Will China Set Up an Air Defense Identification Zone in the South China Sea?
Will China Set Up an Air Defense Identification Zone in the South China Sea?
The current balance of power also suggests that other countries cannot do much more than largely symbolic actions to challenge China’s ADIZ in the South China Sea. Several governments, most notably the United States, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Australia, Britain, and France, will flatly reject the Chinese ADIZ. But most other countries, including some ASEAN members, will acquiesce to Chinese power. The United States will fly some military aircraft into the Chinese ADIZ within the first hours of its declaration, but the Pentagon will have to think twice when deploying a carrier strike group to waters under the Chinese ADIZ. Vietnam and Malaysia may or may not declare an ADIZ of their own.
But a Chinese ADIZ will aggravate the animosity between China and most of its maritime neighbors. It will also intensify the strategic competition globally between China and the United States and regionally between China on one hand and Japan and India on the other. Less internationally but no less strategically, it will hit a big nail on the coffin of Chinese influence in Vietnam and mark a point of no return in Sino-Vietnamese relations. Vietnam’s top defense diplomat, Nguyen Chi Vinh, noted in a January 2014 interview that a Chinese ADIZ “would be more dangerous than even the nine-dash line” and it would “kill” Vietnam.
If China declares its South China Sea ADIZ this year or the next, then it can win more than it loses—in the short term. In the longer term, however, that coup will be a Pyrrhic victory.
Alexander L. Vuving is a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. The analysis in this article is based on a primer on the South China Sea ADIZ by the same author, published in The National Interest four years ago. The author wishes to thank Harry Kazianis for his encouragement and Carleton Cramer for his valuable comments. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. government, the Department of Defense, or DKI APCSS.
Image: Reuters