LBJ School - The University of Texas at Austin
Why the Arctic is Not the ‘Next’ South China Sea
Elizabeth Buchanan and Bec Strating
November 5, 2020
The South China Sea and the Arctic are increasingly grouped as strategic theaters rife with renewed great-power competition. This sentiment permeates current affairs analysis, which features geopolitical links between the two maritime theaters. And these assessments are not resigned to “hot takes†— the linkage features at senior policy levels, too. Consider, for example, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s rhetorical question, “Do we want the Arctic Ocean to transform into a new South China Sea, fraught with militarization and competing territorial claims?â€
To what extent are China’s challenges to maritime order in the South China Sea a signal for how it will approach the Arctic? Understanding the differences as well as the similarities between the South China Sea and Arctic geopolitical “competitions†is crucial to predicting the strategic implications of future maritime posturing and policies from Beijing. Comparing the South China Sea flashpoint and the Arctic in the context of strategic competition highlights how maritime “revisionism†is better understood as maritime exceptionalism. Yet comparisons often fail to provide an accurate picture of the internal geopolitical climates in each region, and we argue that it is too simplistic to extrapolate the trends in one theater and apply them to the other. China and Russia approach the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in a localized and interest-based way when it comes to the South China Sea and Arctic regions. These localized approaches to the law of the sea has implications for understanding challenges to multilateral rules-based governance of the global commons.
https://warontherocks.com/2020/11/why-the-arctic-is-not-the-next-south-china-sea/
