US Navy deploys three aircraft carriers to Pacific against China

Authored by wsws.org and submitted by DrogDrill
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US Navy deploys three aircraft carriers to Pacific against China

For the first time in three years, the US Navy has mobilised three aircraft carrier strike groups to the Pacific as a part of a provocative military build-up against China. The deployments underscore the strategic shift by the Pentagon from the so-called “war on terror” to great power competition that heightens the danger of conflict between nuclear-armed powers.

As of Thursday, the nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and their associated groups of destroyers and cruisers set to sea in a massive show of force. While there are no details of their planned movements and exercises, all will be operating in the Western Pacific in strategically sensitive waters off the Chinese mainland.

An F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet is seen on the deck of the U.S. Navy USS Ronald Reagan in the South China Sea, 2018 [Credit: AP Photo/Kin Cheung]

USS Theodore Roosevelt, which has been sidelined in Guam after a major outbreak of COVID-19, is now operating in waters off Guam. The USS Nimitz strike group left the US West Coast earlier this week while the USS Ronald Reagan together with its battle group has left its base in Japan and is currently operating in the Philippine Sea.

In comments to the Associated Press about the deployments, Rear Admiral Stephen Koehler, director of operations for the US Indo-Pacific Command, specifically referred to China as the chief target. He accused Beijing of slowly and methodically building up military outposts in the South China Sea and putting missile and electronic warfare systems on its islets.

Koehler declared that the US “ability to be present in a strong way is part of the competition… you’ve got to be present to win when you’re competing.” He then boasted: “Carriers and carrier strike groups writ large are phenomenal symbols of American naval power. I really am pretty fired up that we’ve got three of them at the moment.”

The dispatch of three aircraft carrier battle groups to waters near China comes as the Trump administration has deliberately inflamed tensions with Beijing by blaming it for the global COVID-19 pandemic. Without a shred of evidence, Trump has accused China of covering up the outbreak and given credence to far-right conspiracy theories that the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory.

While Trump is attempting to deflect attention from his own criminal negligence in dealing with the pandemic, the scapegoating of China is part of Washington’s aggressive efforts that began under President Obama’s “pivot to Asia” to undermine and confront Beijing. US strategists regard China as the chief obstacle to American imperialism halting its historic decline and reasserting its global hegemony.

Under President Obama, the Pentagon launched a “rebalance” to the Indo-Pacific to station 60 percent of its naval assets and warplanes in the region by 2020. As part of this strategy, the US has been restructuring its extensive bases in Japan, South Korea and Guam, forging basing agreements throughout the region, including in Australia, Singapore, India and Sri Lanka, and strengthening military alliances and strategic partnerships.

In the current standoff with China, the Trump administration has encouraged India’s dangerous confrontation with China along their contested border. Both sides have mobilised thousands of troops who face each other at several points along their mountainous border areas. The two regional powers, both of which are nuclear-armed, fought a border war in 1962 and the border disputes have never been resolved.

The deployment of aircraft carrier strike groups is just part of the US build-up of military forces in the Western Pacific. Fox News reported this week that the US Air Force has deployed nuclear-capable B-1B Lancer bombers to Guam last month that have been conducting operations over the South China Sea. The Air Force has also sent long-range, high altitude Global Hawk drones to Japan to carry out surveillance in the Western Pacific.

Under the Trump administration, the US Navy has stepped up its so-called “freedom of navigation” operations that deliberately violate territorial waters claimed by China around its islets in the South China Sea. In late April, the Navy carried out two South China Sea operations in as many days followed by another on May 7. On May 28, the guided missile destroyer USS Mustin passed within the 12-nautical-mile territorial limit of Woody Island in the Paracel group that has been occupied by China for decades.

Washington’s claim that it is simply asserting “freedom of navigation” is a fraud. The US Navy is determined to maintain a presence in the South China Sea which is critical to the Pentagon’s AirSea Battle plans for a massive assault on Chinese military bases in the event of war. The South China Sea is adjacent to sensitive Chinese military bases on Hainan Island, including for its nuclear submarines.

The US Navy has also increased its transits of the Taiwan Strait that lies between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan which China claims as part of its territory. On June 5, the guided missile destroyer USS Russell passed through the narrow strait—the second US warship to do so in three weeks and the seventh this year. The Chinese state-owned media responded by branding the transit as “another provocative move.”

Taiwan is another sensitive flash point that the Trump administration is deliberately inflaming. While not officially abrogating its “One China” policy recognising Beijing as the legitimate government of all China including Taiwan, Trump has steadily strengthened diplomatic and strategic relations with Taipei. He has backed Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen whose Democratic Progressive Party advocates a more independent role for Taiwan from China.

The carrier group deployments follow a further escalation of tensions between the US and China when Taiwan’s defence ministry allowed a US Navy cargo plane to make an unprecedented flight through Taiwanese air space on its way from Okinawa to Thailand. Beijing responded by condemning the incident as “provocative.”

The Trump administration’s dangerous escalation of military tensions with China coincides with the global crisis of capitalism revealed and accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Like his counterparts around the world, Trump is not only preparing class war against the working class, but is driven to force rival powers to bear the lion’s share of the burden of the economic crisis.

The reckless US military intervention in areas of key strategic importance for China risks a confrontation, whether by accident or design, that could rapidly spiral out of control into a catastrophic war that would envelop the world.

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Relaxed_Engineer on June 14th, 2020 at 02:11 UTC »

The World Socialist Website might have an agenda, just saying.

Beatrisx on June 14th, 2020 at 01:47 UTC »

“Fox News reported this week that the US Air Force has deployed nuclear-capable B-1B Lancer bombers”

This is false. There are No nuclear-capable B-1B bombers anymore as they had that ability removed as part of an arms reduction treaty with the old Soviet Union at the end of the 80’s

Fox News really need to start reporting facts and not fake news.

The_Novelty-Account on June 14th, 2020 at 01:15 UTC »

So this article is specifically talking about the Sourth China Sea.

There's an interesting international legal reason that this constantly happens in the South China Sea. Basically, in order to prevent China from taking sovereignty over the islands, the United States and other states that do not want China to have legal claim to the islands, must display that China does not have that sovereignty.

China is attempting to declare a bunch of islands within the South China Sea to be its own territory, most people know this. The reason is the vast natural resource bed available as well as a geopolitically advantageous position. In order to do so it has made its own islands and occupied them which does not actually give them any rights over the surrounding waters according to the Law of the Sea Convention. However, it is also occupying natural islands in the area as well.

According to the Island of Palmas Case (Netherlands v. United States) (1928), 2 RIAA 829, a state effectively occupies a territory when it is able to exert sovereignty over that territory, which in effect, actually leads to that sovereignty. Here is the major except from the case from page 839 of volume II of the UN report of international arbitration awards from 1928.

Titles of acquisition of territorial sovereignty in present-day international law are either based on an act of effective apprehension, such as occupation or conquest, or, like cession, presuppose that the ceding and the cessionary Powers or at least one of them, have the faculty of effectively disposing of the ceded territory. In the same way natural accretion can only be conceived of as an accretion to a portion of territory where there exists an actual sovereignty capable of extending to a spot which falls within its sphere of activity. It seems therefore natural that an element which is essential for the constitution of sovereignty should not be lacking in its continuation. So true is this, that practice, as well as doctrine, recognizes—though under different legal formulae and with certain differences as to the conditions required—that the continuous and peaceful display of territorial sovereignty (peaceful in relation to other States) is as good as a title. The growing insistence with which international law, ever since the middle of the 18th century, has demanded that the occupation shall be effective would be inconceivable, if effectiveness were required only for the act of acquisition and not equally for the maintenance of the right. If the effectiveness has above all been insisted on in regard to occupation, this is because the question rarely arises in connection with territories in which there is already an established order of things. Just as before the rise of international law, boundaries of lands were necessarily determined by the fact that the power of a State was exercised within them, so too, under the reign of international law., the fact of peaceful and continuous display is still one of the most important considerations in establishing boundaries between States.

What this leads to is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaKbZW0pqkM

Which happens at least every few months. China asserts its sovereignty, the United States in calling it international airspace disputes that sovereignty. Every time a country successfully sails its ships through the area without China preventing that freedom of movement through international waters, its claim to the islands is weakened. So, when the US attempts to sail its ships through the areas that China is claiming sovereignty to, it responds as if it actually has sovereignty over the area.

The reason this time it is significant, is because three carrier groups are far in excess of what was previously considered necessary to fight the claim that China owns the territory. From an international legal perspective this may mean two things. First, that the United States is simply being defensive and signalling its might by sailing near the sea but not through it largely for geopolitical reasons, or second, that the United States is genuinely concerned that China's land claims in the South China Sea are actually becoming effective, and therefore feel that the necessary threshold to show that the land claims in the South China Sea are not legal is now higher. If the latter is the case, we can expect more behaviour like this for the foreseeable future until China backs off of its land claims, or the United States and NATO allies decide persistent objection to the claims with this type of persistent show of force is not worth the effort.

Edit: This source is heavily biased in its commentary. That said, the United States is actually doing this, and you can read more from better sources in the following links:

https://time.com/5852710/u-s-aircraft-carriers-indo-pacific-china/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-sends-aircraft-carriers-as-china-makes-waves-in-the-pacific-11591780654

https://www.businessinsider.com/3-navy-carriers-in-pacific-seen-as-warning-to-china-2020-6

Edit 2 I've really gotta go to bed, but thanks for all of the really solid law questions! You can keep asking and I'll try and get to them tomorrow. The most complex questions will take a bit more time for the proper sources to make sure I'm giving the right information, but I'll try and get through the ones I know enough to answer all the same! Cheers!