Oh please:
Two successive US administrations—Barack Obama’s and now Donald Trump’s—have failed to push back credibly against China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, which has accelerated despite a 2016 international arbitral tribunal ruling invalidating its territorial claims there. Instead, the US has relied on rhetoric or symbolic actions.
Even though Obama carried out fake freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea, even he didn't hand the sea to China.
And today, we are conducting actual freedom of navigation operations rather than the innocent passage sailings done under Obama. These FONOPs actively deny China's claims to control.
So what is the complaint? That neither Obama nor Trump have destroyed the Chinese base on the Philippines territory that the tribunal ruling held is absolutely not Chinese under international law?
Is the complaint that America hasn't leveled the sea feature bases that China has built and which China is using to back their claims to control the South China Sea?
Really, we should go to war when China is annoyingly claiming the sea but not actively stopping others from using the sea as international waters?
If you want to say America has only carried out rhetoric or symbolic actions to defy Chinese control, you have to say that China doesn't actually control the South China Sea despite its claims.
And if it comes to war, China will have problems exercising that control too far from China's shores.
And where China can exert control with shore-based missiles and aircraft, denying the use of waters near China is well within China's capabilities--at least initially--whether China claims the water as Chinese or recognizes it as international water.
Just as America controls the Gulf of Mexico despite not claiming it as territorial waters.
Honestly, that essay was just idiotic. America is pushing back against Chinese claims of legal control while bolstering capabilities to challenge the control in practice if push comes to shove.
And allies are on track to help us with both.
