America should stand as much as Asia’s bully

MANILA –

For over a decade, China has been utilizing an more and more aggressive hybrid-warfare technique to extend its energy and affect within the strategically necessary South China Sea. Countering it will likely be one of many defining challenges for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration.

Chinese language President Xi Jinping’s “Chinese language dream” of world preeminence relies upon considerably on reaching dominance within the South China Sea and ending America’s primacy within the Indo-Pacific area, an rising world financial and geopolitical hub. And China has not hesitated to make use of coercive ways in service of those aims.

In recent times, boats belonging to international locations whose territorial claims China disregards, such because the Philippines and Vietnam, have confronted blockades, ramming, water-cannon assaults and even bladed-weapon assaults by Chinese language vessels. Offshore power operations endure common harassment. Merely fishing in waters China calls its personal can expose an individual to a Chinese language assault with iron pipes. Such violent confrontations have heightened regional tensions and undermined stability in a vital hall linking the Pacific and Indian Ocean.