On
July 13, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement
outlining the “U.S. Position on Maritime Claims in the South China Sea.” The statement coincides with the fourth anniversary of a landmark decision by an international arbitration tribunal vindicating claims brought by the Philippines against China under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and Pompeo’s announcement explicitly aligns the United States with the UNCLOS tribunal’s ruling, declaring that China’s expansive claims to offshore resources across most of the South China Sea are “completely unlawful.”
The day after Pompeo’s statement, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs David Stilwell delivered a speech setting forth a bill of particulars concerning Chinese misdeeds in the South China Sea and beyond. Stilwell argued that China seeks to “replace international law with rule by threats and coercion.”
Some observers might dismiss these statements as part of a broader Trump administration effort to demonstrate its “tough on China” credentials in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. As diplomatic-legal communications, however, the statements warrant a closer look—as much for what they don’t do as for what they do.
Neither document substantively changes the United States’s position regarding China’s expansive South China Sea maritime claims and the inconsistency of these claims with international law—including China’s notoriously ambiguous nine-dash line covering nearly 80 percent of the South China Sea. China has never clarified whether the nine-dash line represents a claim to the land features within the line and their adjacent waters, a boundary of national sovereignty over all the enclosed waters, or a claim of some other set of “historic rights” to the maritime space within the line.
To be sure, Pompeo’s statement is the first instance in which the U.S. government has publicly endorsed the merits of the 2016 UNCLOS tribunal decision on the status of certain features in the Spratly Islands and related maritime entitlements (a decision that did not address underlying sovereignty claims). But the State Department has previously acknowledged the legitimacy of the UNCLOS tribunal’s decision, issuing a statement in July 2016 recognizing the decision as “final and legally binding on both China and the Philippines.”
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