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America is suffering from a strategy deficit in the South China Sea. For nearly a decade-and at accelerated speed since 2014-Beijing has been salami slicing its way to a position of primacy in that critical international waterway, while eroding the norms and interests Washington long has sought to defend. To date, however, Washington has struggled to articulate an effective response. The Obama administration opposed Chinese maritime expansion rhetorically and worked to improve the overall American military and geopolitical posture in the Asia-Pacific. Yet the administration only occasionally mustered the leverage necessary to check China's quest for dominance of the South China Sea, and often it was unable even to impose substantial long-term costs on Beijing for its short-term assertiveness. For its part, the Trump administration has yet to formulate or implement a coherent South China Sea strategy, and it has swung from suggesting that America might deny Chinese access to islands in the South China Sea physically-something approaching an act of war-to appearing subsequently to deprioritize the issue.
Today, the situation in the South China Sea is reaching a critical stage as Chinese advances accumulate, America's room for maneuver diminishes, and observers throughout the region wonder whether the United States is up to the challenge. And yet Washington still is searching for a strategy.
Part of the trouble, no doubt, lies in the sheer difficulty of meeting a calculated Chinese offensive that is simultaneously audacious and subtle, one that is changing the geopolitical status quo profoundly but incrementally, in ways designed not to provoke a decisive response. Yet getting America's South China Sea strategy right also requires thinking more-systematically about what Washington should seek to achieve and what it should hazard in the effort. It has become common, in recent years, to hear calls for the United States to get tough with China over its illegal island building, militarization of disputed features, and coercion of U.S. allies and partners.1 Yet it is far less common to hear in-depth discussion of what the long-term goal of such a program should be, whether that goal is actually achievable, and how much cost and risk the United States should accept along the way.2 This is dangerous, because it increases the possibility that America may commit itself to goals...