Is China Reshaping the Global Oceans Regime?:
Beijing sees itself as fundamentally above the law and beyond accountability to others, especially smaller states. And while full-scale global change to the oceans regime is beyond China’s grasp, Kardon writes, Beijing’s actions may have consequences beyond its nearby waters.
The law of the sea—codified for decades in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea—is pretty clear on most things. Countries have territorial seas stretching 12 nautical miles off their coasts. Islands do, too. Rocks and submerged features do not. Countries also have resource zones that stretch at least 200 nautical miles, theirs alone to fish, mine, and harvest deep-sea riches. Every state can fly, sail, and operate in waters beyond the territorial seas and pass freely through straits. The problem is that China, though a party to the U.N. convention, flouts each of these elements.
At the bottom of the ontological stack, there is naked force: the ability of a man to put a bullet through the head of another man. Governments are monopolies on this sort of force–and governments establish their legitimacy by promising only to use this force when necessary to enforce a set of laws that are transparent to the people who may be at the receiving end of that bullet.
But without force, laws are simply a suggestion: there is nothing preventing someone with a bigger gun to simply say “yeah, I don’t care.”
China is apparently putting this to the test. And China does not really care what we think of China, so long as it can establish the de-facto reality–which it can when there is no-one who is willing to enforce the de-jure status quo.
And unfortunately the Western world has forgotten that laws without a government willing to enforce them are just suggestions: we’ve seen this with Europe’s approach to international law, with the United States telling the International Court of Justice to go hang (as the US is not a signatory to the treaty establishing it), and even with the “Defund The Police” movement.