US aircraft carriers are practising war in the South China Sea. China’s navy is doing the same. What could possibly go wrong?
The threats are flying thick and fast in the South China Sea.
Beijing’s state-controlled Global Times news service declared: “Any US aircraft carrier movement in the region is at the pleasure of the PLA (People’s Liberation Army).”
The US Navy’s chief of information retorted: “And yet, there they are. Two @USNavy aircraft carriers operating in the international waters of the South China Sea.”
Beijing insists the waterway bounded by Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and Taiwan is its sovereign territory. The UN disagrees. Washington demands that existing freedom of navigation rights through the strategically important sea remain unchanged.
Beijing has built up a chain of artificial island fortresses in the Paracel and Spratly Islands. It’s been holding regular large-scale naval exercises there, the latest kicking off last week.
Washington has just sent a battle group centred on two enormous nuclear-powered aircraft carriers into the same waters. They’re also engaged in war-games. And satellite photos reveal that it too has begun to expand and strengthen a Pacific island base.
It’s just a pinprick on a map – a coral atoll roughly halfway between Hawaii and Japan.
Together with Guam, these islands form a chain of air and naval bases between the United States and Asia.
Wake Island was the scene of fierce fighting between the US and Japan in World War II. It represented a strategic outpost. A rest, refuel and repair post in the middle of a vast ocean.
Its importance has been revived as North Korea and China push tensions in Southeast Asia towards breaking point.
Hawaiian news service KITV4 last year reported a US military source as confirming “a lot of changes happening on that small atoll”. The US Air Force was “pouring a lot of investment into the infrastructure and the contracted support to that location,” including operations and accommodation facilities.
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