Column: A war of sand; China's island hopping strategy

During most of its history, China has dominated East Asia, intimidating nations at its borders with its size, military strength, economic prowess, and cultural achievements. For many centuries, Chinese emperors expected kings, princes and other rulers to send ambassadors to acknowledge this superiority, accepting Chinese overlordship in formalized rituals at the Forbidden Palace in Beijing. With the coming of the Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries, China suffered from foreign aggression, civil war, the devastation of the Japanese invasion and occupation until 1945, and then the self-inflicted wound of the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949, and the horrors that followed.

With the economic reforms of recent decades, Chinese economy has boomed, and consequently revived the Chinese understanding that they are the sun around which the rest of East Asia and the Pacific should orbit. One of the ways they intend to assert this authority is at sea.

While an intense naval building program is underway, with aircraft carriers, surface warships and submarines being built and launched at an impressive rate, even more remarkable is China's plans to annex islands and sea zones into their sphere of influence and direct control.

China's strategy is to claim outlying islands and archipelagos, not for any intrinsic value of the distant bits of rock and sand, but because successful efforts to establish Chinese sovereignty on these obscure and resource-poor outcroppings, or create new ones where previously there were only submerged lava formations or reefs, will lead to expansion of China's territorial waters and exclusive economic zones. These zones allow the nation that controls them to have first rights to resource exploitation -- oil, fish, shipping lanes -- as well as to exert military control over maritime commerce passing through.

The first major area where China is attempting this is in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Recent satellite imagery has shown the extent of Chinese ambitions; Chinese efforts have created new islands, settled the few inhabitable ones, and erected research facilities, harbors and even temporary military bases (if concrete and steel structures can be considered temporary). The Spratly Islands cross several exclusive economic zones, but one Chinese effort, on the aptly named "Mischief Reef," is clearly being made within internationally recognized limits of the Philippine zone.

China is not just infringing on Philippine territory and waters; their major earth-moving efforts are destroying fragile reefs and maritime ecosystems. Over 300 acres of irreplaceable coral reefs have been covered with sand, and sensitive breeding grounds for a wide variety of sea life have suffered the same fate.

China also has claimed other terrain in the Pacific: the Senkaku Islands, controlled by Japan since the 19th century, Socotra Rock, under South Korean control, and the Paracel Islands, occupied by China but claimed by Vietnam. While Chinese diplomats use historical maps from when China controlled these islands, in each case China later signed treaties yielding sovereignty to them. While past events are relevant, as are the conditions under which the treaties were signed, China is charging forward with military, economic and demographic initiatives to seize de facto control over all of these islands, assuming that international law and history can be bent appropriately once they achieve their practical objectives, and the flag of the People's Republic flies high from each island, rock and reef.

The United States has military agreements with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, and has enhanced its support to each of these nations in recent years. As part of the "Pivot to Asia" by the Obama Administration, shifting (or at least not reducing) military and diplomatic resources to the Pacific, President Obama has appropriately restated U.S. support for the territorial integrity and economic zones of Japan and South Korea in general terms. However, the U.S. Administration and the president have left some ambiguity in comments about the Senkakus and other islands. While the U.S. position is intended to encourage China to embrace diplomacy and compromise, in fact it is likely to have the opposite effect.

The U.S. must support our allies in territorial disputes, when the letter of international law is against the Chinese effort. This is a literal line in the sand that the Chinese must be persuaded not to cross, or from which they must be encouraged to withdraw.

These islands are of emotional and economic significance to China, but far less important than positive trade and political relations with their neighbors and the U.S. A few small measures from the U.S., such as standing visibly with our allies at a news conference restating that these islands are not Chinese territory, sending joint maritime patrols through these areas, disseminating open source satellite imagery showing the environmental catastrophe (and violations of international law) being perpetrated by the Chinese, slowing military-to-military cooperation and sales of dual use (military and civilian) technology to China, would make the point. We do not have to confront territorial aggression directly to increase its costs to the perpetrators, as well as to embolden allies naturally predisposed to stand in the way of China. These measures, modest and realistic, would show the world, and especially China, that the "Pivot to Asia" has real meaning: a U.S. sustained, U.S. engagement in support of our allies, our interests and a balance of power in the region.

Wayne Bowen received his Ph.D. in history from Northwestern University, and is also an Army veteran.