WHERE WORLD WAR III COULD BEGIN

     As America’s navy continues its’ increasingly dilapidated condition and faces even worse times under the pending sequestration cuts, the threat of war at sea looms larger than ever.  

   The South China Sea is the passageway through which over 50% of the world’s merchant fleet tonnage passes.  Fully one third of all seagoing traffic sails in it.  In excess of six times the amount of oil that is transported through the Suez Canal and seventeen times that which goes through the Panama Canal traverses this vital body of water. It is a sea that is on the brink of exploding.

    The People’s Republic of China claims that is has sovereignty over almost all of the South China Sea, ignoring the claims of other regional lands and in defiance of the United Nations Law of The Sea. The rise of China’s navy has transformed the issue from a debate among diplomats to a confrontation between warships. Beijing’s General Luo Yuan, in a statement issued in late April, declared that China should prepare for “war at all costs” to take control of the strategic waterway.

    Negotiated attempts to address the dispute, which primarily involves currently uninhabited but strategically located islands, have largely failed.  Beijing has refused appeals to allow the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea to consider the matter.  Similar pleas to negotiate the crisis before the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have also been rejected. China’s response to criticisms of its refusal to negotiate before international bodies has been that it prefers to deal individually with each local nation separately.  This is a pragmatic approach that allows Beijing to intimidate each opponent, one at a time.

    The most inflammatory point of contention, and the one that most directly involves America, concerns two relatively deserted outcroppings of land, the Spratly Islands and the Scarborough Shoal. Although the areas are particularly close to the Philippines, a longstanding U.S. ally, China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei allege claims to some degree to them.

     The claims are not merely about national pride.  According to numerous published analyses, at least seven billion barrels of oil (representing about 80% the capacity of Saudi Arabia) and as much as 900 trillion cubic feet of natural gas are up for grabs for whoever controls these isolated spots.  A Congressional Research Service report released in April notes that these vast riches are largely within the Philippines 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone, but China claims them for itself. Since the Philippine armed forces are exceptionally weak (the CIA ranks it as 140^th in capability among the nations of the world) it is expected that the U.S. Navy will be called upon to defend both its ally and the interests of the world community in this most prized portion of the South China Sea.

    Experts have described this area as the principal flashpoint that could lead to a major war.  Any conflict within the region would have devastating consequences for a world economy already reeling from a downward spiral of national debt and the worst economic climate since the Great Depression.