The Balloon Goes Up Over the South China Sea

There were signs of a major escalation in US activity in the South China Sea…but not during the ASEAN meeting.

Back on July 13, I wrote about US frustration with successful PRC efforts—symbolized by but not limited to the HYSY 981 drilling rig outrage--to defy the U.S. campaign to deter PRC assertiveness in the South China Sea:

Quote:

US South China Sea policy needs a reboot.  To quote the Financial Times:  “Our efforts to deter China [in the South China Sea] have clearly not worked,” said a senior US official.

In 2010, the US justified its attention to the remote reaches of the SCS on the grounds of “a national interest in freedom of navigation”…

[S]ince the PRC relies on freedom of navigation for commercial traffic to an existential degree (most of the traffic through the SCS is, after all, going to and from Chinese ports), there was an embarrassing dearth of Chinese offenses against freedom of navigation that compelled US action.

…

[Events] would seem to require that the definition of the US national interest in the South China Sea be redefined to enable more effective pushback, preferably pushback that carries the threat of the PRC’s least-desired outcome: confrontation with US military forces…

The Financial Times makes an interesting elision by stating “The Obama administration declared South China Sea a US “national interest” in 2010,” leaving out the rather important qualifier “in freedom of navigation”…

Today, if the US is simply declaring a national interest “in the South China Sea” full stop, that would imply, well pretty much whatever the US wants it to imply.  In practical terms, this means that the United States will have the luxury of acting unilaterally in its self-defined national interest, unconstrained by rigid considerations of international law (which the PRC, for the most part, carefully attempts to parse and the United States, by its failure to ratify the Law of the Sea convention, is on the back foot) or the position of ASEAN (which the PRC has, for the most part, been successful in splitting).

The US recently took another bite out of the SCS apple by calling for a construction ban in the South China Sea (the PRC has been dredging, expanding, and improving some of its island holdings in order to strengthen its sovereignty claims)…

…

Apparently the United States has decided that ASEAN needs an extra push to come up with the proper anti-PRC policies and, even though the US is not a member of ASEAN, it will be more pro-active in trying to shape its policies and counter the PRC’s attempts to divide and influence the forum.

Endquote

Fastforward to mid-July, and Secretary of State John Kerry floated the construction “freeze” proposal at the ASEAN meeting in Myanmar with the support of the Philippines.  

The scheme was DOA, Dead On Arrival, bracketed by unambiguous PRC rejection before, during, and after the meeting.  ASEAN declined to mention the freeze proposal in its communique, opting for endorsement of the code of conduct negotiations instead.

Another unfortunate takeaway from the ASEAN meeting was the unwelcome suspicion that the United States has compromised its “honest broker” status to the point that the real “honest broker” i.e. the independent-minded power that can and must be wooed by all parties with genuine concessions in order to hammer out unity and workable compromises is now Indonesia.

Nevertheless, in its background briefing, the United States delegation declared victory:

Clearly, we have succeeded in our mission, which is to try to seed the clouds of conversation…

This apparently was not enough for some journalists:

QUESTION: So coming back to what Matt was pressing on the freeze, I mean, that’s not going to be agreed this time.
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: So I think that you want to --
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: That was never the expectation.
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Right.
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: Yeah. So the whole purpose was to shape the conversation, focus the conversation in the region on the behavior and the assertions that are occurring, and making sure that the pressure stays on those people making – those countries asserting their behavior. 

Some headlines spun it the US way:

VOA: US Presents ASEAN Meeting as Setback for China 

Bloomberg: China Thwarts US Bid to Reduce South China Sea Tensions 

However, for the most part, the PRC rebuff and the lack of a positive outcome were acknowledged.

The US subsequently made the portentous announcement it would “monitor” developments in the South China Sea, a message, I suppose that the U.S. claims the right to promote its South China Sea agenda independent of what ASEAN desires to do…or not do.

As for the PRC, it announced a “dual track” of bilateral talks + negotiations with ASEAN over a code of conduct; and reaffirmed its rejection the freeze—and with it the validity of the US role as the “responsible adult” in the South China Sea.

Xinhua weighed in with a cutting commentary “A Calm South China Sea Needs No Flame Stoker”, which reminded ASEAN that the previous pretext for US intervention hadn’t panned out: “The U.S. worry over maritime safety is unwarranted since the freedom of navigation has been fully guaranteed.”  

It concluded with a statement that, although Chicom propaganda, is distressingly close to the truth:

It is a painful reality that Uncle Sam has left too many places in chaos after it stepped in, as what people are witnessing now in Iraq, Syria and Libya.

The South China Sea should not be the next one.

Ouch.

The real fireworks, however, was provided by U.S. Senators John McCain and Sheldon Whitehouse during a visit to Vietnam.  

Vietnam, of course, is in play now.  Reformist elements in the Vietnamese elite are taking the nationalist tack of criticizing the leadership for excessive obeisance to the PRC and, more discretely, advocating a tilt toward the US, pluralism, and a more open economy.  Although the Vietnamese government eventually nixed a visit by the foreign minister to Washington to discuss closer coordination (presumably because the PRC withdrew the HYSY 981 rig), McCain and Whitehouse went to Vietnam to discuss a lifting of the US arms embargo and, presumably explore the alluring question of an eventual US return to Cam Ranh Bay.

During their visit, Vietnamese media reported on August 9 that Whitehouse made this rather remarkable statement:

At yesterday’s press briefing, Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper asked Senator Sheldon Whitehouse for comments about the U.S.’s responses, considered by public opinion as rather strong, against China over the recent tension in the East Vietnam Sea.

Senator Whitehouse replied that exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of every country form a sustainable network of EEZs that have been established based on international conventions and laws, as well as on mutual understanding, which help avoid conflicts and maintain stability in EEZs.

Therefore, whenever a challenge appears and poses a threat to peace and stability in EEZs, then not only the U.S. but also the entire world community will take action against the threat, the senator said. [emphasis added]

Such a case has occurred and the U.S and other countries have responded against it, he added.

I am not familiar with the precedent cited by the Senator.  

When the United States committed naval vessels to make sure the Straits of Hormuz remained open in 2011-2012, it was acting on a very limited brief: the right of the world community under customary international law to keep open for “transit passage” a vital strait inside twelve-mile territorial waters (not the EEZs) of Iran and Oman, for which no alternative existed. 

Iran, on the other hand, tried to argue that a promise to observe “transit passage “ rights was obligatory only to states that had ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which Iran and the United States both had not done.  The U.S., obviously, chose to ignore Iran’s lawfare objections, but the long-recognized need to ensure transit passage through critical straits also meant that the world gave Iran's position rather short shrift.

EEZs are a whole ‘nuther thing than territorial waters, it would seem, a 200 nautical mile zone beyond the twelve-mile limit recently defined by UNCLOS and reserved for economic exploitation by the state that can support a claim to it.

As far as I have been able to determine, disputes about EEZ activities have been addressed bilaterally by coast guard and maritime patrol vessels, particularly in the South China Sea, where the PRC, Vietnam, and Philippines harass each other’s fisherman and oil exploration vessels.  Third parties, let alone the “entire world community” have never been involved.

And I haven’t seen any initiatives toward militarizing these disputes (though Vietnam claimed that PLAN vessels were protecting the HYSY 981).

As recently as March 2014, judging by a Congressional Research Service report, the main U.S. concern was that PRC EEZ disputes remain non-military, to prevent the US getting sucked into a conflict by virtue of its treaty obligations to Japan and the Philippines:

China’s actions for asserting and defending its maritime territorial and exclusive economic zone (EEZ) claims in the East China (ECS) and South China Sea (SCS), particularly since late 2013, have heightened concerns among observers that ongoing disputes over these waters and some of the islands within them could lead to a crisis or conflict between China and a neighboring country such as Japan, the Philippines, or Vietnam, and that the United States could be drawn into such a crisis or conflict as a result of obligations the United States has under bilateral security treaties with Japan and the Philippines.

Apparently, that has changed, thanks to the PRC’s aggressive adoption of non-military measures, from subsidizing and equipping its fishing fleet for South China Sea forays to plunking billion-dollar exploratory drilling rigs in contested EEZs, and the idea now is that the best way for Vietnam and the Philippines to push back might be by interposing US naval muscle.

As potential harbingers, US surveillance aircraft overflew Chinese maritime patrol vessels during the resupply of marines on the beached Philippine hulk Sierra Madre at Second Thomas Shoal in April 2014 (amped up surveillance is considered to be an important weapon in “gray zone” crises, the term of art for confrontations that tiptoe to the brink of military conflict, but don’t quite cross).  In May, the USS Blue Ridge, the Seventh Fleet's flagship, ostentatiously sailed past the current PRC-Philippine hot spot, the Scarborough Shoal, and launched a helicopter to observe and photograph two PLAN warships in the vicinity.

Maybe in the future US naval vessels interpose themselves as Chinese maritime patrol vessels try to harass survey and drilling ships in disputed Philippine and Vietnamese EEZs; maybe the next time the HYSY 981 parks itself in contested waters, US ships interdict its resupply.  

Plenty of options.

And the injection of US military factors into EEZ disputes might be justified under Senator Whitehouse’s formulation that “challenges against the peace and stability of EEZs” are a threat that “the U.S. and the entire world community” will act against.

Declaring a national mission to interfere in third-party EEZ disputes bring us, inevitably, into murky legal waters.

The United States, of course, has not signed UNCLOS.  Instead, in 1983 the United States took the worldwide adoption of UNCLOS (by the PRC, among others) as an opportunity to invoke the UNCLOS 200 nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone formulation as “customary international law” enabling a unilateral proclamation of a 200 nm EEZ by the United States.

The unilateral nature of the proclamation, and its legal separation from UNCLOS, was amusingly confirmed last year, when US House of Representatives Republicans embarked upon an initiative to name the US EEZ endowment, some 3.4 million square miles, as the “Ronald Wilson Reagan Exclusive Economic Zone” with the declaration that: 

“The authority for President Reagan to issue his executive order [establishing the EEZ] did not come from the United Nations or from the Law of the Sea Treaty. It came from the sovereignty of the United States government, a concept that somehow seems to escape some members of this Congress,” Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) said.

So, I assume, the ability to intervene in somebody else’s EEZ dispute can also be presented by the US as a matter of “international customary law”, a rather nebulous concept that renders moot the potentially constraining verbiage of the UNCLOS treaty.  

I also suspect the U.S. will see no difficulty in unilaterally declaring that US naval activities in the territorial waters of the Straits of Hormuz provide adequate precedent for the application of similar interpretations to an EEZ in the South China Sea.  If the Chinese want to disagree, I suppose they are welcome to take their arguments to whatever pro-American venue chews over these disputes, digests them for years, and eventually spits out non-binding decisions.

It is always possible that Senator Whitehouse was talking through his hat in Vietnam but, given the presence of Senator McCain (who with Secretary of State John Kerry shares a close interest in nurturing the U.S.-Vietnam relationship) and the simultaneous ASEAN confab in Myanmar, I consider his statement a metaphorical shot across the bow, as in (my words):

The PRC has chosen to slap aside Secretary Kerry’s freeze initiative.  Well…

If, as anticipated, the Arbitral Commission rules in favor of the Philippines and tosses out the Nine Dash Line, and the People’s Republic of China exercises its great power prerogative of ignoring the award and ignoring calls to submit its South China Sea EEZ claims to arbitration under the UNCLOS formula, then the United States will exercise its superpower prerogative of imposing its novel definition of customary international law inside EEZs on the SCS and start messing with China’s stuff.

I will add the observation that I expect the possible injection of US Navy in local EEZ disputes will probably featuring nonstop serial & parallel harassment of US naval vessels by agitated and indifferently skippered Chinese maritime patrol vessels, fishing vessels, and whatnot.  This is exactly the kind of “gray zone” headache that the US Navy would like to avoid; but I also think the Navy wants a 300-ship presence in the Pacific and realizes it isn’t going to get it by shirking ignominious and onerous police duty demanded by the White House.

As for the PRC, under the traditional understanding of its foreign policy it would realize that it is outgunned by the US and its best hope for advantage lay in sidestepping confrontation with the US, temporizing in its dealings with ASEAN, and trying to buy and bully its way to advantage in bilateral exchanges with its smaller neighbors.  Ordinarily, in other words, the PRC would quail at the prospect of facing the US Navy and dial down its behavior accordingly.

Unfortunately, these are not ordinary times.

The PRC did invite President Obama to share the fruits of the “new great power relationship” in a recent spate of editorials, but it seems unlikely that they expected the US to take them up on it.  More likely, it was a propaganda gambit like Kerry’s freeze, along the lines of “We tried to be nice, but…”

The PRC can reasonably entertain the expectation that, in January 2017, Hillary Clinton, architect of the pivot to Asia, will be president and will enter office seeing the need to reassert the US role in Asia through some aggressive moves against China, certainly in the South China Sea, maybe on the issues of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Japan to block Chinese vessels from the territorial waters of the Senkakus, maybe even in support for Taiwan independence and Hong Kong democracy.

Meanwhile, President Obama is slogging through a quagmire of crises in Ukraine and Iraq (and the election fiasco in Afghanistan) that has spread his resources to the point he can’t even spare a thought for the collapse of Libya; has induced serious alliance fatigue, especially in Europe, thanks to an all-in Ukraine policy whose motto is, literally, F*ck the EU, and the dismal campaign in Gaza; and, most importantly, has pushed Russia, normally an arms-length peer, into the arms of the PRC as a diplomatic, economic, and security ally.

In the next few weeks, China and the world may get a chance to see if Russia, not quite the sturdiest of America’s antagonists, intervenes in Ukraine and successfully defies the sanctions/subversion/soft and hard power pressure of the Western democratic alliance.

The combination of opportunity, a closing time window, and the prospect of worse to come is not a recipe for restraint by the PRC.

I’m not saying that the PLAN will come out blasting away at the Seventh Fleet; but I can imagine a worst case scenario of spate of ugly and destabilizing incidents, obstructions, collisions, protests, sanctions…and even, though it is difficult to imagine today, a demand, not a request, that the United States abandon its new ASEAN beachhead, and remove itself from EEZ disputes between the PRC and its neighbors.

On balance, I don’t think the United States is ready for its Suez moment—a humiliating climbdown, probably in the South China Sea, that signals the surrender of imperial pretensions.  I also think Xi Jinping is focused on securing his rule and advancing his domestic political and economic agenda and will decide not to add a major confrontation with the United States to his list of challenges.

However, a storm is brewing over the South China Sea.  And the United States and China will both have a hand in deciding where and when it will break.

A Quiet Revolution in the South China Sea

Is the PRC Ditching the Nine Dash Line?

Without any ambiguity, the People’s Republic of China has announced that it considers itself and not the United States the boss in the South China Sea.  Its most assertive statement of this principle was to send the HYSY 981 rig, escorted by a flotilla of dozens of ships, into waters that Vietnam claims as its Exclusive Economic Zone for some exploratory drilling, right after president Obama made a trip to Asia (but, tellingly and perhaps unwisely, not to the PRC) to talk up the US pivot.

In keeping with the PRC pattern of avoiding overtly military operations—those that would justify the invocation of existing or new U.S. security alliances with PRC neighbors—the flotilla apparently included no PLAN vessels, and the objectives and disputes surrounding the rig have been characterized in economic/bilateral terms.

In its attempts to present itself as a responsible and competent steward of the South China Sea—and in order to bring Vietnam to heel and isolate the Philippines for the next, much more complex and risky round of “salami slicing”--the PRC might be prepared to make a major shift in its South China Sea maritime claims.

Alert readers (admittedly, China Matters has no other kind) will immediately grasp the significance of this passage from the May 31 People’s Daily:

The truth is, so far China and Vietnam have not reached consensus on delimiting their exclusive economic zones and continental shelves, but the waters in which the oil rig is operated are only 17 nautical miles (31.5 kilometers) from Zhongjian Island of China’s Xisha Islands while about 150 nautical miles from Vietnam’s coast. In other words, the drilling site is located only five nautical miles from the outer limit of China’s territorial sea and is undeniably within China’s exclusive economic zone, regardless of whichever principle is applied in future delimitation.

The People’s Republic of China is claiming the right for its HYSY 981 drilling rig to operate at its current location based upon an EEZ justification, not by its position within the notorious “cow tongue”, the area enclosed by the “nine-dash-line”.

Over the last year there have been several informal indications that the PRC is planning to move beyond the anachronistic “nine-dash-line” as the basis for its South China Sea claims, and haggle with its neighbors on the basis of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, with its maritime claims based on sovereignty, territorial waters, and Exclusive Economic Zones or EEZs.

That is big news for the South China Sea and, perhaps, bad news for the United States, which has relied on the patent absurdity of the nine-dash-line claim to justify its role as the sensible adult in the SCS.

For clarification, the general principle is that a coastal state like Vietnam is accorded an EEZ of at least 200 nautical miles or even more if the continental shelf justifies—provided there is no conflict with the EEZ of an island held by another state.

In the case of a conflicting island claim, the coastal claim does not gain automatic precedence; nor is there a standard formula for drawing an EEZ boundary between the two claims.  For instance, there is no principle that the boundary be drawn at the midline between the coastal baseline and the island baseline.  UNCLOS calls for the boundary to be drawn on the basis of “equity”, taking factors like the populations of the immediate EEZ claimants into account.  

Vietnam would clearly get the lion’s share of EEZ in the direction of the Paracels, but its position that its continental shelf claim entitles it to the spot where the HYSY 981 is drilling—and any complicating claims to a Paracels EEZ can be ignored-- is less defensible. 

The PRC position (reflected in the reference to “regardless of whichever principle is applied in further delineation”) is that the Paracels is going to get something, at least something more than five miles beyond Zhongjian Island’s territorial waters, and the HYSY 981 is covered.  

Since we’re talking about the South China Sea, the situation is even more complicated.

In 1996, the PRC drew a single baseline around all the Paracels, essentially treating them as a single archipelagic group; Zhongjian Island, a.k.a. Triton Island is the basis for the southwestern corner of the claim.  The Chinese position is that the archipelagic grouping as a whole (or, per the PRC formulation, “territorial sea”) is, leaving aside for a moment the issue of conflict with a neighboring EEZ, entitled to a 200 nautical mile EEZ beyond the baseline, hence the invocation of the rig’s propinquity to Zhongjian Island as defense of its legality.

This is not kosher by UNCLOS standards; only essentially archipelagic states (like Philippines but not continental states like the PRC and Vietnam) are supposed to enjoy this treatment.  Furthermore, the above-water real estate inside the claim is miniscule, and doesn’t even come close to the UNCLOS standard that the ratio of watery realm to land features should not exceed 9:1.  Therefore, if the archipelagic claim is thrown out, the best the PRC could do would be to claim a 12 nautical mile territorial waters around Zhongjian/Triton Island itself.  Since the island is uninhabited and incapable of sustaining economic life, it gets no EEZ and apparently leaves the HYSY 981 hanging.

However, to further muddy the waters, several coastal states have ignored these restrictions on archipelagic claims when defining baselines for island groups (for instance, Denmark on the Faroes and Ecuador on the Galapagos).

And, in bad news for Vietnam, the PRC has been able to create a simulacrum of human habitation and economic life on Woody Island in the Paracels.  Woody Island is the designated seat of the Sansha Prefecture of Hainan Province, with a small town maintained by a monthly supply boat, an airstrip, and the prospect of patriotic tourism, thereby creating a plausible claim for itself to a 200 nautical mile EEZ …which would also cover the current position of HYSY 981, 103 nautical miles away.

Previously, Vietnamese representatives, perhaps unwisely assuming that the PRC would never abandon the nine-dash-line, had publicly acknowledged there is a case for allowing Woody Island an EEZ.

Therefore, Vietnam appears to be in something of a bind here.

According to an authoritative looking if officially unofficial paper from August 2013 by Hong Thao Nguyen of the Law Faculty of Vietnam National University, Vietnam’s position on the Paracels is based on three principles: sovereignty over the Paracels, rejection of the nine-dash-line, and the assertion that the issue should be addressed multi-laterally instead of bilaterally.

As yet, the world largely follows the U.S. lead and does not take positions on island sovereignty, so point 1 is out.  If the PRC is switching to an EEZ basis for its claims, then point 2 is out.  And if points 1 and 2 are out, there is no strong basis for taking a bilateral spat to a multilateral forum.

And on technical ground, if the PRC shifts the terms of debate for HYSY 981 away from the nine-dash-line to UNCLOS and EEZ, Vietnam’s claims to the spot the rig now occupies do not appear to be a slam dunk.

Adoption of an EEZ dispute formulation would also appear to create a major political problem for Vietnam.

For Vietnam to negotiate an EEZ settlement with the PRC would involve Vietnam acknowledging PRC sovereignty over the Paracels and China’s as yet undefined yet genuine rights to some EEZ treatment.

This, I imagine, is an impossibly bitter pill for the Vietnamese government to swallow at the present time, given the intensity of anti-Chinese anger that roils Vietnam.

And if Vietnam can’t accept PRC sovereignty over the Paracels, the dispute can’t go to UNCLOS arbitration, it’s a sovereignty dispute, and all those carefully parsed arguments about EEZs and penetrating legal critiques of the nine-dash-line are completely irrelevant.

If this is the case, the PRC has rather carefully and maliciously hoisted Vietnam on a cleft stick.

Indeed, beyond asserting the right to drill holes in Vietnam’s continental shelf, Vietnamese acknowledgement of PRC sovereignty over the Paracels may be the key concession that China is trying to extract from its unhappy neighbor.

And maybe that’s the deal the PRC is offering Vietnam and, by extension, ASEAN: an agreement to play by UNCLOS rules if its sovereignty claims in the SCS are accepted.

Beyond categorical declarations of its absolute superiority of its continental shelf claims, Vietnam appears to be trying to find a way out of its dilemma through the politics of outrage: using heated rhetoric and provocative approaches to the PRC flotilla by various vessels in the hope that the PRC will do something so stupid and outrageous that the arcane and fraught issue of conflicting EEZ and sovereignty claims will be superseded by the easier-to-understand and cathartic issue of battling Chinese aggression.

For Americans, this situation would conjure up ironic memories of another provocation in Vietnamese waters, the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident that the U.S. hyped as an excuse to sidetrack informed debate and escalate its intervention in the Vietnam War.

Remarkably, even though the global China-bashing machine is on hair trigger, there seems to be little appetite as yet for indulging Vietnam.  Even when a Vietnamese fishing boat flipped and sank in a dustup with the HYSY 981 flotilla—an incident that would have supplied ample grist for the anti-China media mill regardless of the inevitably disputed facts of the encounter-- the international response was remarkably muted.

Whether this is owing to recognition of the fundamental ambiguity of the PRC-Vietnam dispute, the fact that ASEAN is thoroughly divided and cowed by the PRC, or because the US is distracted by its Ukraine adventure and is not ready to get a China crisis on at this particular moment remains to be seen.

Judging by President Obama’s security agenda speech at West Point (where he briefly cited the South China Sea issue but coupled it with a call for the Senate to ratify UNCLOS in order to give the US more standing in the disputes), America is not drawing any red lines in the South China Sea just yet.

As Secretary of Defense Hagel was communicating US resolve at the Shangri La forum, the New York Times treated the world to an astounding backgrounder on the Obama administration’s attitude toward Asia.

But even as Mr. Hagel and the United States have adopted a public posture that backs Japan — and, to a lesser extent, the Philippines, Vietnam and any other country that finds itself at odds with China — some administration officials have privately expressed frustration that the countries are all engaged in a game of chicken that could lead to war.

 “None of those countries are helping matters,” a senior administration official said…

Even if President Obama is suffering from lame duck fatigue and is disgusted with the hand that Hillary Clinton and her pivot dealt him in Asia, it seems counterintuitive that the United States will give a green light to the PRC in its South China Sea dispute with Vietnam.

If the U.S. isn’t ready to throw its weight around on behalf of its buddies, right, wrong, or nuance be damned, then the value of the U.S. deterrent and the pivot are significantly devalued.

Furthermore, Secretary of State John Kerry is the godfather of U.S.-Vietnamese rapprochement and I find it difficult to believe he—or his ally on the matter, John McCain--will let Vietnam take a whipping from China without some kind of riposte. 

The hope that the US cavalry will ride to the rescue, despite its current ambivalence, is probably one of the factors that is keeping Vietnam from sitting down with the PRC for the bilateral talks that Beijing is insisting upon.

But for the time being, the PRC seems to be cautiously enhancing its legal position—and relying on the expectation that the world will get tired of Vietnamese intransigence before it becomes sufficiently outraged by Chinese assertiveness—to gain further acceptance of its interests and rights in the South China Sea.