by PETER LEE
As I predicted a while back, the United States has quietly ditched its old, underperforming pretext for confrontation in the South China Sea and is sidestepping into a new justification.
I do not care deeply about America’s stake in the South China Sea.
So I have little interest in slogging through recent US & PRC contributions to the controversy du jour: the viability or lack thereof of the notorious nine-dash line, or 9DL, under international law.
The only people who should give a sh*t about the South China Sea are the Chinese. Much of the PRC’s trade and Middle East energy pass through the South China Sea; and the determined US rapprochement with Myanmar (and anti-Chinese activism by the PRC’s domestic Myanmar opponents) has threatened one of the PRC’s important energy security countermoves: the Rakhine to Kunming oil and gas pipeline originating beyond the western end of the Malacca Straits.
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