Another point made by Vuving in his critique is more sensible, and concerns the actual strategic value of China’s newly built facilities in the South China Sea. He contends that I misunderstand China’s strategy, because I focus on resources (oil and fish) vice strategic location. For example, he holds that the main value of Scarborough Shoal is that it is an “ideal place from which to watch and patrol the central eastern sector of the South China Sea.” But another surveillance post in the South China Sea is quite redundant, because Beijing already has more than enough patrol assets (military, coast guard or militia)—and that is not even considering ample and developing aerial surveillance capabilities, as well as real-time satellite reconnaissance.

In fact, our assessments are not that different with respect to the new facilities in the Spratly islets. He explains, “Although China’s military assets on the South China Sea islands will be highly vulnerable in wartime, they can be very useful for peacetime patrolling and psychological intimidation.” A main point of my initial analysis was to draw attention to the high vulnerability of any Chinese assets based on these facilities in the age of precision guided munitions. So Vuving evidently accept my analysis for military conflict scenarios—as does a Pentagon official who was quoted in this forum as saying, “If China wants to build vulnerable airstrips on these rocks, let them—they just constitute a bunch of easy targets that would be taken out within minutes of a real contingency.”

I agree with Vuving that these facilities in the South China Sea will allow for somewhat increased surveillance and even maybe, yes, “intimidation.” Chinese sailors and air crews may be a little less green after getting a break from their long patrols. Chinese fishing boats may indeed grow more numerous in the area if they know they have a truly safe shelter from the common typhoons that sweep the area. But who exactly will be intimidated by the increased Chinese presence during peacetime? Will the U.S. Navy be intimidated? Of course not. Those likely to be intimidated by an elevated Chinese patrol presence are local hydrocarbon exploration and fishing interests. Thus, we return to the issue of resources, and I again emphatically reject the notion that Washington should take active steps in the direction of military conflict with Beijing to support Philippine or Vietnamese oil and fishing interests.

Vuving’s critique repeats many times that the new Chinese facilities in the Spratlys will indeed “allow China to upset the military balance.” Not only does he posit that China is likely to deploy thirty to forty fourth-generation aircraft to the new airstrips in the Spratlys, but he also claims that regional states will be deterred from attacking the new airfields, because “China can declare that it makes no difference between an attack on these islands and an attack on its mainland.”

To my estimate, it is still quite early to suggest that China is able or likely to stage so many fighter aircraft out of the new facilities. One leading expert on PLA development has stated, for example, that the only plane that will fly from these “bases” will be the small maritime patrol aircraft, the Y-7. As he explained it, that is partly due to the weak coral base of these airstrips, which can neither support heavy aircraft nor the tough tempo that fighter operations would require. But let’s assume the worst case, putting aviation logistics aside as well, that Chinese fighter interceptor squadrons will not only be deployed to these remote airstrips, but will deploy in operationally significant numbers. I have posited that, in any contest with the U.S., these aircraft would likely be smoking, twisted metal wrecks within the first twenty-four hours of the beginning of a conflict. Vuving does not contest that point, but says that the new Chinese facilities will “upset the regional balance.”

My response to this point is that there is actually no “regional balance” to upset. Since the 1990s (if not before), China has had the firepower to take on and defeat any Southeast Asian opponent with relative ease. In 1988, for example, they swept aside Vietnamese forces in a lopsided set of naval skirmishes to set up several preliminary bases in the Spratlys. I have discussed the very uneven nature of the China-Vietnam military contest in some detail in an interview with the New York Times and also in this article for National Interest. Thus, Vuving is correct to say that China will have vast military superiority in the South China Sea with its new set of airstrips in the Spratlys. However, my view is that China was already vastly superior in military terms (when the U.S. is not involved), so the actual change to the military balance is quite marginal.

And for the same reason that the new facilities will be highly vulnerable to U.S. firepower, so even Southeast Asian nations will have a reasonably good chance to put the new airstrips out of commission for lengthy periods. Indeed, one does not have to turn the islets into a “sea of fire” by cratering every part of the runway, when all that is required is to take out the fuel or munitions storage facilities. Most ideally, stealthy and relatively invulnerable submarines could barrage the new Chinese bases with missiles from various vectors. Vietnam and Malaysia could develop those capabilities quite easily. But even laggard Philippines could likely put ordnance on these obvious targets by, for example, quietly purchasing an array of medium and long-range surface-to-surface cruise missiles that South Korea has been developing for a long time. True, that may require some adjustment of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), but that would be wholly reasonable in the face of China’s major conventional missile buildup. Other weapons systems could also be used to inhibit air operations, such as planting sea mines around the islets to interdict their resupply.

This kind of deterrence will be much more effective than attempts to massively scale up the Philippines’ coast guard to play gray-zone games against China’s massive coast guard forces. The latter approach is a genuine pipe dream for the foreseeable future. Maybe Vietnam’s coast guard prospects are a little better, but most Americans would oppose their taxes going to fund Vietnam’s coast guard since these gray-zone games are just about oil and fisheries interests and do not seriously impact U.S. national security.

The strangest and most objectionable part of Vuving’s critique comes near the end. Here he candidly suggests that “China and the United States may share the same view when it comes to nautical freedom…” and, as I have related above, Vuving also explains that “freedom of navigation” does not quite fit the bill as a persuasive rallying cry for confronting Beijing in the South China Sea. Therefore, he argues, the real question in the South China Sea is about China’s alleged “grave threat to U.S. leadership in the region.” This line of reasoning seems to resemble closely that classic neo-conservative tract from 1992, authored by Paul Wolfowitz, that claimed the goal of U.S. foreign and defense policy should be primacy, plain and simple.

Vuving may underestimate Americans’ distaste for the rather tautological formula of seeking to maintain leadership in all areas of the world in order to preserve primacy. In the critique’s final, tortured logic, Vuving explains: “The concentration in this domain of Asia’s chief arteries means that, to paraphrase Harold Mackinder, he who controls the East and South China Seas, dominates Asia; and with the rise of Asia, he who dominates this region, commands the world.” It strikes me as particularly odd and disappointing that even today leading American strategists could engage in such bombastic nineteenth-century rhetoric by looking to British imperialist theorists for guidance. Mackinder and such thinkers were obsessed with protecting India from the imagined Russian threat, neglecting the fact that Russia’s help would be badly required in the contests that would follow for Britain. Next, these contemporary South China Sea hawks, with Mackinder tucked under their arms, will propose erecting myriad new coaling stations around the “spice islands” and perhaps also making the U.S. presence in Afghanistan permanent—the better to protect the Asian “heartland” from China’s encroaching Silk Road initiative. Americans thankfully have more common sense than to pursue expansion and endless conflict on the other side of the planet indefinitely. Certainly, that is how the founders of our country distinguished themselves from statesmen in London way back when.

I am on record repeatedly calling for both a stronger U.S. Navy (increased numbers of submarines, for example), as well as the prudent drawing of credible red lines that would cover the home islands of our allies. Vuving mischaracterizes my approach when he suggests that my view is the U.S. should “keep its hands out of the South China Sea.” Indeed, I am reasonably comfortable with present U.S. force levels in the area, as well as occasional patrols by U.S. forces. Limited goals require neither massive forces nor enormous engagement. There may come a day when the U.S. needs to commit many more resources for deterrence in the Western Pacific, or could even have to contemplate a major war to halt Chinese aggression. But such dangers are nowhere on the horizon. The present danger is “fear itself,” related to the Thucydides Trap, not to mention the quite irrational or uninformed urgings of odious parochial and nationalist interests of various “third-party” states.