U.S. Navy ship nears 12-mile limit around Chinese islands

A senior U.S. defence official told Reuters news agency the warship began its mission early on Tuesday local time near the reefs and would spend several hours there.

Additional patrols would follow in the coming weeks and could also be conducted around features that Vietnam and the Philippines have built up in the Spratlys, the second United States official said.

During a news conference in Boston last week, the US Defense Secretary, Ash Carter stated that U.S. will fly, sail and operate wherever worldwide law allows it to and that includes its adventures in and around the South China Sea.

“Let us not forget that in October 1962, when the Soviet Union was building missile sites in Cuba – not even on USA soil – US President Kennedy made it clear in a televised speech that the United States would not “tolerate the existence of the missile sites now in place”, it said in reference to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

According to a report published by USA newspaper Navy Times, the country’s Navy will soon receive an approval for a mission to sail in the vicinity of the Spratly Islands.

In June, for example, a Chinese coast-guard vessel was flanking a Chinese fishing boat in waters around Indonesia’s Natuna Islands, according to Rear Admiral A Taufiq R, the commander of the Indonesian Western Fleet. It will likely be accompanied by surveillance planes that have already been operating the the area.

The move, which has been considered by USA officials for months, is sure to anger Beijing, which has said it won’t tolerate what it considers a violation of its territorial waters. By not deploying its navy too visibly, China is seeking to avert worldwide condemnation that might result if it tried to impose its territorial assertions with warships.

But defense officials believe Beijing’s ambitions are more alarming, and point to China’s construction of airstrips, military facilities like barracks and ports. “A specific challenge to freedom of navigation is something that can be as simple as a single ship or an aircraft traversing the area subject to the excessive claim without notifying the nation or asking permission for the transit, primarily because that transit would occur in worldwide waters”.

In 2014, the U.S. Navy carried out such operations against 19 countries, including China. The Chinese have not been informed, the source said, adding that no trouble is expected.

Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam – members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations – also claim parts of the sea.

The largest of the Spratly Islands have been claimed by multiple countries in the region antagonized by China’s build-up.

Greg Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and global Studies in Washington said that the USA operation was aimed at testing control of the seas, not sovereignty over the disputed islands and would present a dilemma for China.

“Australia strongly supports these rights”, she said in a statement. In 1981, shortly after the Pentagon formalized its periodic challenges in the Freedom of Navigation program, the United States chose to push back against Libya’s claim to the entirety of the Gulf of Sidra by dispatching a pair of aircraft carriers. “I think that we must exercise our freedom of navigation throughout the region”.

Washington’s militarist drive has produced one disaster after another, to which it has responded by the launching of further wars and regime-change operations. But given the high stakes, boiling Chinese nationalism, and the very public debate, Beijing may take more provocative action short of military force.