SOS: Stop China at Scarborough or Face the Chinese Off California
by Gordon G. Chang
September 23, 2025 at 5:00 am
The shoal is especially strategic: It guards the mouths to both Manila and Subic bays.
"The South China Sea is the key waterway that allows American naval forces to transit to and from allied nations in northeast Asia, southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Australia. The lynchpin of control over that body of water today is Scarborough Shoal." — James Fanell of the Geneva Center for Security Policy and co-author of Embracing Communist China: America's Greatest Strategic Failure, to Gatestone Institute, September 19, 2025.
When Chinese leaders and flag officers saw Washington's failure to protect a treaty ally in 2012 at Scarborough, they began moving against Second Thomas Shoal and other Philippine reefs and islets in the South China Sea, went after Japan's islets in the East China Sea, and began reclaiming and militarizing features in the Spratly chain. The Obama team unintentionally legitimized the worst elements in the Chinese political system by showing everybody else that aggression worked.
"The Obama administration's decision to allow China to take possession of Scarborough from our treaty ally Philippines emboldened China's Communist Party to take control of the entirety of the South China Sea." — James Fanell, to Gatestone Institute, September 19, 2025.
At Scarborough, the Chinese feel they can pick on a weak state and get an easy and casualty-free win, something Xi Jinping may feel he needs at this moment. Taiwan, on the other hand, presents a much harder target.
"If the war in Ukraine has taught us anything, it is that confronting adversaries at the first point of conflict is important, otherwise the enemy will fill the vacuum," he noted. "If the U.S. fails to defend our national interests at Scarborough today, we can be sure that America will be facing a violent People's Liberation Army at Guam, Hawaii, or even our West Coast in the not-too-distant future." — James Fanell, to Gatestone Institute, September 19, 2025.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21921/scarborough-shoal
