Contribution to Book
The United States and the South China Sea
Security Dynamics in the South China Sea: Contemporary Challenges and Opportunities
(2024)
Abstract
The United States perceives China as a revisionist actor with the intent and capacity to revise the rules-based international order, enhance its sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific, and become the world’s leading power. China’s actions in the South China Sea threaten core US interests in freedom of navigation, the international maritime regime under the United Nations Law of the Seas Convention (UNCLOS) which enshrines freedom of the seas, and the principle of peaceful settlement of territorial disputes. Beijing’s creation and militarization of artificial islands increasingly gives it the capacity to impose an anti-access/area-denial strategy, threatening global commerce, and the passage of US military assets. US policy has failed to halt China’s advances, leading top US officials to admit that China now controls the South China Sea. US strategy toward the South China Sea is integrated deterrence, the same as its overarching National Security Strategy. Integrated deterrence is designed to raise the costs of taking actions antithetical to US interests sufficiently so that China will refrain from taking them. The Biden administration has been relatively successful in mobilizing a coalition of like-minded states behind this strategy, but it is unclear whether deterrence will work and whether the coalition will hold in the face of Chinese efforts to split it. If China is successful, a breach between the United States and its regional partners would change the region’s security architecture, facilitate China’s rise to hegemony in the Indo-Pacific, and undermine the global rules-based order.
Keywords
- International Security,
- South China Sea,
- Geopolitics
Disciplines
Publication Date
2024
Editor
Howard M. Hensel
Publisher
Routledge
Series
Military Strategy and Operational Art
ISBN
9781032657493
DOI
10.4324/9781032657493-18
Citation Information
Ann Marie Murphy and Alexis Turek. "The United States and the South China Sea" New YorkSecurity Dynamics in the South China Sea: Contemporary Challenges and Opportunities (2024) p. 241 - 263 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/annmarie-murphy/20/