in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and benefiting global maritime trade — roughly $5.3 trillion of which flows annually through the South China Sea, Swift said.

Without naming China, Swift said nations imposing “superfluous warnings” on movement in international waters view freedom of the seas as being “up for grabs” and something that can be “taken down and redefined by domestic law or by reinterpreting international law.”

China claims much of the South China Sea as its own, an assertion rejected by the United States.

“There should be no doubt” the U.S. Pacific Fleet remains “as committed to freedom of the seas as ever,” Swift said.

“Put simply, we will continue to exercise freedom of the seas for all nations, because we know from painful past experience, to shirk this responsibility and obligation puts much more at risk than any one nation’s maritime interests,” the four-star admiral said.

Much of the issue centers on China’s contentious island-building in the South China Sea, where the nation is reclaiming reefs and outcroppings, and building airstrips and deep-harbor ports the United States believes are for military purposes.

The U.S. Navy irked the Chinese with a weeklong patrol in May by the littoral combat ship USS Fort Worth near the Spratly Islands in international waters in the South China Sea — where it was followed by a Chinese guided-missile frigate.

That same month, CNN was aboard a Navy P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane that was warned by the Chinese eight times to leave the airspace as it flew near the disputed area.

At a Senate Armed Serv­ices Committee hearing last month, U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said the White House was restricting Navy ships from operating within 12 nautical miles of the reclaimed islands, a standoff distance that does not exist for waters off man-made islands.

“This is a dangerous mistake that grants de facto recognition of China’s man-made sovereignty claims,” said McCain, who advocated for the patrols.

David Shear, assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs, admitted under questioning from McCain that the last time the U.S. military conducted a freedom of navigation operation within 12 nautical miles of the contested features was in 2012.

McCain asked Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., commander of U.S. Pacific Command at Camp H.M. Smith, who also testified, what he thought about the issue.

Harris said he agreed that “the South China Sea is no more China’s than the Gulf of Mexico is Mexico’s. I think that we must exercise our freedom of navigation throughout the region.”

Harris, who has been critical in the past of China’s island-building, also said the U.S. military had not conducted a direct flyover of any of the reclaimed lands. He said U.S. forces should be allowed to exercise freedom of navigation — maritime and flight — “against those islands that are not islands,” including within the 12-mile limit for some.