Emptiness of US rhetoric has been exposed by China bringing Vietnam to heel

In the first quarter of 2018, China successfully coerced a South China Sea claimant state and got away with it. The implications are serious and undermine ongoing efforts by the United States and its democratic partners to build a “free and open” Indo-Pacific.

The Vietnamese decision was not made freely by the government. For months, China has been working to coerce the government of Vietnam and deprive it of the right to freely exploit its exclusive economic zone as should be its right under international law.

Last summer, in July, executives from Repsol said that China threatened to initiate a military conflict with Vietnam in the Spratly Islands if the Spanish firm moved ahead with its planned drilling activities in a separate oil drilling block. PetroVietnam’s decision in March followed similar coercion. 

So far, several weeks out from the Vietnamese decision, China appears to have entirely got away with bullying a littoral South China Sea state from accessing its own hydrocarbon resources. The development underlines the ultimately shallow assurances the United States has been able to provide to regional states.

I’ve noted in these pages that under President Donald Trump, the United States has increased the operational tempo of its much-discussed freedom of navigation operations near disputed features in the South China Sea. Roughly, one operation takes place every two months instead of roughly every quarter under the Obama administration.