Of course, in terms of challenging the U.S. for supremacy in Chinese littoral waters, these forces matter little. If conflict erupted with the U.S., it’s possible that they’d play an asymmetric role conducting, say, swarm attacks on U.S. warships and supply lines. But they’d be easily outgunned otherwise and could do little to solve China’s ultimate strategic dilemma: the U.S. ability to establish a blockade at a string of regional chokepoints. But China has no appetite for war anytime soon. And its use of paramilitaries has allowed it to engage in a “salami slicing” strategy, asserting de facto control over the waters bit by bit without firing a shot or, most important, provoking a clash with the looming U.S. Navy.
Indeed, by flooding the South China Sea with these paramilitaries, China has established, as the chief of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command put it last year, control over the South China Sea in “all scenarios short of war with the U.S.” In other words, it can effectively dictate terms to Southeast Asian states like the Philippines and Vietnam on where their fishermen can fish, where their oil companies can drill, what they can build on their own contested reefs, and so forth. If regional states want access to the natural gas or the fish or the atolls, they have to ask nicely. Naturally, this gives Beijing leverage on any number of other matters and opens opportunities to forge political agreements reducing the scope of military cooperation with the United States and its allies. And by cementing its presence around its new bases on reclaimed islands in disputed waters, it leaves the U.S. with few options short of direct confrontation to roll back China’s militarization of the disputed islands on behalf of these allies, straining their faith in U.S. security commitments.
Is There a Role for the U.S. White Hulls?
The U.S. Coast Guard is considered the most sophisticated in the world, and it too has very big vessels, including its 4,600-ton Legend-class National Security Cutters. From time to time, it deploys these on deepwater assignments far from home. The Bertholf, for example, was sent to the region after the collapse of the Hanoi summit primarily to monitor North Korean smuggling. Coast Guard cutters can also be placed under U.S. Navy command under certain conditions, as was the case with the Bertholf while it paraded down the Taiwan Strait. In 2012, the cutter even participated in the U.S.-led Rim of the Pacific exercises – the world’s largest annual multinational naval drills – helping track missile threats and providing gunfire support for onshore troops.
U.S. warships aren’t particularly well suited for maritime policing tasks like sanctions enforcement; they’re designed to wage war, not to board smuggling vessels or break up squabbles between foreign anglers. And in the shadow of potentially hostile countries like China and North Korea, the last thing the U.S. Navy wants is its already overstretched crews confronting Chinese fishermen – especially if they’re armed and taking orders from the PLA. Doing so could force China to respond in kind, risking a conflict the U.S. would rather avoid. And since the U.S. generally doesn’t take an official position on which parts of the disputed waters belong to which country, intervening on behalf of one claimant or another would undermine its core goal of upholding the so-called “rules-based order.”
This is why some argue for a U.S. Coast Guard role in the region. If (and this is a big if) the U.S. were keen to intervene on behalf of a regional claimant – at least in scenarios where it could do so in compliance with international law – Coast Guard cutters would be more adept than U.S. warships for doing so without dragging the PLA-Navy into the fray or bolstering Chinese claims that the U.S. Navy is the true aggressor in the region. The Coast Guard, in other words, lends itself better to U.S. messaging that it’d merely be helping other claimants enforce the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (which China ratified) with forces proportional to those of the Chinese. The Coast Guard would be in position to document and make public harassment by China’s maritime forces, puncturing the veneer of plausible deniability that the little blue men give Beijing and stiffening international pressure. This wouldn’t be enough to convince Beijing to fully scale back, but it would arguably pose a bigger deterrent to China than anything else the U.S. has tried.
Moreover, to regional states like Vietnam and the Philippines that have refrained from provoking Beijing by conducting joint patrols with the U.S. Navy or giving U.S. warships extensive base access, embracing the U.S. Coast Guard may be more feasible. Indeed, since the U.S. is keen to offload regional security responsibilities to friends and allies across the globe, and since few Southeast Asian states have much hope of building up robust naval capabilities anytime soon, focusing on coast guard training and assistance instead makes sense for the U.S. This was a core goal of the Pentagon’s 2015 Southeast Asia Maritime Security Initiative, which has languished under the Trump administration. It’s also an area where the elite Japanese coast guard has been increasingly pitching in. Beijing evidently has the same idea, with joint Chinese coast guard training with Southeast Asian states becoming more common.
But while an increase in coast guard training, and perhaps limited multinational patrols, is certainly possible, that’s likely to be the extent of any expanded presence of U.S. white hulls anytime soon. For one, the risk of a clash between a U.S. Coast Guard cutter and a Chinese counterpart escalating can’t be ignored. The U.S. cutter could be quickly overwhelmed and overmatched, even by Chinese paramilitaries, requiring the U.S. Navy to step in. In that sense, their very presence in hostile waters is a potential liability. The Bertholf wouldn’t have been in the Taiwan Strait if the Navy thought there was any chance of a hostile Chinese response.
For another, the U.S. Coast Guard presently isn’t big enough to make much of a difference in the waters, anyway. As noted, it currently has just a single cutter in the Western Pacific. It’s already overstretched at home, and its budget – just $9.3 billion requested for 2020, $1 billion less than it was allotted this year – doesn’t exactly suggest that the U.S. is gearing up for a substantial overseas force. (Nor has the U.S. been ramping up security assistance to regional partners, as often pledged.) It has just eight Legend-class cutters and more than 3,000 square miles of the world’s largest exclusive economic zone to patrol.
Washington evidently just doesn’t see enough strategic rationale to devote more resources to maritime policing in the disputed waters. Regional states may chafe at the lack of U.S. interest in going to bat on their behalf, and this may help Beijing make important political inroads. But Chinese bases in the Spratlys and Chinese oil rigs across the South China Sea pose little threat to the U.S. position in the big picture. So long as the U.S. can control the chokepoints, it has the upper hand in the Western Pacific. And it thinks this reality, along with public anger about Chinese aggression in claimant states plus growing support from allies like Japan, India and Australia, will be enough to keep regional states from throwing their lot in fully with the Chinese – whether or not the U.S. white hulls are there to challenge China at its own game.
|
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario