US naval operations in South China Sea ‘provocative’: Intl. lawyer

The United States’ plans to conduct naval operations in the South China Sea despite Beijing’s warnings stand as “naked evidence” of its “provocative” intentions, says an international lawyer in Indonesia.

“The US has made countless diplomatic statements in connection with other maritime territorial disputes between China and US allies like Japan, strongly urging China not to engage in unilateral or provocative action while the related issues remain unresolved.  Yet here once again we see the US engaging in tactics calculated to be nothing if not provocative,” Barry Grossman said on Wednesday.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said the United States will “fly, sail and operate wherever international law permits, and whenever our operation needs require it.”

The Pentagon chief made the comments when asked about news reports that the US Navy had sent a guided-missile destroyer within 12 nautical miles of one of China’s artificial islands in the South China Sea late on Monday.

“There is no reason whatsoever for the US to repeatedly carry out major naval operations in waters off China’s coast, thousands of miles from the US or from any other place where there is an internationally recognized military conflict underway,” Grossman told Press TV in an interview.

“We all know what would happen if China or Russia carried out such military maneuvers in international waters in the Caribbean or off either US coast. The notion that such provocative US maneuvers off China’s coast are a proper and legitimate tactic is both absurd and reckless,” he said.

“These plans stand as naked evidence of US intentions which clearly have nothing whatsoever to do with securing the right of passage for commercial and private vessels in international waters,” the analyst continued.

The US Navy’s latest maneuver, which was meant to reassure allies in Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines in the face of China’s actions in the Spratly Islands chain, was quickly condemned by Beijing as a “deliberate provocation.”

“Any claim or strategic interest the US has in the South China Sea is a purely derivative one born of its private treaty arrangements with allies in the region which are little more than US client states,” Grossman noted.

“In any case, the US made its position on international maritime law and indeed national sovereignty perfectly clear in 1962 with the Kennedy administration’s position during the Cuban missile crises. The US position has always been that it will not broker any perceived threat, real or imaginary, to its territory or to its commercial and military interests globally, regardless of what the accepted principles of international law have to say about any particular contrived crisis used by the US security apparatus to justify its aggression and provocations,” he stated.

The maritime territorial disputes between China, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia are “extremely complicated” and have been aggravated by the US intervention, the analyst said.

“While it is easy to find fault with the political establishment in each of the countries involved in these disputes, I have no doubt whatsoever that if the US and its Atlantic World allies mind their own business, in due course, the genuine stakeholders will come to their own practical solutions without subjecting the known universe to the threat of thermonuclear war,” Grossman argued.

“Like the far more urgent conflict in Syria, this brewing dispute, being agitated by the United States, in the South Sea would be easily resolved by the US and its allies simply butting out, going home, and minding their own business,” he concluded.

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