The tense contest over maritime areas in the South China Sea is not the doing of only one country in the region, a United States Department of State official said. Michael Fuchs, the second top policy maker for Asia Pacific, said in an influential Washington-based think tank over the weekend that no claimant is solely responsible for the state of the tensions. He said that the behavior of claimant states over small features in the sea attract attention from the rest of the world. China has overlapping claims over the East and South China Sea with the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, Brunei and Malaysia. Its because the way in which countries pursue their claims speaks to whether future disputes will be handled by the threat and use of force on the one hand or the rule of law on the other, Fuchs said. It speaks to whether the same rules will apply to all claimants – big and small alike, he added. Fuchs explained that nations inside and outside the region including the United States if tensions spiral and misreadings and misinterpretations rule over the key waterway.
Posted on: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 07:19:37 +0000