Secretary Clinton isn't making headway with the Chinese over the South China Sea:
Clinton had arrived in China from Indonesia, where she urged Southeast Asian nations to present a unified front in dealing with Beijing in attempts to ease rising tensions in the South China Sea. China and a host of Southeast Asian countries, including the Philippines, Vietnam and Brunei, have overlapping claims to several small but potentially energy-rich areas of sea, reefs and islands.
The U.S. wants China and the other claimants to adopt a binding code of conduct for the region, along with a process to resolve maritime disputes without coercion, intimidation or the use of force.
Clinton wants the Chinese to drop their insistence on settling conflicting claims with individual nations and instead embrace a multilateral mechanism that will give the smaller members of the Association of South East Asian Nations greater clout in negotiations. She said she wanted all sides to make meaningful progress by a November summit of East Asian leaders that President Barack Obama plans to attend in Cambodia.
We aren't going to get the Chinese to agree to multilateral talks given the insistence in Peking that it is all their territory--end of story.
If the other states with claims in the South China Sea pledge with each other in a binding treaty to openly deal with China one-on-one but to not ratify their individual settlement treaties until all countries that need to make deals have concluded deals--and that the refusal of any one party to agree means that all agreements fail--then China loses the ability to pressure one state to unravel a united front.
Something needs to be done. In the past, when China had little military ability to make good on their claims, doing nothing was a reasonable strategy. But failure to get something on paper to settle claims means that one day the Chinese will use force--again--to settle the claims in their favor.
